Funereal Plots

Horror Cinema reviews
Matthew M. Bartlett

Get Away

Director: Steffen Haars

Writer: Nick Frost

The Smith family, parents, a son, and a daughter, are on a much-needed family vacation to Svälta, a small, insular village in Sweden. While there, they hope to catch part of an 8-hour traditional play performed on the anniversary of Karantan, a holiday commemorating the time that the village was under British-imposed quarantine during a plague and ended up overpowering and eating their oppressors.

The Smiths are, of course, British, and it’s made abundantly clear early on that despite their host, a B&B owner, having arranged for their lodging, they are not welcome in town, and especially not at a sensitive cultural event. The B&B owner turns out to be a voyeuristic creep with a penchant for dressing in the clothing of his unwitting female guests, and the townspeople do everything they can to make the little clan uncomfortable and afraid.

This is, of course, a very familiar folk-horror setup, complete with villagers either menacing or bizarrely idiosyncratic (shoutouts in particular to standouts Eero Milinoff and Anitta Suikkari), and creepy animal and skull costumes; there are deliberate echoes of Midsommar, and, of course, The Wicker Man.

The particularly British humor, infused with a capacity for and a love of language) is evident right off the bat, with explicitly hilarious family bickering and insults, especially from Richard, the patriarch. Frost, most famously of Shaun of the Dead, is at his best here, a seemingly clueless bearded patriarch with a family that matches him volley for volley. Aisling Bea, who plays Susan, his wife, is hilarious, and the bickering siblings (essayed by Sebastian Croft and Maisie Ayres) throw a lot of gusto and personality into their roles—the plot may be pat, but the characters are anything but. While Get Away doesn’t hit the heights of Frost’s work with Simon Pegg, nor of the movies it gently lampoons, it’s solidly watchable, perhaps somewhat funnier than it is frightening.

I’d strongly suggest that even if you’re put off by the cliched folk horror trappings and the predictability of such plot arcs, you should still watch, especially if you get on with British humor, because the third act takes some chances and offers some compensatory delights that make it well worth sticking it out for the 90-minute runtime.