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January twelfth two-thousand and twenty-five, and it's time to get our first bout of Shudder Roulette under our belts for the new year with the new take on the Folk Horror genre, Get Away.
I strangely feel like I've been watching less Shudder than usual lately, so I needed this. Maybe it's because I no longer subscribe to Shudder directly, but now get to it as part of an AMC+ subscription. And one of the first things I noticed is that the user interface through AMC+ is a lot less ideal than the one through Shudder directly. The AMC+ interface does not give such comprehensive listings of different categories like "Foreign" or "Original and Exclusive", and I miss seeing everything so neatly sorted for me.
But I heard of this new movie, starring Nick Frost, and knew I needed to jump into the new app to check it out. The story is of Frost's character's family taking a vacation trip to the Swedish island of Svalta. Svalta has a dark history of a mass quarantine that led to starvation and many deaths two hundred years prior to the events of the film, and every year, the locals celebrate Karantan in memorial. And they aren't enamored of the idea of having guests.
Still, one local is fine with offering up his late mother's home as an AirBNB to the traveling Brits, so the latters arrive and settle in for a holiday away from home. This causes much consternation among the leaders of the island--the kommune--and they decide to take action against the uninvited interlopers.
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ I'm not much of a Folk Horror fan, so this movie got me by taking the tropes and construct of such horror and turning them all on their heads. The things with Folk Horror for me are that I often find them unintentionally funny, and I often find the lack of any real scares or of action elements to be a bit tedious.
Get Away solves both of these problems! First, by just going straight out and making the movie a partial comedy, so that there is no discomfort when I am laughing at the movie but am not entirely sure I am supposed to be (looking at you, original The Wicker Man and Midsommar).
The second problem is resolved by having the final act turn into an absolute blood-letting. The passive creepiness is eschewed entirely for some bombastic and brutal action set-pieces. So there's no worry about settling into boredom or having to pretend you are overwhelmed by an underwhelming finale. There are dismemberment and blood geysers. Blood geysers!
+ Get Away features a fair few reveals and turns along the way, and while they aren't exactly hard to predict, that is fine because they work within the context of the movie. And scenes you see that might initially make you question what is going on all end up paying off later on when all the cards are on the table. So there were a few moments here that would have been a Down for me earlier in the flick because they don't seem to make sense, but the movie ends up putting them all to bed with later unveilings.
And as with the first Up, the reveals are entertaining and make everything you are watching that much more enjoyable. They play into the nihilism that is coming in the third act, and they make a movie that could have been much more dry all the more engaging.
- Outside of the inimitable Nick Frost, most of the acting is just "okay". Not to call anyone out or anything because nothing on that front is particularly awful, but everyone else just kind of feels like they are along for his ride and letting him do the bulk of the lifting. Maisie Ayres is a young talent who has not been in much at this stage in her career, and she shows some promise here, but... yeah. Everyone else floats around adequacy.
And that's a shame because there could have been even more fun to be had if the characters had really been unrestrained and really allowed to go nuts. So on that front, I guess I don't know if it's the director keeping his talent reeled in or the talent not having as much of a blast with the script as they could.
- The ending to Get Away is relatively abrupt, and it doesn't feel as though there was a worthwhile payoff to what you had been sitting through. A seemingly relevant character is gone most of the screenplay only to pop back up at the very end in a fairly auspicious return. It feels like a plot point that the film forgot about, then sloppily (though humorously, to be fair) resolved.
And past that, you've just got... an ending that doesn't feel like it answers for much of what you have seen. It begs the typical question for horror movies of "Now what happens to these characters?", but maybe even moreso than usual. I don't know... I just wanted something more out of the resolution.
OVERALL
Nick Frost's newest offering to the Shudder service provides some decent laughs and a lot of visceral action if you are interested in either of those. If you are looking for a more traditional Folk Horror outing, this might not be for you, but as someone for whom that genre does not often work, I had a pretty good time with it.
🍿 SCORE = 68 / 100
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