Director: Steffen Haars Screenwriter: Nick Frost Cast: Nick Frost, Aisling Bea, Sebastian Croft, Maisie Ayres Distributor: IFC Films Running Time: 86 min. MPAA: R

Subversion is a tricky thing to inject into a film. Get Away is a film that attempts to surprise with its twist of a folk horror nightmare vacation that is turned on its head. To get to that point, however, this film stumbles with so many bog-standard horror tropes that the twists are not so much exciting as they are a break from the exaggerated misfires. It’s a film that wants to pretend it’s in a shitty Swedish horror film by commenting on how the scenario feels like a shitty Swedish horror film. As it turns out, it’s an off-beat British comedy masquerading as a horror comedy masquerading as a Swedish folk horror film. If this were a Russian nesting doll of genres, it’d be translucent.

The feuding family of Richard (Nick Frost), Susan (Aisling Bea), Sam (Sebastian Croft), and Jessie (Maisie Ayres) have taken off from Britain on a vacation to a Swedish island. The family is already bickering on the road there. A stop at a diner before the ferry has the son hoping for vegan food and the daughter refusing to eat at all. Running the diner is a scowling local who only takes cash and warns them not to go to the island. The family proceeds anyway, where they’re greeted by some creepy locals who observe their guests with harsh eyes, unkind words, and concerning traditions. Any typical family going on a vacation would have peaced out at all these red flags, especially when the island’s ritual involves a condemnation of the British. There has to be an ulterior motive for the family to put up with all this weird island horror tropes.

Eventually, the curtain is pulled and it’s revealed the family are actually killers who seem to delight more in the slaughtering than the bantering. To the film’s credit, there is a mild charm when the ensemble start cavorting as they rip apart the island’s ritual, transforming a folk horror into a horror comedy, loaded with gore and absurdity. But all of this arrives as too little too late. The monotonous road to the reveal is one of exhaustion, where the horror staging feels less like an engrossing folk horror and more like a middle-of-the-road independent horror film that tries too hard to evoke the familiar ingredients. In the same way that the American remake of See No Evil went so over-the-top with its bubbling terror that there’s little shock with the reveal, the same underwhelming growth plagues a film that could have been a decent dose of taking a stab at this type of genre mixing and subversion.

There’s a bit more going on in the film beyond the family enduring the island before their grand finale. Tracking the island are some detectives and there’s another creepy dude framed as a red-herring serial killer. But all of this feels like busy work to throw audiences off the scent and not very well. The intersection of the authorities and locals stirs together for some chaos, but with enough vagueness to connect the dots before the reveal. It’s like opening a birthday present that wasn’t wrapped very well, where you can clearly see it’s a box from pet store but that the actual gift was not purchased at a pet store. You almost have to fain shock at the big reveal and force a smile when the violence starts spilling on the screen, if only to feel something more.

Get Away’s appeal depends entirely on how long you can endure the tedium before the twist. If you can survive the mundanity, there’s a decent treat at the end, as Nick Frost delights in the slaughter of Swedish locals and emits some of his trademark charm with less awkwardness and more confidence. But watching all of this unfold had the same effect of watching an amateur folk horror, getting bored, and throwing on a giddy gore fest before finishing.

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