{"id":69144,"date":"2025-07-17T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T06:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/69144\/"},"modified":"2025-07-17T06:00:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T06:00:10","slug":"stream-it-or-skip-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/69144\/","title":{"rendered":"Stream It Or Skip It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Frost<\/a> and Aisling Bea (This Way Up<\/a>) are parents subjecting their teens to Dad\u2019s terrible car ride jams and Mom\u2019s penchant for\u2026unique holiday destinations in Get Away, a film under the Shudder\/IFC banner now streaming on Hulu. Also starring Sebastian Croft (Heartstopper<\/a>) and Maisie Ayres, and written by Frost with direction from Steffen Haars, Get Away finds an English family repairing to a remote Swedish island for a little R&R. You know: a quaint bed and breakfast, invigorating dips in the harbor, and a view of preparations for Karant\u00e4n, a mysterious bit of folk history celebrated by the locals, who definitely don\u2019t want any outsiders around. \u201cYou\u2019ll leave,\u201d it is said. \u201cOne way or another.\u201d But as things move along, to whom that warning applies becomes an open question.<\/p>\n

GET AWAY<\/a>: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Gist:<\/strong> It\u2019s like a Volvo commercial as Richard (Frost), Susan (Bea), Sam (Croft) and Jessie (Ayres) drive through an expanse of Swedish greenery on their way to the island of Sv\u04d3lta. It\u2019s a remote place with one ferry in or out and a history of violence. It didn\u2019t go well for the English naval officers who came ashore there 200 years ago. But it didn\u2019t go well for the local people, either, who were cut off from the mainland by a terrible snowstorm. \u201cPeople died\u2026or turned to cannibalism to feed themselves.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Sam and Jessie groan about being dragged to another bizarre vacation destination which lacks even basic cell service, and Richard and Susan indulge in tourist-y cluelessness at the restaurant by the ferry \u2013 fermented mackerel anus is on special \u2013 we learn a little about the people of Sv\u04d3lta, whose Karant\u00e4n celebration seems to involve fertility masks, history portrayed as ritual, and the fabrication of fresh wooden coffins. The ferry arrives to dump the visitors on the island, and the leaders of the local \u201cKommune\u201d are quite unhappy to see them. But at least Matts (Eero Milonoff), their host, seems mostly un-crazy. His mother\u2019s house, which they\u2019re renting, has all the hallmarks of local hospitality. Slippers, seclusion, and a story about his mother being beheaded, \u201cright there in her favorite chair.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The title of Get Away can be read as one word. Who doesn\u2019t love a holiday? But like Get Out<\/a>, it can also be read as a verb. As the days count down to Karant\u00e4n, the locals\u2019 oversized mask game gets more and more weird. There are animal sacrifices. And a village matriarch tut-tuts about returning to the \u201cunsurpassed clarity\u201d of old traditions. You have to wonder: despite the stark beauty, why would anyone vacation here? It\u2019s not like the Vrbo listing highlighted \u201ctwo-way mirrors,\u201d \u201cface-licking,\u201d and \u201critual murder.\u201d But you also have to wonder about whose traditions we\u2019re here to celebrate. As we learn more about why these visitors love a vacation, we also get an eyeful of their typical itinerary. \u201cThe family that stays together\u2026\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Get PHOTO: Sky Original Film<\/p>\n

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?<\/strong> Midsommar<\/a> basically ruined the wearing of a leafy laurel for anything besides ritualistic horror-murder, right? A family vacation also flirted with disaster in the modernist dark comedy Force Majeure.<\/a> And recent highlights in the areas of horror-comedy and folk-horror include The Monkey<\/a> and Totally Killer<\/a> as well as Azrael<\/a> \u2013 with the latter featuring Get Away co-star Eero Milonoff.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Performance Worth Watching:<\/strong> The familial squabbling of the visitors at the center of Get Away sets the particular tone of the film, and brings to life the best of Nick Frost\u2019s script.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Memorable Dialogue:<\/strong> Susan: \u201cMy great great great great great grandfather actually died here on this island \u2013 he was one of the brave officers your ancestors murdered\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Sex and Skin:<\/strong> None.<\/p>\n

Our Take:<\/strong> Respect local traditions at your peril! Don\u2019t go in the woods! And whatever you do, don\u2019t go on the Moors at night! In the movies, visitors and vacationers have been warned away from meddling in local living and traditions so many times, it\u2019s a wonder anyone goes anywhere without expecting to find a Wicker Man<\/a> or a Werewolf in London<\/a>. Or maybe it\u2019s a wonder anyone goes to any of these places they were warned about\u2026and then just accepts getting killed? For Get Away, Nick Frost takes this trope of the movies and twists \u2013 hard, until blood shows \u2013 and the result reveals with delicious glee the false bottom of his initial setup. Look, mayhem definitely ensues. It\u2019s no spoiler to say that. But as it does, Get Away blends horror tradition, slasher movie economy, and a brand of burned-to-a-crisp, hacked-off, or blown-to-bits comedy that delights in destruction as much as it does a sick comeback line.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nobody\u2019s morals made the trip to Sweden in Get Away. Even if Richard and Susan had never got the idea to plan this particular visit, the local people were already burdened by the weight of some very sordid history. That both groups have intentions to make good on secret plans \u2013 but in so doing severely misjudge the other \u2013 is a big part of where the comedy hits most in Get Away. But it\u2019s also quite into subverting expectations. Does it spend perhaps too-long of a time trying to do that, either from the locals\u2019 perspective or their visitors? Perhaps. But horror movies should always revel in their payoffs, and if you thought this film was simply another tale of a vacation gone wrong, wait until you see what kind of comments are left in the guestbook of the Sv\u04d3lta rental home. Or splattered on its walls.<\/p>\n

Our Call:<\/strong> Stream It! Get Away is a funny and increasingly bloody (and twisty) trip as it skewers vacation horror stories and horror films themselves with a smart, unapologetically dark script from writer-star Nick Frost.<\/p>\n

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social<\/a>) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nick Frost and Aisling Bea (This Way Up) are parents subjecting their teens to Dad\u2019s terrible car ride…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":69145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[48846,13270,171,54,48847,53,48848,48849,48850,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-69144","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-aisling-bea","9":"tag-british","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-horror","12":"tag-movie-reviews","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-nick-frost","15":"tag-sebastian-croft","16":"tag-steffen-haars","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114867052791439004","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}