According to conventional wisdom, you know a style has reached oversaturation when the spoofs start showing up. I’m not sure I agree, but judging from all the delicious-living Black Philip memes and #goodforher TikToks riffing on the ending of Midsommar, it’s safe to say the public has been ready for an injection of levity into the self-serious folk horror wave of recent years.
The efforts of champions like Kier-La Janisse to thrust the subgenre into mainstream awareness are commendable, but the craze may fall victim to its own success. “Folk horror” is in danger of becoming a marketing term. It might be hard for rustic settings, ceremonial regalia, and pre-Christian rituals (especially those of northern Europe, but that’s a whole different can of worms) to keep their symbolic power when they’re just window displays for catching a target audience’s eye. As we stand on the edge of a descent into cynical commerce, there’s plenty of room for parody, and that’s where Steffen Haars and Nick Frost’s Get Away comes into play.
Get Away is a difficult film to write about. I can say, “go in blind,” but that tips you off that there is a twist. I can pretend there’s no twist, but I’d be limiting myself to half a review. That’s because Get Away becomes a wholly different film in its third act, and I wouldn’t be doing my job if I sent you in unprepared for that.
Here’s what I can tell you: a British family (mum, dad, and two surly teens) vacation on a tiny Swedish island where an annual festival commemorates a deadly historical outbreak and quarantine. Aside from their app-based B&B host, everyone on the island seems to belong to an archaic commune that is openly hostile to foreigners. The net slowly tightens around our tourist protagonists until the day of the festival arrives, and things take an unexpected turn.
Hot Fuzz might be a glib comparison, but the movies have more in common than star and screenwriter Nick Frost. Both hinge on third-act twists that recast everything that went before, and both attempt to poke loving fun at their genres while treating them with enough respect to be legitimate entries. I’d argue that Get Away walks this line less gracefully than Hot Fuzz, but to say why would be to spoil the fun.
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The film’s humor is pitched in a dry British monotone, along the lines of frequent Frost collaborator Alice Lowe. It’s funniest when skewering its entitled boorish tourists but falls flat when it tries to develop zany characters. The virtue-signaling vegetarian teen was a tired trope when The Simpsons did it three decades ago. One character’s cross-dressing kink goes hand-in-hand with evil proclivities, which is incredibly tone-deaf in 2024, even if not deliberately malicious.
And then there’s the twist. It’s not Get Away’s fault, but it happened to be the fourth horror movie I’ve seen this year with the exact same twist. I might have been more receptive otherwise, but I’m not sure. It’s also a huge tone shift that comes across as a betrayal of what the film has built to that point.
You can’t accuse Get Away of not having a brain in its head. It plays with some clever ideas about how the tourism industry reproduces colonial violence—fertile territory for folk horror that might remind viewers of The Ritual. But ultimately, there are two different films here, and the second one discards the first with such finality that it feels like there should be credits in between.
And seriously, what’s the deal with 2024 and that twist?