Should You Watch It or Pass?

Nick Frost and Aisling Bea (known from This Way Up) play parents who put their teenagers through the agony of Dad’s questionable music choices during car rides and Mom’s love for unconventional holiday spots in Get Away, a movie jointly released by Shudder and IFC that’s currently available on Hulu. The film includes Sebastian Croft (from Heartstopper) and Maisie Ayres, penned by Frost and directed by Steffen Haars. It follows an English family seeking relaxation on a secluded Swedish island. There, the family anticipates quaint lodgings, refreshing swims, and watching the locals prepare for Karantän—a mysterious traditional festival. The island’s inhabitants are not keen on outsiders. Observers are warned: “You’ll leave,” they assert, “One way or another.” However, who this warning truly targets becomes uncertain as events unfold.

GET AWAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Envision a Volvo commercial featuring Richard (Frost), Susan (Bea), Sam (Croft), and Jessie (Ayres) navigating the lush Swedish countryside en route to Svӓlta island. It’s a solitary locale accessible by only a single ferry and has a violent past involving unfortunate encounters for English naval officers 200 years prior. The locals faced dire situations too, isolated by catastrophic snow, leading to death or resorting to cannibalism. 

Sam and Jessie voice their discontent about being stuck in yet another eccentric holiday spot devoid of cellphone reception, while Richard and Susan bumble their way through a tourist experience at a ferry terminal eatery offering exotic dishes like fermented mackerel anus. Meanwhile, insights into Svӓlta’s residents are revealed—Karaktän involves rituals with fertility masks and historical enactments, alongside making fresh wooden coffins. Once they disembark with the ferry, the island’s community leaders visibly disapprove. Still, Matts (played by Eero Milonoff), their amiable host, appears relatively normal. The rental home, belonging to Matts’ mother, offers a warm welcome: cozy slippers, isolation, and a chilling tale of his mother being executed, “right there in her favorite chair.”

The title of Get Away can be read as one word. Who doesn’t love a holiday? But like Get Out, it can also be read as a verb. As the days count down to Karantän, the locals’ oversized mask game gets more and more weird. There are animal sacrifices. And a village matriarch tut-tuts about returning to the “unsurpassed clarity” of old traditions. You have to wonder: despite the stark beauty, why would anyone vacation here? It’s not like the Vrbo listing highlighted “two-way mirrors,” “face-licking,” and “ritual murder.” But you also have to wonder about whose traditions we’re here to celebrate. As we learn more about why these visitors love a vacation, we also get an eyeful of their typical itinerary. “The family that stays together…” 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Midsommar 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. And recent highlights in the areas of horror-comedy and folk-horror include The Monkey and Totally Killer as well as Azrael – with the latter featuring Get Away co-star Eero Milonoff.     

Performance Worth Watching: 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’s script. 

Memorable Dialogue: Susan: “My great great great great great grandfather actually died here on this island – he was one of the brave officers your ancestors murdered…”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Respect local traditions at your peril! Don’t go in the woods! And whatever you do, don’t 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’s a wonder anyone goes anywhere without expecting to find a Wicker Man or a Werewolf in London. Or maybe it’s a wonder anyone goes to any of these places they were warned about…and then just accepts getting killed? For Get Away, Nick Frost takes this trope of the movies and twists – hard, until blood shows – and the result reveals with delicious glee the false bottom of his initial setup. Look, mayhem definitely ensues. It’s 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. 

Nobody’s 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 – but in so doing severely misjudge the other – is a big part of where the comedy hits most in Get Away. But it’s also quite into subverting expectations. Does it spend perhaps too-long of a time trying to do that, either from the locals’ 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 Svӓlta rental home. Or splattered on its walls.

Our Call: 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.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) 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.