Get Away

“Nick Frost in a horror-comedy” is the sort of sentence that inevitably invites comparisons to Shaun Of The Dead. Get Away is a markedly different beast to Frost’s iconic 2004 film debut: this is a horror-comedy set in Northern Sweden rather than North London, and there’s less of an affectionate genre homage going on here: while Get Away’s creepy Scandinavians and their strange rituals occasionally evoke Midsommar, there’s more of a droll holiday-gone-wrong vibe — Eden Lake meets National Lampoon’s Vacation, if you will.

That is cemented from minute one, with Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’ blaring through the speakers of a hire car. This is where we meet Frost — on both acting and screenwriting duties — in pure dad mode as the affable Richard, cheerfully blurting out lines like, “All aboard the Skylark!” Aisling Bea, as his wife Susan, ably matches his energy, brightly calling him “Daddy”, and referring to their vacation as “holibobs”, to the chagrin of their eye-rolling teenage children (Sebastian Croft, Maisie Ayres).

Its wild, gonzo, go-for-broke third act dials up the shock factor to 11.

The Nordic locals, meanwhile, are like the patrons of The Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf In London, all silent stares and scowls. Despite repeated warnings and insistence from the community that they are not welcome, the family persist, for reasons that seem, initially, puzzling. Susan seems to have some sort of ancestral connection to the island, and there is at least one witty acknowledgement of how Brexit has made European travel a little more awkward for Brits abroad, but why would you bother sticking around?

The gently funny out-of-towners approach and spooky _Wicker Man-_esque rituals that dominate the first two thirds of the film feel serviceable enough, if a little derivative. Dutch director Steffen Haars has a nice handle on the tone, which skips lightly and ably between British irony and Scandinavian melancholy, and Haars makes the most of his verdant setting. But we’ve seen this sort of stuff before.

Indeed, it could all start to feel a little forgettable — were it not for its wild, gonzo, go-for-broke third act, which dials up the shock factor to 11. Just when you think you could be out, it pulls you back in, in the bloodiest and most gloriously crude fashion possible. It’s the kind of reverse ferret that will make you want to rewatch the film immediately.