By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
Best known as the co-star of Edgar Wright’s iconic Cornetto Trilogy, Nick Frost also has experience as a writer. He co-wrote the movie Paul (2011) with Simon Pegg and has published two books (Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies and A Slice of Fried Gold). The new horror comedy Get Away (2024) is the first feature that Frost wrote by himself. In an interview for the Fantastic Pavilion, Frost said that he “loves writing” because it gives him “a little anchor in reality and something to do. It makes me a better person.”
Frost approached Get Away in a familiar way: “For 20 years we’ve made films to make each other laugh. We’ve never made a film to try and make a larger audience laugh. We realized quite soon in our careers that what people like is the fact that a film was made trying to make other mates laugh. We’ve always tried to stick with that. There are jokes in Get Away that are just for Edgar and Simon,” Frost revealed.
Directed by Steffen Haars, Get Away is set on Svälta, a remote Swedish island where 200 years ago an alleged pandemic led to prolonged quarantine, death, starvation, and cannibalism. Although Svälta is a fictional place, Frost drew inspiration from his trips to a real Swedish island: “The island that I went to a lot was actually used by the British during the Napoleonic War, because if Napoleon’s sea fleet was going to get to Europe it had to come past that island essentially. The British Navy had an outpost there. Disease struck and a lot of the island just died, including the British. So on the island there’s a cemetery and there’s a little section for members of the British Navy that died. Every year on the island a British vessel would come in, to harbor, and they’d walk up the hill, to the place where the British sailors died.”
The protagonists of Get Away are an Anglo-Irish family who go on vacation to Svälta, in time for the start of the Karantän, a festivity that evokes what happened on the island in the 19th century. Frost himself plays the dad, Aisling Bea the mom, while Maisie Ayres and Sebastian Croft play the children. Bea revealed in the interview that she loved “that part of the script about a middle-class couple. My favorite things to play were moments from our marriage, when Nick would throw in something like ‘we talked about this in couples therapy.’ That would manifest when a dead animal was being dropped on their doorstep or when they were running around in action sequences.”
From its first scenes, Get Away presents the classic scenario where despite the warnings and red flags, the protagonists continue their trip towards an ideal place for a horror movie. Once they arrive in Svälta they encounter a very hostile commune – led by Anitta Suikkari’s character – and an Airbnb host (Eero Milonoff) who soon enough emanates a creepy vibe. But the family won’t leave the place, as they really need this vacation.
Get Away certainly recalls Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). Even at one point a detective (Ville Virtanen) visits the island to investigate a double homicide. Frost confirmed that “The Wicker Man was a direct influence” and that “Midsommar (2019) was a bigger influence.”
Regarding themes that are present in Get Away and other folk horror films – like the clash between different cultures, and tradition and modernity –, Frost commented the following: “I’m always struck by how much tradition they have in places like Scandinavia or Wales. I watch a lot of Japanese television, right now it’s sumo wrestling season and it’s like ‘Jesus Christ! This is a thousand years old.’ What traditions do we have here in Britain? We have Black Friday. We miss our traditions, a lot of our deeper cultural traditions have been diluted or just disappeared.”
In addition to being a combination of horror and humor, Get Away is defined by a plot twist that shouldn’t be spoiled. Therefore I warn you that the following responses from Frost and Bea, which have to do with other influences and the essence of Get Away, hint at what ends up happening.
“I’m a big fan of the Lars von Trier film The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998), where a group of people pretend to be physically and mentally disabled, in order to see if they could pull it off. As soon as they get in their vehicle afterwards and they transform back into themselves, they then break down what worked, what didn’t work, what can they do better. I love that,” Frost said, adding that “I’m fascinated with the Dutch film The Vanishing (Spoorloos, 1988) and the Belgian film Man Bites Dog (C’est arrivé près de chez vous, 1992). I love the fact that you shouldn’t empathize with these people. But because we spent so much time making them really quite endearing humans, when the shit hits the fan at the end, you still kind of like them, you know? Even though they’re doing awful, awful things. It’s nice as a writer to try and get an audience to feel that way.”
Bea concluded by saying that “no matter what the characters do, the key to any film is that the audience wants to stay with them. That’s what I think Nick’s done so brilliantly.”
Get Away opens in U.S. theaters on December 6, via IFC Films and Shudder.