Movie Review: The Weekend Away (2022)

“Trust no one, suspect everyone” – how cliche does that sound? Yet exactly that is the tagline for the poster of The Weekend Away – a new mystery thriller released on Netflix this month. Luckily, I didn’t notice that line anywhere before watching the film, otherwise I would have had second thoughts about watching it.

_{Christina Wolfe as Kate and Leighton Meester as Beth in The Weekend Away. Source}

The reason why I feel like I’ve been lucky to watch this film is because it’s practically built upon a rebellious premise that every known mystery thriller trope that involves looking for missing person should be twisted, and every expected expectation should be proven futile. Kudos to Sarah Alderson, who apparently wrote both, the script and the novel: after watching The Weekend Away I’m giving up my long time ambition of earning money as a clairvoyant. During the hour and twenty minutes of constantly getting my intuition (and my ego!) belted mercilessly, I’m left with wisdom that I know nothing.

There are some other insights I realize I’ve gained during the said affair. First of all, I think there is too much Eli Roth living in me. (If you are a horror fan reading this, you should try watching this film too in order to see if Eli Roth is present in you.) When I see an opening scene with a dead young woman’s body floating in sea waters, accompanied by sounds of cello, and two female friends afterwards appearing to be in the lead roles in a movie I know is a mystery thriller, produced in 2021, about someone going missing in a former communist country somewhere in Europe, I instantly set my expectations for scenes that involve organized crime, torture, exploitation, struggles and fights, car chase and revenge. It turned out Netflix hadn’t lied when not mentioning horror in the genre category. When I realized this halfway through watching the film, I also realized that I’m hooked despite some truly silly plot holes. As an example of plot holes I think I should mention the fact that neither the lead heroine, nor detectives at police station would suspect drink spiking in a situation where that happening could have been of a high probability. Moreover, our lead heroine, a married woman, is entirely incapable of spotting ingenuine, unnatural behavior of the opposite sex for what it really is as if she’s never dated before. These things might get you wondering, dear reader, what made me to continue watching a film like that, and my answer is – at that point virtually everyone in it had become a suspect! Honestly, I don’t remember a film I watched that had managed to grow the paranoia to this level. Even if I realized I have watched too many films in my life hence the knowledge of too many possible twists and tropes hence the level of suspicion, I still had to admit that watching The Weekend Away was quite a unique experience.

I can’t promise you will like the way it all plays out in the end, but the watching experience is exciting enough: there are people of different backgrounds in it with good actor skills, events develop in a pace that’s a part of a good intrigue and mystery. In the end you might realize, people aren’t really that bad as your inner Eli Roth may think.

Peer Ynt