The vacation movie has dramatized the iconic notion of a girls’ trip, the opportunity to get away from a drab, mundane life and explore some new location. Often it is a tropical place, or at least somewhere a lot warmer than New York City in the winter. From movies like Girls Trip to Spring Breakers, romantic comedy and crime territory has been covered by the overarching theme. But what happens when someone goes missing on a trip? This question is the answer that Australian director Kim Farrant sought to find in the Netflix original thriller The Weekend Away.
The Weekend Away is based on the thriller novel by Sarah Alderson of the same name. The novel was inspired by an innocent trip Alderson took to Lisbon, Portugal, with a best friend. Although that trip did not have any deadly consequences, The Weekend Away does. It meditated on concepts of female friendships, especially in one’s twenties and thirties, and how many people do not know what they are doing at that age.
Leighton Meester returns to feature films after three years where she was famous for her performances on The CW’s Gossip Girl and Single Parents of ABC Television Network. Character named Beth is played by Leighton Meester who portrays her as if she were Beth; best friends with Kate (Christina Wolfe), who appeared previously in Batwoman as well as Luke Norris (Rob), Ziad Bakri (Croatian stranger) and Amar Bukvic (a kombi van driver). However they all begin with Beth & Kate.
They consider themselves closest friends since they met while studying abroad at England where both live now though Beth is American while Kate introduced Rob (Luke Norris) whom she had fallen pregnant for whom she currently resides married him too despite this marriage looking unhappy according from them talking quite distantly between each other. They were slowly growing apart during time when Beth got birth but when Kate’s marriage started falling apart piece by piece, the two decided they would leave together and go to Croatia. This was supposed to be a trip of self-indulgence and something that Kate could help her feel better about life in general and eventually find her purpose.
What ends up happening is the exact opposite: Kate is found dead in the water. The film hides nothing, showing Kate’s body floating in the water as the opening shot. Almost immediately, it is established that something is going to be wrong on this getaway, and the viewer, along with the characters in the movie, is going to have to put together the pieces of what actually happened here. It also sets the expectation that darkness lingers underneath a bright and sunny town shown in the next shot.
And perhaps revealing this fact so soon can be a double-edged sword for the movie. It quickly establishes what is to come and what the film is going to be about, but at the same time, it vastly lowers the stakes. Kate disappears during a night out in town; Beth panics when she realizes that Kate never came back to their posh hotel room all through that night after a few drinks. However because we already know what has most likely happened tension which could have been built upon from this event does not exist at all.
Kate, on the other hand, has qualities that are way different from those of Beth; she is audacious and outgoing, the kind of person who can push Beth to experience something new. When Kate slyly proposes naked swimming after Beth mentions that she may have left her swimming suit behind, Beth stares unimpressed, shyly averting her gaze. In the time Kate is alive, her vibrancy fills up the screen. Unlike Beth who wears a pale shade of blue for their night out, Kate puts on a sparkly number fit for a club complete with bright red lipstick and high heels. She even tells Beth that she needs to snap out of it and start having sex with random guys sometimes. However this might be reasonable since she has only separated from her husband and now wants to live freely.
But then here’s what actually happens: She didn’t drink that night and does not recall doing anything along those lines. However, she blacks out and wakes up the following morning vomiting. There is no sign of Kate in the show. This feels very familiar, like something that typically occurs during normal vacations or girls’ trips together. When trying to get away from everyday life you will find yourself buying too many drinks which lead to being drunk till one passes off while the other girl is still awake insisting on some sex.
Beth’s anxiety increases as Kate fails to come home but in fact Zain (Ziad Bakri), a Syrian taxi driver who drops off at her hotel stands out surprisingly in this case.As an illustration he seems like he is the only taxi driver there due his appearing for many times and being called all over but still shows empathy towards Beth when he first met him helping her find Kate.Inclusion of his name into police records could jeopardize his visa therefore he hesitates about this.Croatia has traditionally been an asylum for people fleeing political instability in their countries.
At this point there is quite a bit of gaslighting occurring, with Beth’s spouse and even the male cop dismissing her fears. “Kate has gone off with a guy and her friend is upset,” the male police officer laughs to a companion in Croatian as Beth sits anxiously in front of them. No charges are ever filed and a female police officer notes that he did not do his job well when she returns next day.
This is an obvious double standard which significantly darkens the beginning of this movie; since Kate is seen as sexually promiscuous and a party girl men treat her like she should be demoted for good. Rather, it is merely brushed aside because there is a presumption that she will stumble home drunk anyway. Had things been reversed and Beth were missing, an alarm would have been raised perhaps. It was blatant sexism cloaked around the tragedy about to happen.
The Weekend Away doesn’t try to revamp the storyline of a disappearance where friends and family try to figure out what happened. It is not set in the usual tropical setting that one expects of an average girls’ trip celebrating freedom. Instead, they head off for beautiful Croatia in a little coastal town that has just the right somber atmosphere with its old-world European charm and mountains on the horizon.
Maybe it is this film’s genre adherence which marks it down. The movie fails to break free from conventional tropes and dynamics created by films featuring people who go missing, and it stretches out whodunit for as long as possible. Each character becomes a suspect, ridden and layered with twists. This could be the person Kate might have hired on the night she disappeared or their creepy landlord seen going through their stuff.
Leighton Meester as Beth gives us a finely observed close-up performance as she tries desperately to piece together what might have happened that night. Though everyone else keeps saying she does not know anything about it, that Kate will return safely, she insists something is wrong somewhere. Of course, viewers know her gut feelings are correct thereby unfolding them how friendly they are.
However, Beth is quite an unstable character. She does not have any story beyond her friend’s vanishing act as her mistrust and fear continue growing. There is no real satisfying specific growth in her narrative arc though; eventually she unveils what really happened at last but still remains Beth from first frame till now but more cynical due to life experiences since then like loss of innocence elsewhere too thus maybe this is why Zain finds solace in him after escaping Syria because of war & death like Beth experienced(.)
The Weekend Away has a runtime of ninety minutes; however within this short time, there’s so much packed up in here. Hidden social commentaries peek out from under on being mothers recently exposed life of migrants such as Zain but get buried under the main plot which is continuously twisting. At some points, the movie itself is quite foreseeable and the stakes are too low, but it keeps the story fresh by adding a new twist every five or ten minutes. Taking one back to nineties films, it makes for a great Friday night movie with no newness in its genre’s offerings.
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