The Weekend Away strikes me as fairly typical of the films that you find on platforms like Netflix. It's a thriller, efficiently put together and reasonably pacy, if rather superficial and certainly unoriginal. Like so many other thrillers at present it features a strong woman protagonist and a bunch of men who display varying degrees of creepiness. The backdrop, in that delightful-to-visit country Croatia, is visually appealing and one of the film's strongest points.
Beth (Leighton Meester) flies off to Croatia to visit her charismatic friend Kate (Christina Wolfe) for the weekend. Beth confides that her marriage to Rob (Luke Norris) has hit a rough patch, despite their shared devotion to their young child. Kate insists on taking Beth out clubbing and chatting up two hunky men. The next thing we know, Beth wakes up much the worse for wear and Kate is nowhere to be seen.
Beth insists to a disbelieving cop that her friend has gone missing and that there is something sinister about the disappearance. Is the weird landlord implicated, we wonder? And why are the police so unhelpful? The film is based on a novel by a writer called Sarah Alderson, who also wrote the screenplay, and she certainly keeps the twists coming, although at the expense of plausibility.
This film is fine as a time-passer, though I didn't warm to Beth in the way I think I was supposed to. At least she was slightly less irritating than Kate. The men, other than the Beth's taxi driver chum, a Syrian refugee, were uniformly unpleasant. Final verdict; competent light entertainment, but likely to be forgotten after a weekend or two.
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