When I first started watching Lane Tolan’s Getaway, I thought I knew what to expect. The movie starts off with a drawn out montage of scenes featuring little to no dialogue, with enhanced sound detail that I found it really satisfying. The “jangling” of a discarded chain; the subtle “thud” as, legs dangling, a body drops to the ground; the drawn out “crush” of legs slowly sweeping across grass. Mixed with some key music choices, the sound composition of these intro scenes sets the stage for an eerie thriller.
Hot girl Tamara, pursued (or, stalked?) by a few equally hot, yet kinda sketchy guys, who may or may not want to kill her, is going to meet up with some also hot friends in a remote woodsy location with a lake–a perfect movie choice for a rainy Monday morning in quarantine. The plot seems straightforward enough. It would appear that Tamara (Jaclyn Betham) and her friends Brooke (Landry Allbright) and Maddie (Scout Taylor-Compton) are just three average ladies, taking a girls weekend to flirt with guys and get drunk. There’s a brief interaction between Tamara and her friend(?) Jerry (Jamil Walker Smith) as Tamara is leaving for her trip, and you can’t decide if he’s a stalker or if she likes him.
Then, on her way to the lake, Tamara has a run-in with some creepy guys (Lane Tolan and Noah Lowdermilk) who give her gas for her broken down car, but make it very obvious they’d like to take a little more than just a thank you from her…Take into account the aforementioned montage, and the suggestively awkward interactions with the male species, and you’ve got some classic Backwoods-ish type of misogynistic slasher thriller on your hands. But (thank god) you come to find out there’s more to this movie than that. Brooke and Maddie, Tamara’s friends, are in a relationship. And neither they, nor Tamara, have the time of day for any of the guys in the movie; unless of course it’s to accept free alcohol, to use one of them as an alibi, or to try to kill one of them. The entire movie continuously surprises you as it defies female stereotypes, and that’s something I really appreciated about it.
As a fan of more brutal, similar-themed horror movies though, this movie was like the Degrassi of its class–claiming “it goes there” without ever ending up wherever “there” is. Even the scenes where Merv (Lane Tolan), Kib (Noah Lowdermilk) and Pa (Lane Caudell) are trying to be vulgar, they come off as a lot of talk–not much walk. I’m not sure if it was the acting, the writing, the costume design, or all of the above, that worked against the overall believability of the film. From the time I saw Merv and Kib, I understood the film wanted them to come off as creepy lumberjack types, but I wasn’t really buying it. It could have been the skinny jeans and the stylish shoes, but to me, these guys didn’t look like they’d spent too much time in the woods. We don’t get too much of a backstory with this family either, so I’m not entirely sure I trust that their motives are what they say. Like, are we supposed to actually believe that Merv and Kib have been brainwashed by their God-loving, angel-baby-creating father, or is Pa just pretending to be into these weird cult-like fantasies so that he can create a family of rapists?
The movie has a very tongue in cheek style, which helps to combat the lack of gore and special effects. I could not keep a straight face when Kib tells Tamara with every ounce of seriousness he can muster, “You’ll make devil babies; so I don’t know what to do.” Lines like this, melded with bizarre themes that seem ridiculously out of place (Is this movie about witches or not??), keep the viewer engaged until the very end of the movie. Regardless of whether or not you believe the characters, you want to know how the movie ends.
Overall, I really enjoyed Getaway. The characters were fun and sexy as promised. The camera angles and use of sound in certain instances added to the satirical quality of the movie. I loved the pivotal end scene: Tamara, Brooke and Maddie are slowly walking across the field, guns blazing, “February” by Victoria Victoria lilting in the background–time slows and the camera focuses on the barrel of the guns, Tamara’s exposed chest, the flowing waves of the women’s white dresses. An expression of power in femininity. The music choices were on-point, and the sound editing precisely complimented movements, like when Brooke and Tamara are dancing and clapping in rhythm to “Songs You Sing” by Old Heavy Hands at the bar. All of these aspects of cinematography and sound mixing come together to create a film that was captivatingly entertaining.
Getaway is available to stream on Amazon Prime.