The Weekend Away Parent Guide

Beth (Leighton Meester) feels stuck at home after giving birth to her first child with her husband, Rob (Luke Norris). Her best friend, Kate (Christina Wolfe), has a plan to cheer her up, which includes an exciting vacation in Croatia, with a scenic rental in the old town, bicycle tours, the works. To the weary new mother, it sounds like a dream weekend.

After her arrival, Beth is disappointed that Kate seems more interested in drinking heavily and dancing at one of the city’s nightclubs than hanging out together. One night of hard partying later, and Beth wakes up in bed with a blinding hangover and little recollection of the previous evening. Worse, Kate isn’t in the apartment, and isn’t answering her phone…and there’s blood on the floor. Determined not to abandon her friend, Beth sets off to track her down, but every answer leads to more questions.

The script rarely manages to to answer most of those questions in a satisfactory manner. It rushes through the motions of a thriller, clipping from plot point to plot point without much concern for the coherence of the story. On paper, almost everyone is a suspect, which is how thrillers help to build tension. In practice, there are two likely characters, and the film is just a race to see which one gets killed first. I will say that helps the film’s pacing, which zips right along, but that’s probably because the whole thing is over in 85 minutes, with 6 minutes of credits to push it past the 90-minute standard.

Shockingly, The Weekend Away has hardly any profanity. Either I’ve been doing this job too long and lost my ability to hear cursing, or bad language in this film was entirely limited to sporadic outbursts of mild cursing and terms of deity. That’s genuinely bizarre for a film with a TV-14 rating. I can only assume that the drinking, drug references, and sexual language pushed it to that rating. There are also brief instances of hand-to-hand violence, but it’s far less graphic than you might expect.

I suppose if you’re hard up for a way to spend an hour or so, this will fill a gap. It’s not completely incompetent, and on the surface it looks and sounds like a regular movie. Just don’t pay too much attention, because that’s when you’ll start noticing all the little shortcuts that keep this from being any amount of fun. It’s a story written in the shorthand of cardboard characters and recycled plots, and it requires no serious thought whatsoever. Honestly, if I’d given in to my instincts and fallen asleep halfway through, I think I could have dreamed a better ending.