The Gossip Girl veteran stars as an American whose friend disappears on trip to Croatia, unraveling a host of secrets in swift if predictable fashion.
Her Beth – foggy and confused, learning to trust her own instincts as her assumptions crumble – grounds a thinly written character who could’ve been merely a plot device in a shallow story. Beth summarily unravels a host of secrets behind her friendship with Kate, her marriage to Rob, and side characters such as creepy hotelier Sebastian (Adrian Pezdirc), though those secrets aren’t ultimately that surprising. The rest is a blacked-out blur, convincingly relayed in small flashbacks; Beth awakens from her bender to find Kate missing and delays her trip home to London to find her.
Director: Kim Farrant Starring: Leighton Meester, Christina Wolfe, Amar Bukvic Running time: 90 minutes. A psychological thriller with an international cast ...
However, one of the main problems with this film is that most of the twists and turns are largely predictable except, in all fairness, the final “shocker”. Unfortunately, in The Weekend Away, once the final twist has been delivered, it lacks plausibility. Her past is unearthed as the film progresses and its relevance to her friendship with Beth is exposed. As with all films of this genre, there have to be twists and turns to the plot, generally with an unpredicted big twist offered as a finale – one that none of us anticipated and generally catches us out. In contrast, Kate is the overindulged, spoiled brat and is far from endearing. The film begins with the girls’ weekend away and its attendant cliches and fails to pull itself away from this. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Sarah Alderson, who was also responsible for the screenplay.
Netflix's new murder-mystery The Weekend Away, starring Gossip Girl's Leighton Meester, is here to enable your questionable online shopping habits.
After quickly flying to Croatia to try and convince Kate that she mustn’t tell Beth about their months-long dalliance, a late-night argument about the situation down by the water costs Kate her life when she tries to push Rob away and that black onyx necklace fully breaks apart in the struggle. Rob has been banging his wife’s bestie on the dl for months and doesn’t want Beth to find out about the affair. Suspecting Kate has been murdered (she has), Beth sort of stands around wringing her hands and weeping for help as the list of suspects potentially involved in Kate’s disappearance gets longer.
The pleasure of a thriller like this is to get lost in its locales and caught up in the web it spins.
Films like this live and die on the commitment of their lead performance and whether the audience roots for her to get out of this mess. The scenery is gorgeous, the twists keep the adrenaline pumping, and the performances are memorable. Beth trusts her own instincts, even when the police, Kate’s estranged husband Jay (Parth Thakerar), and even her own husband Rob try to get her to doubt what she knows to be true about her best friend. The pleasure of a thriller like this is to get lost in its locales and caught up in the web it spins. They’ve been best friends since Beth’s semester abroad in England, during which Kate introduced Beth to her now husband Rob (Luke Norris). The women have drifted a bit since the birth of Beth’s daughter Aster. By the end of Beth and Kate’s weekend, one of them will be dead. Everything is sunshine and palm trees as bright-eyed new mom Beth (Leighton Meester) makes her way by taxi to a girls weekend away with best friend Kate (Christina Wolfe). In free fall after the dissolution of her marriage, the whole trip is on Kate's, including the lushest AirBnB, raw oysters, and copious amounts of alcohol.
It's the dark thriller that's just dropped on Netflix. And audiences want to know where The Weekend Away was filmed in real-life.
That’s not to say they are the same person at all, but I tend to take elements of my friends in terms of physical descriptions more than personality.” “That’s the joy of being able to adapt your own work is being able to do that. “Off-screen, I will say that it was the best place to have a new baby,” she said. When I wrote the book, I was already imagining it as a movie, so everything key from the book really did go into the script.” The Weekend Away is about a holiday that takes a turn for the worse. “It’s a thriller by name but less edge-of-your-seat than lounging on the couch, absorbing beats of plot like the ocean tide,” says Guardian critic Adrian Horton, who gave it 3 stars.
Leighton Meester talks to TODAY about the ending of her Netflix movie The Weekend Away and how Beth compares to Blair Waldorf.
Beth may be worlds away from Blair, but she's similar to someone more important to the film: Meester herself. "It was really huge blessing (to shoot backwards) because I got to get it out of the way. I don’t know if that would exactly happen to her to begin with," Meester says. Over the course of the movie, Beth begins to deteriorate. "Maybe who you suspect it is, maybe that’s who it was in the first place." "I'm most excited for people to (suspect) everyone," Meester says.