The Weekend Away || The Murder Mystery

The Weekend Away (2022)

So are you looking for a little murder mystery and maybe some drama? The Netflix movie The Weekend Away stars Leighton Meester and takes us through the streets of beautiful Croatia.

A weekend getaway to Croatia goes awry when a woman is accused of killing her best friend as she attempts to clear her name and uncover the truth. Her efforts unearth a painful secret.

The Plot

We have Leighton Meester and she is playing Beth, who goes to Croatia to hang out with her best friend for a weekend. And you can tell that there's this slight strain between them. And maybe it's just because there's been some time between their last visit. Or maybe it's because Beth is a new mom with wildly different priorities than her bestie Kate.

Kate is single and ready to party, but the tension between them, it's just not huge or uncomfortable. We can feel that pull that one has to go and play and the other would just like to rather sightsee and relax. After a pretty big night of partying, Beth wakes up and can't find Kate, which then places her on the hunt for her missing friend.

Along the way, Beth encounters several different people who give off a slight air of suspicion, which then becomes a whodunit.

Down to my Review

So when the movie started, I was mildly afraid that this was going to turn out to be some half-baked, poorly acted Hallmark mystery. And I was kind of surprised that it's not. Yes, the acting is a little overdone and sometimes it gets a bit melodramatic, but never to that level of soap opera.

The progression of events is routine and it's pretty predictable. We can see from pretty far off that Beth will go to the police at some point. She'll be under suspicion because she's a foreigner there with a spotty memory of the events the night before.

She's then going to encounter a couple of people who offer to help her and then all of the pieces will click and the reveal will come. Just because it's formulaic like that doesn't make it a bad movie necessarily. The characters Beth encounters each have a bit of a creep factor to them.

While none of them screams outright psycho or murderer, they all give off just a slightly unsettling vibe that casts suspicion on each of them in different ways. And I really appreciated that aspect of this story. It feels very obvious in who the perpetrator is, even if we don't know the motive. But this one had me guessing through a lot of it. Not all of it is twisty or clever, and you may figure it out right away. But I wasn't upset by the mystery portion.

There's a character we meet at the beginning of the movie named Zane, and I love what he brought to the story. He has a bit of the mysteriousness to him, but he also comes across as just as a really helpful guy. And I like that he adds a bit of calm or maybe rationale to Beth's frantic search.

But then he also adds to the mystery as just one more person that Beth encounters who could be involved. Because this takes place in Croatia, the setting is beautiful and it is stunning.

I do wish that we would have had even more footage of the coast and just some of that bright blue water. What we get to see is great, but a lot of the time is also spent inside the city through alleyways or inside buildings. And none of it looks bad. I just would have liked to have lived vicariously through the production and seen more of the country.

There's a fair bit of repetition within the story. It does make sense that it would be there because we watch Beth struggle to remember events and then we see flashes of memories play again and again in her head. But they do get a little tiresome at times.

I think the weakest part of this movie comes in the final act. The scenes feel a bit too contrived and then almost simplified, which then they add in bits of exposition that aren't really needed because all of the facts had already been laid out in front of us. But even still, the ending didn't make me angry at the movie like some other really terrible mysteries I happen to have come across.

Final thoughts

This is a casual whodunit with a little bit of intrigue and a case that gives a really good attempt at concealing the perpetrator. The setting is beautiful and the camera work looks pretty good.

The tension of the story and the urgency to find the perpetrator is kept at the forefront of the narrative, meaning that the story doesn't lose its focus as it weaves its twisting tale. At the end of this, it's just an OK watch. I'm giving it a 3 out of 5 stars. Although it's not one that's going to stand out as particularly good, but it does not sink to the depths of the abysmally horrible.

Source of images: IMDb

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