The Trip (2021)

Tommy Wirkola's The Trip arrives with a premise of admirable economy: two spouses, one cabin, two competing murder plots, and a collapsing ceiling that deposits three fugitives into the middle of a marital dispute. What follows is an escalating sequence of injuries, improvised betrayals, and a body count the film regards with the enthusiasm of a child at a fireworks display. There is no message here, no lesson, no invitation for us to improve ourselves. The characters are petty and vain, willing to drown a man in a lake and then sell the story to Hollywood. The film approves. That is its entire moral architecture.

Those who arrive hoping for the consolations of contemporary social consciousness will leave empty-handed. The cast is Norwegian and white. The leads are a man and a woman locked in mutual loathing, which is not a gender critique but a hobby. Race, climate, capital, and the body's relationship to itself are all absent, not suppressed but simply unimportant to a screenplay whose chief concerns are hammers, tasers, and the correct angle at which to shoot a friend. A single dark joke about whom a captive intends to violate is the closest the film comes to any identity content, and it treats that as a punchline, not a position. Nobody in this cabin is being lectured to, and nobody watching it will be either.

The result is a comedy of pure misanthropy, assembled with real craft and no agenda beyond the next gag. Noomi Rapace and Aksel Hennie commit fully to the ugliness, and the film rewards them with gore, Norwegian pop songs, and a finale in which the couple repackages their own cowardice as heroism for a paying audience. It is refreshing in a way that is difficult to recommend in polite company: a film that wants nothing from us but our willingness to laugh at the worst people available. An American remake already exists. Of course it does.