The Weekend Away (2022)
Directed by Kim Farrant
No — The Weekend Away is not woke, scoring 10 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Weekend Away arrives with the modest ambitions of a Netflix thriller and the budget to match, which is to say it wants to occupy you for ninety minutes and then evaporate.
Consciousness Markers
The cast includes actors of diverse backgrounds, notably Ziad Bakri as Zain, but the film does not foreground identity or make representation a central theme.
The film centers on a female protagonist investigating her friend's disappearance and confronting a cheating husband, but it remains a conventional thriller rather than a feminist statement.
The Middle Eastern taxi driver is portrayed as a helpful ally rather than a villain, subtly subverting a common trope, but there is no explicit racial commentary.
No LGBTQ+ themes or characters are present.
No climate or environmental themes are present.
No critique of capitalism or economic inequality is present.
No body positivity themes are present.
No neurodivergence themes are present.
No revisionist history themes are present.
The film does not lecture the audience or convey explicit social messages.
Why it received this score
The Weekend Away arrives with the modest ambitions of a Netflix thriller and the budget to match, which is to say it wants to occupy you for ninety minutes and then evaporate. Kim Farrant directs Leighton Meester through a Croatian holiday that sours in the usual ways: a nightclub, a blackout, a missing friend, a body in the water. The film is adapted from Sarah Alderson's novel, and it carries the flat, functional competence of a paperback left on a hotel nightstand. Nothing here is attempting to rearrange your politics. It is attempting to keep you awake on a flight.
To its credit, the film does not sermonize. Ziad Bakri plays Zain, the taxi driver who becomes the heroine's ally, and the screenplay makes no ceremony of his heritage. He is competent, decent, and never asked to explain himself, which quietly inverts an old trope without pausing to congratulate anyone for the inversion. Beth's investigation gives her agency, and her refusal to reconcile with a philandering husband lands as a small, satisfying beat. None of this amounts to a statement. The movie holds no thesis about marriage, or men, or Croatia, or much else. It has a plot, and a serviceable one, and it trusts that to be enough.
The Croatian press was unkind, and not unreasonably so. The depiction of Split is loose with geography, and the pacing sags whenever the characters stop running. What remains is a competent diversion with a strong lead performance and a twist that arrives with a shrug. It is the sort of film that will be forgotten by the following Tuesday, and it seems at peace with that fate. We should be as well. Some vintages are not meant for the cellar. Some are meant for the hotel minibar, consumed at midnight, and never mentioned again.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
When her best friend vanishes during a girls' trip to Croatia, Beth races to figure out what happened. But each clue yields another unsettling deception.
Questions about The Weekend Away
Is The Weekend Away woke?
No — The Weekend Away is not woke, scoring 10 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Weekend Away have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 25.
How does The Weekend Away compare to other 2022 movies?
It ranks #155 of the 223 films from 2022 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Bros (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.