The Trip (2021)

The Trip is special because it treats marital misery like a high-wire act, balancing razor-sharp dark comedy with a gleefully nasty streak of horror that keeps you laughing even as you wince. Tommy Wirkola directs with a cheeky, propulsive confidence, turning a quiet cabin getaway into a pressure-cooker of shifting power plays and inventive mayhem, while Noomi Rapace and Aksel Hennie commit so fully to the madness that their chemistry becomes the movie’s secret engine. The vibe is mean, fast, and mischievous—like a twisted date-night thriller that keeps finding new ways to surprise you without ever slowing down to explain the joke. Fair warning: it’s aggressively not for the squeamish, with graphic violence and adult content pushed to lurid extremes, but if you can handle the blood and bile, it’s a wickedly entertaining ride.

The Trip wants to be a jet-black, couples-from-hell comedy that swerves into a nasty home-invasion horror, and you can feel the director aiming for cheeky, over-the-top chaos. The problem is the humor often lands as juvenile rather than sharp, and the movie leans into tasteless shock so hard it can start to feel mean-spirited instead of clever. It’s also structurally lumpy and episodic, so the momentum sputters even when the premise should be a slam dunk. If you’re squeamish or allergic to extreme gore, sexual-assault-adjacent material, and relentless cruelty played for laughs, this will be a miserable sit—but if you like boundary-pushing splatter with committed performances (especially Rapace) and don’t need your satire to have much soul, you may still have a good time.