A Perfect Getaway is a 2009 thriller written and directed by David Twohy, shot on Kauai in Hawaii and running 98 minutes. Timothy Olyphant plays Nick, Steve Zahn plays Cliff, Milla Jovovich plays Cydney, Kiele Sanchez plays Gina, with Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton as the hitchhikers Kale and Cleo. The setup is simple and excellent: a couple are murdering honeymooners in Hawaii, and we are following three couples through the jungle trying to work out which one it is.

Let me start with the thing I did not expect, which is that Kale, the aggressive hitchhiker who radiates genuinely unpleasant energy from the moment he appears, is Chris Hemsworth. This is 2009, two years before Thor, and he is doing an American accent. Anybody who follows this site will know I have strong views on that particular subject, and I now appear to have located the origin point.

This was a really interesting film. The premise does an enormous amount of work, because it hands you a job the moment it starts. Somewhere in this jungle is a couple killing other couples, and you spend the entire runtime assessing everybody you meet. That is a genuinely good engine for a thriller.

Nick did a fantastic job. He is simultaneously extremely sketchy and extremely charming, and holding both of those at once for the length of a film is considerably harder than it looks. He is self-described as an American Jedi, an ex-special forces type whose stories are either entirely true or complete nonsense, and the film never lets you settle on which.

I thought the whole cast held their own, and I could not picture anybody else in those roles. That turns out not to be a personal quirk, because contemporary reviewers worked through the cast one at a time and arrived at the same conclusion. One review described Cliff as perfect as the cowardly everyman, Nick in fine form, Cydney as exactly the right mixture of what the role required, and Gina as particularly good as the southern girl who is nowhere near as stupid as she presents.

There was a specific point made about Cliff at the time that I enjoyed a great deal. Several critics, Roger Ebert among them, noted that this was the film in which Steve Zahn was finally liberated from the doofus characters he had spent years specialising in. Somebody at last let him into the smart half of the story, and he does a considerable amount with it.

And I genuinely did not know what to believe. The film keeps moving the suspicion around with real skill, and when it revealed that Cliff and Cydney were the killers all along, it actually shocked me, because I had been looking everywhere else in the frame.