Six Summer Films about Skipping Town

Summer is a time of exodus, when people flee the city to beat the heat. Some films make a soft thing of it: a holiday, a fling, a return home by September. However, these films take this impulse to escape much more seriously, showing that while the open road promises freedom, it almost always delivers something stranger. 

Wild at Heart (1990) directed by David Lynch

Wild at Heart is a lovers-on-the-run film turned fever dream. For Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern), tearing out of North Carolina is the only way for them to escape a controlling mother and be together. The road is at once an escape and a corridor through American corruption: every motel and petrol station hides something rotten. Yet the strange magnetism between them is somehow enough to cut through the blood and kerosene, resulting in a surreal yet profoundly sincere film about running off together and overcoming any hurdle. 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) directed by Terry Gilliam

Director Terry Gilliam takes the giddy fantasy of life on the road and warps it into a hallucinatory desert hellscape. The trip Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) take to Vegas in a red Chevrolet Impala is both literal and chemical, and quickly derails into a psychedelic-infused, paranoid nightmare. Based on Hunter S. Thompson’s influential autofiction, this film captures the manic pursuit of an American dream long since soured, and the narcotic haze it takes to keep chasing it.

Thelma and Louise (1991) directed by Ridley Scott 

What started as a girls’ weekend away became one of the most iconic getaway films in American cinema. Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) leave Arkansas in a 1966 Ford Thunderbird, all smiles, scarfs and cat-eye sunglasses, not yet the lawless desperada duo they are about to become. Sweaty and explosive, Ridley Scott’s film is a tale of rebellion, ride-or-die friendships and the price of the supposed freedom of the open road.  

‘Sommaren med Monika’ (Summer with Monika, 1953) directed by Ingmar Bergman

In Stockholm, two teenage lovers (played by Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg) flee the city by boat, trading crowded apartments and alcoholic parents for a deserted archipelago off the Baltic coast. Bergman gives viewers sun and sensuality, but also an idyllic love typical of a summer romance – one that won’t survive the winter. Unlike other getaway films, Bergman doesn’t pan away as the couple escapes into the unknown. He keeps rolling long after the fantasy is over, into the adult responsibilities that must eventually be faced.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) directed by Martin Scorsese

For widowed housewife Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn), skipping town means a release from drab New Mexico suburbia and an unfulfilled desire. She sells up and heads west, chasing a long-shelved dream of singing, and a life on her own terms. Beneath its old Americana diner charm, this film is a bittersweet ode to newfound independence, proving the road to self sufficiency is both bumpy and unpredictable. 

My Own Private Idaho (1991) directed by Gus Van Sant

My Own Private Idaho slows the typical road film to a drift, asking what life on the road looks like with nowhere to flee from. Following narcoleptic Mike (River Phoenix) as he wanders across the vast, lonely Idaho landscape, Gus Van Sant captures the beauty and fragility of a life permanently in transit. A testament to disillusioned American adolescence, this film reimagines the road not as a site of escape, but as something that resurfaces a forgotten past.