Movie Review: GET OUT

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Jordan Peele, the writer-director of the satirical horror/suspense film Get Out (2017), has said that he once didn't think it would ever get made. In fact, I don't see how it couldn't have been made. I usually know that a movie is successful and worthwhile when I can't stop thinking about it afterward, and this holds true for Get Out, which kept me awake for a while last night after I experienced it (it's not a film you just watch). It's visceral, layered, thought-provoking, and quite scary.

The movie wasted no time bringing the dread and shock, and it immediately marked first-time helmer Peele as someone special. How else to explain the fact that we felt fear for a black man strolling through a suburban neighborhood at night? And the scene's ending perfectly set the tone for the rest of the flick. Even the following scene, a seemingly bucolic tableau of a loving young couple (Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya) at home packing for a weekend away, was not without tension and dark foreshadowing. Their discussion was an obvious setup for problematic situations ahead, though they would turn out to be way different than the standard kind I was anticipating.

Peele refused to let up on the tension and creepiness as Rose and Chris made their roadtrip to her family's remote home. The quiet of the heavy foliage along the road and the apparent absence of all life was oppressive and brought on a feeling of isolation for us and for Chris. Whatever was to come--and we knew something was coming--there would be no easy escape from it. Then we got the collision with the doomed deer and the first of several instances where Peele presented us with something we'd only really understand later, in this case Chris's connection of the incident to his mother's death, which has heavily shaped his character.

Rose's parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) were meant to come off initially as warm, welcoming, hippy people, but they sure didn't reassure me or take me off my guard. Almost immediately, Dad was making comments and striking attitudes indicative of Caucasians who don't understand African Americans, and Mom was just plain weird. Adding to the creep factor were the zombie-like black gardener, the Stepford-style black housemaid, and the unpredictable, redneck son.

When the guests arrived for the party and started examining Chris as if he were meat, I was reminded of the short film The Washingtonians, in which a small family encounters a community of cannibals. In this part of Get Out, I wasn't sure if the bizarre partygoers and their hosts planned to eat Chris, sacrifice him, or use him in some kind of ritual for life extension. But when the black man with the old-fashioned speech (Lakeith Stanfield) entered and mingled in a bizarre way with all the white people, I was reminded of another film, the Spike Lee-produced mockumentary CSA: The Confederate States of America, which gave me the same horrible sense of an alternate reality where racism was still the natural, prevalent state.

Then came, in my opinion, the most horrific scene of the film, though it became so in retrospect: the silent auction. These gruesome people were bidding for the body of a human being, knowing that his personality would be relegated to a kind of Hell in his own head. Only this morning did it dawn on me that this sequence was just a parody of the livestock-style auctions America and other countries put Africans through for centuries. It was incredibly haunting and infuriating.

Fast-forwarding through the inevitable "capture" of Chris and the revelation of the insidious plot, I want to comment on the "real" Rose. She was arguably the craziest one of the loony bunch, demonstrated starkly when she sat on her bed with her Fruit Loops and milk, calmly using her laptop to find her next boyfriend/victim. It recalled to my mind the fact that she'd been in a relationship with Chris for five months, and presumably had gone through a similar routine with all the previous black paramours, having sex with those poor suckers and deviously causing them to fall in love with her. Truly, she was the center of the evil in the family.

Chris's clever, heroic escape seems, on the surface, to be a normal trope of the genre. But, as the sympathetic protagonist brutally plowed through the family, I watched the rage in his face and feared for his sanity. Even if he escaped, he might not really ever be free again.

As the credits rolled, I said to my parents, "This movie was written by someone who does not trust white people." But, to be fair--and I'm going off Peele's own comments--it's only a segment of white people he doesn't trust, and his feeling is totally understandable. I don't think he could have found a better conduit for expressing his feelings than he got in the extraordinary Daniel Kaluuya, who turned in a performance far above what's generally expected in this genre. The hypnotism scene alone is worth the price of admission. It's no wonder he's winning so many accolades.

All the very best horror films carry a message, and the message in Get Out is one of the most memorable and timely. What's more, the message is wrapped in a frightening, funny flick that will reward multiple viewings. You can't do much better than that.

Rated R for violence, language, and sexual references.

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