Director: Jordan Peele
Writer: Jordan Peele
Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel, Lil Rel Howery
Runtime: 104 mins.
2017
Get Out is a horror thriller (with a dash of comedy) about Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black man in his twenties who is being dragged to the suburbs so that he can meet the family of Rose (Allison Williams), his white girlfriend. Despite the anxieties programmed into him by a whole life of discrimination, he trusts her dubious assurance that her family is not prejudiced in the least. For their part, Rose's parents Missy (Catherine Keener) and Dean (Bradley Whitford) go out of their way to reassure Chris about that exact thing. Yet between the white parents who doth protest too much and the black servants who doth protest too little, Chris quickly realizes that there is something deeply wrong with this estate, and that he must, at all costs, get out.
Spoilers ahead.
Get Out functions as an allegory for race relations in America--a fairly complex one, especially as the plot unfolds. For it's not simply that the family dehumanizes Chris, though they certainly do so. It's that they appreciate him in the most Othering ways possible. It's that they wish they could vote Obama in for a third term. It's that they respect Tiger Woods. It's that they fetishize and desire elements of black culture and black bodies that they cannot have, as a result of being alienated from their own racial identity.
The brilliant twist, however, is that they can actually acquire those things via literal body snatching. There is so much to unpack in Get Out concerning race, bodies, identity, etc. There's the way Peele (the first black writer/director to break 100 million dollars at the box office with his debut film) takes familiar microaggressions and cranks them into heightened moments of horror. The pop-psychology-infused Sunken Place, absolutely incredible work of sound mixing and visual design, is foremost among these. There's the scene in which Rose eats Froot Loops one half of one Loop at a time, keeping the whites (milk) separated from the coloreds (Loops) as she casually searches for her next victim. Everything about her room--excepting her wall of black bodies in the form of photographic trophies--is just SO. GODDAMN. WHITE.
But most of all, there's the way Peele masterfully cultivates empathy. Here Kaluuya is the secret weapon. He is our litmus test for moving through this world. The camera carefully sticks with Chris as we watch how he handles the environment. Kaluuya has a tremendous talent for indicating his character's state of mind to the audience without obviously telegraphing it to the other characters. He doesn't do that Bad Acting thing where he starts stammering while making something up just to show the audience that he's making something up. He remains utterly collected and crafty at all moments--at least until panic can't help but set in. He also manages to subtly give us a window into the emotional world of an incredibly guarded character through body language and the way he controls his gaze. But his work would have been muddied were it not for Peele's expert framing. The plot of the film doesn't rely on its allegorical aspects to function, but it also insists that the audience connect those dots. The narrative and thematic elements at play are fused with far more complexity than we ought to expect from this genre--or a first time director in any genre, for that matter. Peele embarks on a perilous balancing act, but Get Out handles it with consummate grace.
We see this in the beautiful symbolic progressions that play out over the course of the film. Three in particular come to mind: the police, the deer, and the hit and run.
How could a movie that so explicitly confronts race relations in America not touch the issue of police violence and racial profiling? Get Out tackles it early on with a skin-crawlingly authentic encounter with a patrol officer. Even before Chris and Rose arrive at their destination, even before the horror elements of the story surface, the intrusion of a police officer already throws us off-kilter. The effectiveness of the scene is doubled by the way Rose uses her race and gender to her advantage in dispelling the tension.
The real kicker is that the police officer may have been in on the whole scheme, a tool meant to get Chris to place further trust in Rose--or the officer may have simply been a racist asshat. Whether part of a savage secret cult or simply a civil servant, the net effect is the same for Chris. He would be scared either way.
That initial police encounter is paralleled in the film's climax. As Chris fights tooth and nail for his life, with increasing brutality and desperation, he finally sees a light at the end of the tunnel--only for that light to flash red and blue. This incredibly powerful moment forces us to reflect on stereotypes and perspective. We know that Chris has been victimized by a powerful racist cabal, but we also realize in that moment that nobody will believe him, especially if a police officer were to discover him bruised and bloodied at a crime scene. The violence will be pinned on his black body.
The theme of Othered bodies and violence takes shape in the motif of the deer. On the way to meet Rose's family, Chris hits a deer with his car.* The scene is surreal and tense, with Chris creeping into the darkness to find the dead deer, and experiencing... something as he looks into its glassy eyes.
*which makes this at least the third horror movie of the past year in which the protagonist's car hitting a deer is a major first act moment
What that something is is clarified over the course of the runtime; Chris confronts a deer once more in the Armitage's home, in the form of a head mounted on the wall. Dean, Rose's father, speaks of killing dear with casual brutality, and we intuit that Chris is disturbed by the ease with which these people talk about snuffing out life that is Other than them. They will come to speak about Chris in much the same way.
That is, until Chris turns the table on them, returning casual brutality with some earnest and committed brutality of his own. It's no accident that he uses the deer head to stab Dean, the family's patriarch, to death.
There is another crucial wrinkle to Chris's early moment with that deer, one that is revealed through a stylistically astonishing animated flashback that tells us of his mother's death via hit and run. This hit and run motif, another manifestation of unthinking violence perpetrated against those who cannot fight back, comes to a head when Chris escapes. He is once again driving down a pitch black road when the servant Georgina (Betty Gabriel) leaps at his car and is knocked aside. Chris feels compelled to stop and help her, which in every other horror movie would cause us to scream at the protagonist's stupidity. But Get Out is better than those movies. Peele inserts a brief visual reminder of that animated flashback to bring home the full import of the moment; of course Chris can't simply hit and run. His history won't allow him to be so heartless. Peele masterfully threads tension and empathy into this revelatory moment.
'Masterful' is a rare appellation to tack onto a director's first feature, but it resonates nonetheless. I have gone on at length about textural aspects of Get Out, yet I have barely scratched the surface (and somehow haven't even mentioned the transcendent performances by every single one of the side characters, Betty Gabriel especially). When this film was released earlier this year it rightfully became a zeitgeist moment. I do believe that Get Out will be remembered as one of the most important cinematic releases of 2017, not to mention one of the very best. It's not so often a movie achieves the triple crown of culturally relevant, impeccably crafted, and wildly entertaining--especially a low budget horror film from a sketch comedian.
4.5 / 5 BLOBS
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