As someone who has regularly teamed with comedy partner Keegan Michael-Key to explore politics and race relations for laughs, Jordan Peele takes a different approach in Get Out, making a bonafide thriller in the process. The end result is a sleek exercise in suspense that constantly keeps one on their toes so as to not miss an important clue about where things might be going. Chris and Rose (Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams) are ready to take their relationship to the next level when she brings him to meet her parents. Well, except for the fact that she has yet to tell them that Chris is African American, not that she thinks that might be an issue as they drive out to her parents’ countryside home in the middle of nowhere. Rose’s mom (Catherine Keener) is a psychologist who uses hypnosis to help cure patients of their addictions, while her father (Bradley Whitford) is a neurosurgeon. They’re both more than welcoming of Chris, but the couple have arrived on the weekend when Rose’s family has an annual gathering of friends. Chris is already getting strange vibes from the family’s black help, but he gets more suspicious as he encounters the family’s guests, especially the only other black man among them (Lakeith Stanfield). Peele leans far more toward an old school Hitchcock approach, utilizing a slow build and music clearly inspired by Bernard Herrmann to escalate tension. Kaluuya does a fine job as an ersatz Jimmy Stewart replacement, pulling the viewers into the mystery with him. The actors around him, especially Williams, also do excellent work of making the viewer feel just as uneasy as Chris does about everyone who is so unnaturally friendly when meeting him. It’s obvious that Peele’s casting choices accomplish so much at bringing out the strengths in a script that might have felt somewhat one-note or even Twilight Zone-ish otherwise. further reading: The Best Modern Horror Movies The humor that some might be expecting in a movie directed by Peele mostly shows up in the guise of Chris’ best friend Rod (comedian “LilRel” Howery), a boisterous TSA worker who has been suspicious of Rose and her family all along. In the last act, he adds some much needed levity as things go sideways. To say more will surely diminish the surprises that pop up as we watch Chris being led further into the web of intrigue behind what Rose’s family and their friends are really up to. Get Out’s biggest hurdle comes from how long the movie takes to get to its turn, as Chris deals with strange circumstances that don’t necessarily add up to the eventual reveal. Just as you think you’ve figured out where things are going, the story takes a far darker and more malevolent twist, leading to a crazy and bloody final act that really pays off. Get Out opens nationwide on Friday, Feb. 24.
title: “Get Out Review” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-15” author: “Doug Duncan”
It has a point. We’re pretty lame. There is a tendency among the white intelligentsia to congratulate ourselves on our progressive credentials: retweeting Owen Jones and sharing worthy change.orgs is small potatoes, but in Peele’s nightmarishly polite world, we’ve bagged the ultimate virtue-signal trophy. Rose (Allison Williams) and her family are delighted that she has a black boyfriend (Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris) for what it says about them: we’re the good guys, and we really want everyone to know it. Rose and Chris, after a few months’ dating in the city, are heading out to the country to meet her folks. We’re not drawing the usual Deliverance-style distinction between big-city and small-town values here, though it concerns Chris (“Do they know I’m black?” he asks her, afraid she’s setting up a Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner sting to watch the fine-bone china shatter and call out her intolerant family). This isn’t helped when a local patrolman unnecessarily asks for his ID on the drive up, an implicitly racist instinct which Rose seems almost to welcome, so pleased is she that it gives her an opportunity to demonstrate her outrage. But Chris needn’t worry on this score: mum and dad (Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford) welcome him with open arms, with dad particularly eager to talk to him about Obama and Jesse Owens. This is Peele’s main target: a sort of fetishisation of blackness, in which white liberals make the mistake of presuming that every black person is constantly thinking about their own ethnicity, and want to discuss it and be reassured that it’s not an issue. While well-intentioned it treats people of colour as curios and defines them by their race (the Juneteenth episode of Donald Glover’s Atlanta contains a particularly excruciating character with this habit). The horror isn’t so much bolted on to the satire as it is bled through it. When we discover what’s really going on, it’s not by means of a sudden switch to a darker tone, From Dusk Till Dawn-like, but via the realisation that the dread has been there under the surface the whole time, masked by good manners and social awkwardness. There’s pleasingly little reliance on jump scares, and if you’ve been waiting for a little gore you’ll get it. Peele’s even brave enough to cut away to whole scenes that use Chris’s friend Rod for a switch in tone to out-and-out comedy, that lands perfectly through Lil Rel Howery’s exasperated delivery, before dumping you back into the suburban nightmare. While Get Out is in no doubt that racists are the real enemy, it should make white audiences squirm at least a little, asking questions about whether an overeagerness to demonstrate one’s own comfort with multiculturalism is more alienating than it is inclusive. As a thinkpiece it provokes, as a genre film it’s winningly tense, and as a debut it’s about as assured, well-judged and original as you’re likely to see all year. Get Out is in UK cinemas from Friday.
