Get Out, 2017.
Directed by Jordan Peele
Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Betty Gabriel, Marcus Henderson, Stephen Root, and Lil Rel Howery.
SYNOPSIS:
An African-American man visits his white girlfriend’s parents at their odd, country complex where no one is what they seem.
I can quite honestly state that I have never felt the mixture of feelings and emotions that Get Out invoked in me during any other film. To be truly unsettled from one moment, laughing uncomfortable at a darkly hilarious moment and back to unsettled within a single scene. It does all this without it feeling jarring and with such natural flow, with the rest of the movie following this fulfilling pattern.
Get Out sells itself as a normal horror movie, the story of an out of their comfort zone person in the form of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) visiting his white girlfriend Rose’s (Allison Williams) parents for the first time. Of course they live on a large estate, in the middle of nowhere, with a basement that’s out of bounds. Check, check and check so far on ominous signs. Throw in a Dad (Bradley Whitford) who’s “not racist because he voted for Obama”, hypnotist Mum (Catherine Keener) who wants to “cure” Chris’ smoking habit and the oddly compliant and out of place behaviour of the black servants Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel) and you have a film where we know something is amiss from the moment they arrive. What the director Jordan Peele and the cast do wonderfully though is to disguise this discomfort as run of the mill prejudice often experienced by black people, even amongst white people who count themselves as progressive as opposed to anything more sinister.
Peele seems to delight in the details, with a plot that hints and winks towards the truth and the film’s final third with all the subtlety and care of a veteran director let alone someone making their first feature. He frightens with jump scares, chilling characters and Michael Abel’s emotive score. He manages to delights the audience and makes us laugh when the tension is at its highest. When the viscerally violent climax comes it feels natural and organic rather than forced along to a specific end.
Kaluuya is a great avatar as Chris for the audience, his polite stoicism and tolerance of the seemingly innocuous racist undertones and enquiries of the white community as normal behaviour contrasting with the suspicions and terror in other scenes. Williams is perfect in her role, one misstep by her and the whole film comes crashing down and her performance is a joy to behold. Betty Gabriel as Georgina is creepy and truly unsettling in her performance, always leaving Chris and the audience unsettled. Lil Rel Howery will get the majority of the laughs and is hilarious, cutting through the tension with a blunt axe of comedy rather than a knife.
It is impossible to put this film into a box of genre. It uses horror tropes obviously without making fun of them, it satirises white progressives without being blatantly offensive and condescending and makes us laugh whilst terrifying us. Peele and the cast have crafted something that defies the traditional genre and transcends it creating a film that will undoubtedly be looked upon as one of the smartest, funniest and most terrifying films of the year.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★★★★★ / Movie: ★★★★
Matt Spencer-Skeen – Follow me on Twitter
Originally published March 9, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
