Get Out

A belea­guered pro­tag­o­nist strug­gles to deter­mine whether he is just being para­noid, or if there tru­ly is a grand con­spir­a­cy – with him as its malev­o­lent focus. While one way to approach this sort of mate­r­i­al is through the fil­ter of hor­ror, anoth­er would be just to make a straight docu­d­ra­ma (or even doc­u­men­tary) on black lives in white America.

For in their way, films like 12 Years a Slave, 13^th, I Am Not Your Negro, Lov­ing and The Birth of a Nation (either one, real­ly) all tell sto­ries of every­day African-Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence that are as night­mar­ish as any­thing found in your aver­age slash­er or mon­ster movie. The genius of Jor­dan Peele (of Key & Peele and Keanu fame) is to merge these two modes in Get Out, his fea­ture debut as writer/​director, using the wilder tropes of the hor­ror genre to expose truths about race rela­tions in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca. The results are tense, uneasy and dark­ly funny.

“Do they know I’m black?” tal­ent­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er Chris Wash­ing­ton (Daniel Kalu­uya) asks his girl­friend Rose Armitage (Alli­son Williams) before they head off from New York City to her par­ents’ house upstate. The set-up is a per­fect blend of Guess Who’s Com­ing to Din­ner and Meet the Par­ents, but despite the forced bon­homie of retired neu­ro­sur­geon Dean Armitage (Bradley Whit­ford) try­ing des­per­ate­ly to be down with his new homie Chris, and the hos­pi­tal­i­ty of Dean’s psy­chi­a­trist wife Mis­sy (Cather­ine Keen­er), Chris just can­not relax. Even when hypnotised.

Per­haps it’s the way he was harassed by a white cop on the dri­ve over. Per­haps it’s the fact that the Armitages, for all their avowals of lib­er­al val­ues, have black help (Bet­ty Gabriel, Mar­cus Hen­der­son). Per­haps it’s the decid­ed­ly odd behav­iour of their groundskeep­er, Wal­ter (Mar­cus Hen­der­son), house­keep­er, Georgina (Bet­ty Gabriel), or of Logan (Lakei­th Stan­field), the only oth­er black guest at the week­end par­ty. All three seem to have near com­plete­ly assim­i­lat­ed their speech and ges­tures to the oth­er­wise cau­casian cul­ture around them.

Or per­haps it’s just Chris’ avowed instinct to become ner­vous ​“if there’s too many white peo­ple.” It seems more like­ly, how­ev­er, that there real­ly is some­thing more sin­is­ter going on, as is sug­gest­ed by the film’s vio­lent pro­logue. Half the macabre fun of Get Out is dis­cov­er­ing just what that some­thing is.

Aside from the naked bel­liger­ence of Rose’s broth­er Jere­my (Caleb Landry Jones), the Armitages and their white guests all wel­come Chris to their extend­ed fam­i­ly with admi­ra­tion, even envy. But they seem unable to talk about any­thing but race, how­ev­er pos­i­tive­ly, in his pres­ence. The awk­ward­ness of it all, observed with great nuance by Peele, makes for a per­fect com­e­dy of man­ners, until cringe becomes some­thing alto­geth­er more hor­rif­ic – even if Chris’ para­noid friend Rod (Mil­ton ​“Lil­Rey” How­ery) con­tin­ues to bring the com­ic relief.

Land­ing its sharp social com­men­tary some­where between Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers and Soci­ety, Get Out takes racism’s more tra­di­tion­al forms – slav­ery, incar­cer­a­tion, exploita­tion, black­face – for a new, thor­ough­ly mod­ern appro­pria­tive spin.