Movie Review: Jordan Peele’s brilliant, bonkers “Get Out” invents a new genre: Topical Horror.
Warning: Spoilers ahead. Tread carefully.
The opening sequence of “Get Out,” a masterful subversion of the mounting-paranoia horror formula from writer and director Jordan Peele, is one of the most unsettling beginnings to any film I’ve seen in a while — though not for the reasons you might think. The first shot is of an affluent, presumably white suburban street at night. The camera creeps at a low lurch, the block just barely illuminated by streetlights. We then see a young African-American man, played by character actor Keith Stanfield (credited here by his birth name Lakeith), entering the frame, muttering innocently into his cell phone.
Then, something awful happens. Without warning, a car starts to follow the man. Already, Peele shows that this guy knows the drill: he’s a black man walking alone at night through a white neighborhood that probably doesn’t see a lot of multicultural foot traffic. Thinking on his feet and eager to get off this dark, tree-lined avenue, Stanfield’s mystery man then attempts to make a break for it. The resolution of this intro is all the more chilling for how open-ended it is: we don’t come to learn the fate of Stanfield’s character until much later in the film, by which point the central protagonists have been introduced as Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams), an interracial couple taking what’s supposed to be an innocent weekend vacation.
Astute viewers will note that the opening scene has disturbing echoes of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman incident. Of course, this is not mere coincidence. In addition to being a near-perfect audience movie and a nimbly funny and genuinely frightening blend of comedy and horror, “Get Out” is a film that is explicitly about how we deal with race. More to the point, it’s a film about benevolent racism: as Chris and Ruth disappear into a kind of nightmarish morass that seems born out of a witchy Ira Levin novel, we learn that the evildoers of this film are not epithet-spouting, Confederate-flag waving red state yahoos. That would be too easy, and “Get Out” would be a far less interesting film for it. Rather, “Get Out” finds the horror in the kind of aloof, incidental racism practiced by educated white folks: the kind of well-meaning but ultimately harmful cluelessness perpetuated by many latte liberals and self-congratulating academics. In “Get Out,” platitudes and niceties are brandished as weapons.This is the kind of movie, like Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” where there is nothing more blood-chilling than a kind smile from a stranger. The genius of “Get Out” lies in its diamond-sharp and unerringly prescient racial focus. This is a sharp, scary and undeniably woke horror movie that imbues musty old psychological devices with an angry, wholly modern edge.
Jordan Peele, of course, is one half of the popular sketch comedy duo Key and Peele along with Keegan-Michael Key. The duo’s only previous big-screen effort was “Keanu,” a charming if ultimately disposable blend of buddy movie buffoonery, action movie destruction and an unreasonably adorable kitten. Neither Peele nor his partner were behind the camera for that film, but “Keanu” nevertheless felt like a product of the same absurdist mindset that nourished the best bits on their show. Ultimately, “Keanu” felt stretched a bit thin to meet the demands of a feature-length motion picture, but the movie’s action was often genuinely blistering. It was clear that both Key and Peele had studied the intricate bullet ballets of John Woo and the you-are-there kinetics of Tony Scott, even if their only ultimate goal was to lampoon how silly those movies are.
“Get Out” is further proof of Peele’s film nerd bonafides, though his directorial debut displays a more sensitively attuned and impressively rigorous attention to form and tone than “Keanu” did even at its delirious highlights. Blessedly, there’s no winking at the camera or “Jump Street”-style rib digging in the genre pool that Peele is splashing around in here. The man is too naturally funny to not lace his film with some devastating moments of humor, but you can tell he’s deadly serious about this horror business. “Get Out” is one of those movies where nervousness, hysteria and genuine hilarity mingle freely like guests at a bizarre party, resulting in a sustained mood of dread and surrealism. That the movie also functions as both an insight into an oft-underserved personal perspective (person of color surrounded by friendly white folks who then turn unfriendly) and also a critique of privilege and class differences is an unexpected and wholly welcome delight. With “Get Out,” Jordan Peele has stormed through the gates of modern-day horror and genre filmmaking in general, announcing himself as a voice worth getting excited about.
The boy and girl at the movie’s center, Chris and Ruth, seem like the picture-perfect 21st century couple. He’s an African-American photographer who prefers the hectic bustle of city life to the eerie quiet of the suburbs. She’s a lily-white princess (is there any actress more conspicuously white than Allison Williams?) who’s just recently made plans to introduce Chris to her parents. The only snag? She hasn’t informed them that Chris is black. In her mind, it’s no big deal — her parents are enlightened and educated and she claims her father would have “voted for Obama for a third term” had it been allowed. Chris, though, is hip to this act. He’s never met these people. They could be complete lunatics for all he knows. Though Rose’s parents — embodied with just the right degree of passive-aggressive Caucasian smarm by Bradley Whitford (who specializes in that sort of thing) and a dead-eyed, malevolent Catherine Keener — first greet Chris with open arms, our hero’s ominous prophecy turns out to be more accurate than he ever could have predicted.
Not long after Chris arrives at Rose’s parent’s home, terrible occurrences begin to descend upon the household. There are black servants on the property, all of whom seem mysteriously docile and unwilling to question their white overseers. Rose’s mom appears to specialize in a kind of hypnosis, one that induces paralysis in its subjects. When discussing golf with one of Ruth’s family friends, the husband makes sure to look directly at Chris when he mentions that he’s a big Tiger Woods fan. As the film goes on and the proceedings grow stranger, more and more suspiciously polite white people begin to show up at the house. The only fellow person of color on the property comes in the form of Stanfield’s mystery man, who is later seen in the film sporting an anachronistic Southern Gentleman’s wardrobe and a droning new cadence that makes him sound like Dave Chappelle’s impersonation of a white person. It’s not long until Chris suspects he may never be leaving Rose’s parent’s house… and that Rose herself might have something to do with it.
The slowly-mounting trepidation of the scenes at Rose’s family home are genuinely unnerving, creating an aura of perpetually shifting tones and dimensions so that we’re never entirely sure who (beyond Chris) we can trust. Throughout the film, Chris continually makes calls back home to his pal Rod (inveterate scene-stealer Lil Rel Howrey), an airport TSA agent who’s convinced that his skill set qualifies him as an amateur detective. This last notion becomes significant when Chris goes missing and Rod becomes determined to track him down and save him, convinced that Rose’s affluent white family are brainwashing any black folks they come into contact with so that they can be used as sex slaves. While Rod’s crackpot theorizing gets some of the movie’s biggest and most unapologetic laughs, it’s a telling sign that this loudmouthed sidekick character ultimately turns out to be (sort of) right. Rod may be an armchair expert on almost everything, but he’s got his reasons for not necessarily trusting the smiling white faces who have snared Chris into their nefarious web. The character’s final bit of dialogue (which is also the movie’s climactic line) is so funny and perfectly-timed that I suspect some audience members may stand up and applaud.
That’s, ultimately, the tricky tightrope that “Get Out” walks. The movie works like gangbusters as an audience experience: it’s a smashing scarefest, a razor-sharp comedy and a mood piece that suggests Peele has an unabashed love for “The Tenant,” David Lynch, “The Stepford Wives” and, in the third act in particular, 80’s body horror. If those references send your movie-nerd fancy, then “Get Out” is going to be two straight hours of delirious movie-nerd nirvana. And yet the film is so much more than just a brilliant bit of genre reconstruction. Like all great horror films, the terror in “Get Out” is not a means to an end in and of itself. It is a channel through which Peele explores cutting notions of being a perpetual “other,” of being made to feel ill at ease in one’s own skin. In a genre where minority characters are frequently relegated to the role of garrulous subordinate and often gruesomely killed off early on in the proceedings, the Afrocentric clarity of vision in “Get Out” is wildly refreshing. This isn’t just a great, smart horror movie: it’s a great, smart movie, period.
Daniel Kaluuya, who will next be seen in Steve McQueen’s upcoming feature alongside Viola Davis, has a tricky part here. He’s the audience surrogate, responsible for reacting in a straight-faced manner to an increasingly depraved series of escalating incidents, who also must convincingly take charge of his destiny in the movie’s action-packed final moments and pull off a heroic-badass style transformation. To Kaluuya’s immense credit, he is more than up to the task. Peele has repeatedly emphasized the influence that “Rosemary’s Baby” has had on his own film, and like Roman Polanski, Peele casts everyone except his protagonist as some kind of marauding, predatory gargoyle. Everyone’s grotesque physical features are amplified to almost cartoonish degrees, particularly Stephen Root as a blind old coot who gets one bloodcurdling scene where he tells Chris that “he just wants those things he sees through” (he’s referring to his eyes, but the line is loaded enough that it invites analysis and interpretation). Of course, this all serves to underline fundamentally sane and pragmatic nature of Kaluuya’s hero. Especially when Whitford and Keener are having so much fun yukking it up as grinning white devils, Kaluuya’s subtlety restraint is all the more admirable. He’s the grounding center of the movie — its nucleus — and he gives a terrific performance here that is sure to go unappreciated by many who will simply come to “Get Out” for the gnarly genre thrills.
I haven’t seen a sight at the movies this year that’s more genuinely skin-crawling as Allison Williams googling prospective NCAA prospects and somehow eating Fruit Loops with a straw (it sounds more weird than creepy when divorced from its narrative context, but just trust me). It’s moments like this where “Get Out” stops becoming a straight-up horror movie and starts becoming something more: a kind of funhouse reflection of our collective cultural anxieties, filtered through the indelible lens of a throwback genre picture. What Peele has given us here is a complete joy and a masterwork when taken on its own terms. “Get Out” is a serrated scarefest that cuts to the bone of our asinine, allegey post-racial bullshit. I can’t imagine anyone not loving this movie for a million different reasons. Reader, what are you waiting for? Go buy a ticket already! Grade: A.
