Get Out (2017)

Horror is Best in Black and White
or
"White Girls Do It To You Every Time"

I'm not a big fan of horror movies (I don't see everything), but the genre is extremely useful. Look at a new horror movie and the chances are good that you'll see the debut of an upcoming director fast-tracked to "Big" movies because of their sophomore efforts keeping the budget tight and the shots fast and purposeful. Horror is a great training ground for the movie art of manipulation and getting a rise out of the audience and the list of directors who got noticed slogging through the horror genre are long and frequently surprising. And when horror films are very very good (at being bad), they'll explore sub-texts of society and the psyche, sometimes overtly, or sometimes merely tickling a deeply recessed part of our alligator-brains to make the heart jump and our flight-or-flight instincts surface. Horror reduces us to the basics, removing all the drama and the time-wasting melodrama. Horror comes down to the primary drive of survival.

But survival from what makes it interesting.

After a prologue in which a young man is abducted in a somewhat pedestrian suburban neighborhood,* we focus on Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya in a great, understated performance) who is having a certain amount of trepidation over the weekend trip he's taking with his girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams). It is the usual anxiety any boyfriend might have going to meet his lover's parents, but there's also the added color that he's black—the way the film seats it, the problem is always that Chris is black, not that Rose is white, but the film is rooted in Chris' perspective and Rose has never brought up the issue with her parents, despite her protestations that there will be no "problems" ("He's going to tell you that he would have voted for Obama a third time" and, of course, he does). His buddy with the TSA, Rod (LilRey Howery) thinks it is a bad idea, very bad. Any time a black man goes to the house to visit his white girlfriend's parents is a BAD idea, bruh.

But that's not the only issue. Chris has insecurities and this is just the one on the closest burner. He suspects Rose might be cheating on him, despite her protestations—she protests a lot, you'll find during this movie—but the suspicion persists, groundless as it might be, to the point where it clouds anything else and everything is refracted through that jealous filter.

Chris shouldn't have worried about the parents—they are affluent liberals who are guilty as sin: Papa Dean (Bradley Whitford) is a semi-retired neurosurgeon (and yes, he WOULD have voted for a third term for Obama); Mama Missy (Catherine Keener) is a psychologist/therapist specializing in anti-smoking therapies. They couldn't be more welcoming...with the tightest smiles without benefit of Botox injections. When brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) joins the party, he's a bit of a creep, but everybody thinks he's a creep, so it's okay. 

Then, there are the servants, who are "part of the family"—they've been around since Dean's parents needed care-taking and the Armitages couldn't bear to part with them, even though they "hate how it looks." Walter (Marcus Henderson) is a groundskeeper, who keeps an eye on Chris, and Georgina, the maid, (Betty Gabriel, who plays creepy as hell and has one of the best repetitive line readings in a movie—"Oh no, no, no, no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-No!"—since Kevin Spacey told Alan Arkin to go to lunch in Glengarry Glen Ross) is a hovering presence. Chris finds them vaguely threatening. "It's not so much WHAT they say, but how they say it..." he tells Rose.

The same could be said for all the guests at a weekend family function—it's not what they say so much, as how unctuously they say it—a little too cheery, a little too welcoming, no conflict, just a little too "TOO". Then, a night-time walk around the grounds makes Chris extraordinarily uncomfortable, and a resulting chat with Missy over tea gets extraordinarily weird. Maybe, she hypnotizes him, sending him to a weird nether-world she calls "the sunken place." Maybe it happened. Maybe it was a dream. Whatever it was, he doesn't want to smoke any more.

Get Out is the work of Jordan Peele, one of the brilliant sketch comedy team Keye and Peele, late of their self-titled Comedy Central show, and there is comedy here, of a particularly cerebral kind—terror and laughter, tragedy and comedy being Arbus twins of each other, each evoking honest instinctive reactions. As a new director, he knows he can get a small-budgeted project green-lit in the horror field, just as he knows that horror doesn't have to have a big budget to sneak in Big Ideas, that it can be as simple a matter as casting an African-American actor as the most competent-guy-in-the-room (as George Romero did in Night of the Living Dead—a move that was made because Duane Jones was the best actor in the cast). Here, Peele makes the "minority experience" real for anyone not living "in the sociological skin," presenting the foundation of dread that the suspicion of the targeted experience on a daily basis with the ignition of blue lights in the rear-view.

"Give me the keys, Rose"

Get Out is smart, funny, and horrific in a wild, bizarre way. Peele has plans for other horror films that one hopes are as wild in concept, but steeped in the psychological reality that this one is. They could do a lot of good by doing bad as all Get Out.

* Interestingly, it is the second use of "Run, Rabbit, Run" (after its use in the bombing sequence of Miss Peregrine's School for Unusual Children) in the last few months. References keep folding back on themselves in movies, just as there are frequently competitions between similarly themed movies that open nearly simultaneously.