Get Out

"Some people don't want strangers messing around with their head."

In his wildest dreams, comedian Jordan Peele probably couldn't have imagined that his directorial debut, Get Out (2017), would prove such a colossal hit. Making nearly a quarter million dollars against a $4.5 million budget, this modest horror-comedy tapped into pervasive racial anxieties that African-Americans experience daily, while most white Americans ignore or deny. It's a phenomenal flick, perceptive, creepy and darkly amusing.
Photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) worries about meeting girlfriend Rose Armitage's (Allison Williams) parents, fearing that they won't accept their racial differences. Instead her parents - retired doctor Dean (Bradley Whitford) and therapist Missy (Catherine Keener) - seem accommodating and, at first, overly keen to prove their tolerance. But Chris starts noticing things are slightly off: black servants speaking in stilted, arcane language; white characters casually evaluating his body and praising his photographic skills; strange nightmares about his mother's death. He soon discovers that he's in the midst of a cult that uses black men as slaves...and that he's their next victim.
From its unnerving opening, Get Out expertly blends a variety of filmic styles. Peele and photographer Toby Oliver provide shadowy atmospherics and prowling long takes to make Hitchcock or John Carpenter proud. Extreme close-ups intercut with bizarre fantasy scenes, especially when Chris is hypnotized into the "sinking place"; banal family gatherings are undercut by the Armitage's black servants hovering around the fringes, always sidelined. Peele makes excellent use of Michael Abels' moody score, combining African-themed tunes and "Run Rabbit Run" with more atonal, ominous instrumentals.
When mainstream movies still fumble with racism, Get Out's take is refreshingly twisted. Aside from degenerate Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), the Armitages aren't savage rednecks from Deliverance, but well-heeled liberals who praise Barack Obama while lacing conversations with Ebonics. Others offer stilted complements on Chris's physique and remark on the trendiness of blackness, more intent on convincing themselves than Chris, who (being a photographer) sees through their act immediately. Rose seems shocked at her parents, but she proves willingly complicit as well. Thus Peele indicts all of white society, not just the obvious villains, in institutional bigotry.
Being a horror film, Get Out literalizes its metaphors, becoming a race-based Stepford Wives. The Armitages enslave blacks in a bizarre scheme to live forever, forcing themselves and their mores on unwitting subjects. Hence Andre (LaKeith Standard), who goes from slang-talking musician to complacent servant; he and Georgina (Betty Gabriel) lose their identity, both cultural and personal, to become submissive to white society. Chris's friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery) couches the threat in explicitly sexual terms, which isn't far-fetched; Rose proves to be a honey trap luring blacks into slavery. It's a unique juncture of black paranoias, out of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin or early Spike Lee.
It's hard to fault Get Out's message, which is extreme yet on point. It indicts the very viewers who trek to feel-good anti-racist movies as much as police, the media, and rebel-flag flying racists (several scenes explicitly conflate them, with Andre's kidnapping staged Trayvon Martin-style and police mocking Rod's request for help). This, along with dollops of dark humor, make its nastiness not only palatable but palpable. I found Django Unchained's cartoon revenge fantasy tasteless, yet watching Chris hack, shoot and bludgeon his way through the Armitages proved cathartic even to this honkiest of viewers.
Daniel Kaluuya establishes Chris as a laid-back man whose aloofness becomes a coping mechanism; he's mildly annoyed but unsurprised by the Armitage's condescension. Kaluuya establishes weary acceptance as a baseline, then slowly becomes unraveled as he confronts the truth. He hits the right emotional notes without overplaying the horror, making a protagonist terrified watching his worst cultural fantasies come to life.
Bradley Whitford is shockingly brilliant casting: having The West Wing's Josh Lyman, avatar of good-hearted if snarky liberalism, as a crew cut white supremacist makes a jolting impact. Stephen Root has a small but strangely affecting role as a blind man who is, at least, more honest than his onlookers. Catherine Keener and Caleb Landry Jones are more predictably unhinged, while Lil Rel Howery offers broad, not-always-funny comic relief. Acting honors (besides Kaluuya) go to Allison Williams, a cold sociopath wearing empathy like a skin, listening to '80s music as she trawls for victims contemplates or coolly firing at her beau with a rifle.
Whether Get Out is a true classic, or is merely an artifact of an era when bigotry has become increasingly acceptable, is for history to judge. Suffice it to say that it's the right film for its time, showing that your liberal friends sharing anti-Trump memes are no less guilty in social oppression than the obvious bigots.