Skip to main content

A Worthy Horror Film and Social Satire


          The plot to Get Out, written and directed by Jordan Peele, sounds like a Key & Peele sketch. It would fit perfectly in their wheelhouse to turn a black man meeting his white girlfriends’ family into a funny horror Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner spoof. But the thing is, Get Out is actually a genuine horror movie, and a pretty good one at that.
          Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is preparing to go to the country with his girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) to meet her parents after four months dating. Her parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) seem subtly passive aggressive and overcompensating in their niceness towards Chris. He’s also disturbed by how the few black people in the area are incredibly reserved and abnormal in their behaviour. This and a series of suspicious occurrences soon convince Chris that he is in severe danger.
          For a debut film, this is a great first effort for Jordan Peele who though his roots may be in comedy, he definitely has an eye for horror. His direction is clever and he knows how to shoot a scene in the best way to encapsulate a discomforting mood. The writing is also quite good. You get the impression Peele has had more than a few awkward conversations with white people trying to be nice and respectful, as it comes across pretty realistically in this film. The tension in Get Out is great, and the pacing terrific. You know early on something’s amiss, and it allows you to gradually piece together the mystery as things become more threatening for Chris. Never does it lose your investment or its own train of suspense giving it a classic Twilight Zone kind of feel. And though it’s a somewhat slow build, the pay-off is pretty satisfying. Peele creates a claustrophobic atmosphere through unique visuals, and there are even a few good jump scares. The music is quite eerie too, emphasizing African-American culture while the violin screeches both contribute to a creepy mood and hearken back to older horror films.
          Daniel Kaluuya’s been on the fringe of Hollywood for a while now and here his performance carries the movie while also proving once again that the best actors are coming from Britain. It’s a versatile performance and completely convincing, selling even the most ridiculous story points. Chris has his own demons and vices, which give his character added depth and more for Kaluuya to work with. And his chemistry with Allison Williams is really good, they make for a likeable couple. Rose is a pretty standard New York millennial character, but Williams performs this well and gets to play with some added dimension as the film goes along. Whitford and Keener are very good as the in-laws you wouldn’t quite trust, Betty Gabriel and Marcus Henderson are great as the Armitages’ suspicious help, and LaKeith Stanfield has a couple intense moments. Stephen Root is also in this movie in a creepy role, and Lil Row Howery lends some comic relief as Chris’ friend Rod who’s also the audiences’ on-screen representative.
          Rod’s comic relief is necessary and with a premise like this, comedy is unavoidable. And while Get Out is no Evil Dead film, it does use its humour well and sparingly. Clearly the movie, like a lot of Key & Peele comedy, is a social satire on race relations, but while there is a degree of expected humour on racial stereotypes, and some aspects of Rod’s character are very cliché, the movie’s also a commentary on liberal attitudes towards race. Rose’s family are in no way stereotypical racists, and she herself is very defensive of Chris when, on the road down, a policeman appears to be profiling him. But there’s something prejudicial in their attitudes regardless. Again it’s that tendency to overcompensate (such as bringing up Jesse Owens) and awkward attempts at communication that make the people who disturb Chris most those who are at least outwardly very accepting. It’s a unique target of political satire in this day and age which I really admire. And the reveal of what’s actually going on in relation to Chris’ ethnicity is at the same time frightening, clever, and funny. 
          If I had a problem it would be that the ending doesn’t go quite as far as it could. Also a couple story twists are fairly predictable.
          Nevertheless Get Out is a pretty remarkable horror movie. It’s not particularly novel or ground-breaking in its style, but it’s much more effective than its premise would suggest with some genuinely good scares and well-built suspense, as well as good performances, strong satire, and great direction from someone completely new to the genre. The idea that rising comedy star Jordan Peele could make a legitimate horror movie a few years ago would have sounded as absurd as Louie C.K. writing an action thriller. But subverting expectations is a key component in comedy, so therefore, Get Out being really good may be Jordan Peele’s best joke.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more