Why this movie? The opening scene alone, which takes place at night in a wealthy suburban neighborhood, is worth the price of admission (or rather, the price of streaming). Normally, I’m too much of a scaredy cat for out and out horror, but Jordan Peale’s Get Out turns the genre on its head and makes viewers question the assumptions we make about race, and especially the way race functions in movies. Get Out is smart, suspenseful, funny and surprising—and, in an unexpected flourish that I loved, tips its hat to much-maligned TSA agents.
A Black photographer, Chris Walsh (Daniel Kaluuya), decides to take a trip out of town with his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), to meet her parents. The Armitages, a neurosurgeon and psychiatrist (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), live in a sprawling home somewhere in the countryside and Chris feels out of place there. He notices the strange behavior of the Black staff but Rose and her parents brush away his concerns. At a garden party attended by the Armitages’ wealthy white friends, Chris recognizes a Black man who is now married to a much older white woman and when he takes a photograph, his flash triggers a strange response in the young man. Is Chris imagining it or is something off?
Get Out skillfully plants clues that only made sense once I came to the ending, and then I had to rewatch it to see how the clues would play now that I knew what was really going on. Peale ratchets up the tension bit by bit until you see the world through Chris’s eyes—and once you do, everything changes. The Armitages’ impeccably groomed and precise Black gardener and housekeeper (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel) are particularly unnerving.
What they said: Discussing horror as a genre, writer and director Peale noted, “Every great horror movie comes from a true fear, and ideally it’s a universal fear. The tricky nature of this project is that the fear I’m pulling from is very human, but it’s not necessarily a universal experience… The gestation period for this idea kind of spanned several years, and I think one of the most important milestones in that process was just realizing that every true horror, human horror, American horror has a horror movie that deals with it and allows us to face that fear, except [that] race in a modern sense, hadn’t been touched…”
Written and directed by Jordan Peale. With Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener, and Lil Rel Howery. 104 minutes.
Streaming on HBO Max, multiple platforms.
