Jordan Peele’s Get Out Gives Chills For Days
Get Out is a thriller film with an unusual premise that somehow draws on tropes of most thriller and horror films. With Daniel Kahluya in the lead role, the film tells the story of a black man who visits the family of his white girlfriend and runs into issues that go beyond the racial aspect.
Living in New York, Chris Washington is a photographer who lives a comfortable life with his girlfriend Rose Armitage. All ready and packed to go to his girlfriend’s house, he expresses doubts about whether he will be received well by her family. Rose persuades him that there will be no problems and the couple set off on a long drive. However, they hit a deer on the way, an ominous sign of bad things to come. Chris’s friend Rod Williams keeps in touch with him for most of his stay at the Armitage house.
The couple reach the house and Chris is introduced to Rose’s mother (Missy Armitage), father (Dean Armitage), and brother (Jeremy Armitage). Telltale signs of things being slightly wrong start to show but Chris remains oblivious. Rose’s mother is a hypnotist and Dean offers her services to help Chris stop smoking. Jeremy Armitage reaches a little late and the family heads into the dining room, where the family swaps stories of Rose and her childhood. Jeremy starts to talk about Chris’s skeletal structure and muscle, praising his African genetics. The family discourages the topic and the couple heads up to their room. Chris proceeds to have a weird dream where he is hypnotised by Missy Armitage.
The next day, more people are invited to the Armitage home and repeatedly, Chris is directly or indirectly praised for having African genetics. Chris finds this weird but ignores it. However he soon reaches his limit after experiencing many odd occurrences, soon crying on his girlfriend’s shoulder. She suggests the idea of leaving which Chris readily accepts. Just as they’re done packing their bags and are about to leave the Armitage house, Chris finds a box which shows a collection of photos, each one revealing an ex-boyfriend of Rose, all of them African American. This throws Chris off who wants to leave even more now.
Rose Armitage pretends to look for the keys before the members of the family corner him. Missy Armitage knocks Chris out using hypnosis.
Once he wakes up, he sees a live feed of Roman, the grandfather or the patriarch of the Armitage family. He explains that the family regularly transplants white people’s brains into the bodies of black people, preferring their genetics and overall vitality and now Roman wants to do the same with Chris.
Chris is hypnotized and Jeremy Armitage comes to wheel him to the surgery room. Chris knocks out Jeremy, pretending all the while that he was hypnotized. He kills the whole Armitage family except for Rose Armitage who’s upstairs.
After a brief tangle with Rose Armitage and the household help, Chris is found by his friend Rod Williams, who started to search for him after he stopped responding to his calls. The two of them head back to New York with Chris badly wounded.
Final Review
Get Out is an eerie movie that touches on issues of race, American history, and slavery. It does all this while making a tense atmosphere, and ultimately, a thrilling watch. Since this was directed, co-produced, and written by Jordan Peele, you can call it Auteur cinema, allowing one of Hollywood’s younger directors to successfully execute his own vision in his first film.
