Movie Review: Get Out (2017)
Like a lot of people, I think, I was more than a little skeptical when I first heard of a horror movie written and directed by Jordan Peele of Key & Peele fame. The trailer even seemed a bit silly to me.
I shouldn’t have been skeptical. Get Out is an excellent movie. While it’s probably stronger as an allegory than it is as a horror movie, it’s also a well made and effective horror movie.
One feeling I have towards horror movies that I’m sure I’ll restate in coming reviews is that movies don’t easily scare me. When I refer to a movie or an idea as scary or terrifying, I’m referring to it as an idea, rather than if it made me jump or startled when watching a movie. I’m referring to what makes you think, what puts you in the character’s shoes, and the like.
Get Out does an excellent job of all of that. As a white man, I can’t say I relate to anything the protagonist goes through, but Peele’s direction and script do a marvelous job of putting you in the character’s perspective.
This review will contain spoilers, but as many of you may already know, so did the trailers for this movie.
Get Out tells the story of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance), a young black man dating a young white woman, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams). In a weekend excursion, he goes with her to meet her parents.
He expresses some concerns over this weekend, wondering if her parents know he’s black. She says they don’t, but that won’t be a problem. More concerns are raised by his best friend and comic relief character, TSA agent Rod Williams (Lil Rel Howery). The scenes with Rod are very funny, and more in line with what I would have expected from a horror movie by Jordan Peele. But the rest of the movie is played pretty straight. The plot is more than a little ridiculous, the movie takes it seriously. I find that a welcome addition, given that I’ve gotten pretty sick of horror movies so often feeling like they have to wink at the audience. That really all started with Scream (though genre fans will notice the seeds of this in the sixth Friday the 13th film), and in my opinion, it hasn’t been done as well since.
The first scare of the movie comes with them driving out to the country when they hit a deer. A police officer arrives and acts suspicious, asking to see Chris’s identification even though he wasn’t driving. I love the way the two main characters react to this. Rose is surprised, while Chris is understanding and cooperative, implying that this is not unusual for someone of his race.
They arrive at Rose’s parents’ house, and meet Missy (Catherine Keener, Being John Malkovich) and Dean (Bradley Whitford, The West Wing) Armitage, who are friendly if a little strange. Dean explains that he would have voted for Obama a third time if he could have, in a line that echoes Rose’s explanation of how her parents wouldn’t have a problem with him dating a black man.
Dean is a neurosurgeon and Missy is a hypnotherapist. Missy explains that she could work her hypnosis on Chris to make him stop smoking, but he politely declines, more than a little weirded out. Chris is additionally weirded out when he sees the family’s servants, who are all black, and act very strangely.
At night, Chris, unable to sleep, wanders around and sees the black servants acting more strangely. Specifically, he sees the groundskeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson) sprinting outside. He comes back inside and runs into Missy, who puts him under hypnosis by stirring her tea. He recalls the death of his mother, for which he feels responsible, and eventually sinks into what Missy calls the Sunken Place.
It’s a really neat effect, and the concept is genuinely creepy. His body is present, but his mind can barely even observe what’s going on.
He wakes up in the morning, believing it all to have been a nightmare, though he finds that the idea of cigarretes revolts him. A bunch of peole show up for an annual get-together, and they all act weird around Chris, with one man talking about how much he loves Tiger Woods. These scenes may seem just unusual, but once all is revealed in the plot (or if you’ve had the movie spoiled for you by the trailer), they become genuinely creepy.
Chris also meets a blind art dealer, Jim Hudson (Stephen Root), who is familiar with Chris’s work. They seem to bond a bit, but Chris is happy to discover another black man there, Logan King (Lakeith Stanfield), who is married to an older white woman.
Chris talks to his friend Rod on the phone and explains all the weird things that have happened, to which Rod of course reacts predictably humorously. Chris tries to take a photo of Logan, but his flash goes off, and Logan freaks out, begins bleeding from the nose, and yells at Chris to get out. Dean explains this as a seizure, but Chris isn’t buying it.
Chris persuades Rose to leave with him, while in an eerie and silent scene, Dean holds an auction with Chris’s picture, which Jim Hudson wins.
Rod recognizes Logan from the photo sent to him as a man with a different name, and believes there to be a conspiracy. In a comical scene, he goes to the police, who laugh at him.
When packing to leave, Chris finds photos of Rose dating other black men, despite her telling him he was her first. He tries to leave but is stopped by the Armitage family. When he goes to fight Rose’s brother, Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), Missy hypnotizes him.
He wakes up in a basement in front of an old television, restrained to a chair. A video comes on of Rose’s grandfather explaining the situation. Dean will be performing a brain transplant that puts the mind and soul of an old white man in the body of a young black man. It’s revealed that a piece of Chris will still remain, though he’ll be in the Sunken Place, which we’ve already gotten a brilliant visual representation. Jim Hudson explains that he has bought him, and wishes to see again. He says that he’s not like the others, who want a black man’s body for superior physical traits, in a satirical line that could basically be summed up by, “I’m not racist. I have a black friend.”
Struggling to escape, Chris rips the leather on the arm rests of his chair, revealing some stuffing, which he uses to plug his eyes when offscreen so that he cannot be hypnotized. When Jeremy arrives in the room to take him to his surgery, Chris escapes, and beats him over the head with a croquet ball.
Chris then stabs Dean with the antlers of a mounted deer head, and arrives upstairs to see Missy, who tries to hypnotize him, but he throws her tea cup away. She stabs him in the hand, but he fights through it and uses it to stab her, killing her.
Through all this, we see Rose, listening to headphones and eating Froot Loops in a symbolic way that separates the colors from the white milk, while looking for more black men to date.
Chris takes Jeremy’s car and ends up hitting the black housekeeper, Georgina (Betty Gabriel), who is possessed by Rose’s grandmother. Chris feels guilty, so he takes her in the car, but she struggles with him, causing him to crash. This comes to Rose’s attention, who arms herself with a gun and has Walter (possessed by her grandfather) chase Chris down.
Chris distracts him with the flash of his cell phone, and Walter takes her gun, shoots her, and then himself. Rose is able to get to her gun still, and tries to shoot Chris, who starts strangling her, and then stops. We hear sirens and see flashing lights in what could easily become one of the most depressing endings to a film in history, until it’s revealed that it’s Rod in his TSA security car. Rod and Chris leave together, with Rose bleeding to death.
I understand why the movie ended the way it did; we like the character of Chris, and want to see him survive. That having been said, I can’t help but think how effective and haunting the ending could have been if it were the police that showed up instead of Rod, and they shot him, believing Rose to be the victim. This movie provides plenty of social commentary already, so maybe Peele finally felt that he didn’t need that (I understand in earlier versions of the script, that’s how it would have ended). And at least with the ending the way it is, there’s a point to the Rod character. If it were just the local police showing up (it would have to be local, given that Rod’s explanation was met with laughter when he went to the city police), the brief comedic interludes with Rod would have had no payoff. The ending as it is, is fine; I don’t have any real complaints about it. I just think a different ending might have been better, and more effective.
This is certainly a unique movie, playing out almost like a Twilight Zone episode with its sci-fi twist, allegory, and social commentary. And it’s very well made. I was a bit surprised to see this movie be as represented as it was at this past year’s Academy Awards, being nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Jordan Peele even winning the award for Best Original Screenplay. While I was surprised, I can’t say the movie’s not deserving of its accolades; I’m merely surprised given the little respect horror seems to get in the larger film community. Of course, this movie is more than a horror movie, having very clever things to say about race relations, and finding creative ways to convey its messages.
I think it’s probably a bit more interesting in that regard. It’s still an effective horror movie, but I’ll definitely think of this more as social commentary. It’s not the first horror movie to be social commentary, of course, with the Romero zombie movies standing out in particular. But with those, the horror seemed to come first, with the social commentary sort of being a supplement. Here, I’d almost say it’s the opposite.
No matter what way you look at it, though, it’s a really good movie. I’d like to see Peele do some more horror. I think the potential for making socially conscious horror movies is nearly endless, and I hope this opens up some doors for other filmmakers with unique ideas.
Rating: 8/10
