Get Out
Daniel Kaluuya is in for one hell of a weekend in Get Out.
Meeting the parents is a real nightmare in this brilliant horror satire
What’s Get Out About?
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is nervous when his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) suggests a weekend at her parents’ house. He wants to make sure that the parents know he’s a black man, and that it won’t be weird.
Rose promises him it’s fine. Her parents voted for Obama!
Chris puts on his best family-friendly smile and prepares for a weekend in the country. At first, it’s harmless enough. Rose’s dad Dean (Bradley Whitford) does mention how much he loved Obama and drops a lot of “my man”s, but Chris lets it roll off his back. The family also has two black servants, which they assure Chris are remnants from Rose’s grandparents’ time and totally part of the family.
Chris smiles and nods, what else can he do?
Harder to ignore is Rose’s mother Missy (Catherine Keener), a hypnotherapist who insists on trying out her therapies on Chris. When she successfully hypnotizes Chris, things around him start warping. Suddenly the weekend in the country seems more sinister than he imagined. Is he safe in this white space?
What Makes Get Out Good?
On the surface, a sort of Stepford Wives-like tale of body snatchings and secret societies, Get Out goes deep if you stop to look past the gorgeous cinematography and performances.
Get Out is a movie about insidious racism. While overt racism is easy enough to spot, it’s benevolent seeming racism that is often either tolerated or passed over and allowed to flourish. Rose’s family aren’t burning crosses or dropping slurs in their speech, they’re nice — superficially.
But Chris can hear the warning signs that they’re not as wonderful as Rose promised them to be. There are dozens of little microaggressions: Assuming Chris will care that they’d vote for Obama again, assuming Chris would be a “beast” when given an athletic task, and saying “my man” when trying to ingratiate themselves. And while Chris notices all this, he also chooses to ignore it.
Why? Because he’s likely heard it all before.
Chris allowing Rose’s family to blithely think they’re “down” is something he’s probably done his whole life. Easier to survive in a world of self-congratulating white liberals than to try to educate everyone he comes across. It’s understandable, but it also means that Chris misses and dismisses some giant red flags before he understands what’s really going on.
And that’s no accident. Director Jordan Peele, who takes a page from John Carpenter’s handbook of making truly excellent metaphoric horror, is using Chris’ kindness to make a point: even seemingly well-meaning racism has a malignant core. Chris is experiencing Double Consciousness, as per W.E.B. Du Bois, the idea that Black people are always aware of the gaze and judgment of others as well as their own experiences. In essence, the real horror of this is that Chris experiences it on a daily basis, from the cop that demands his ID at a random traffic stop to a dad telling him that losing to Jesse Owens at the Olympics was an honor for his grandfather, and that’s why he’s so willing to overlook some odd behavior from Rose’s family.
The concept that Black bodies are commodified is also at the forefront of Peele’s epic horror movie. Rose’s family sees Chris as a vessel. They plan to use hypnosis and therapy to push his consciousness into an abyss while allowing a white person to take control of his body. Why? Because Black people are “cool” now and Rose’s family views them as sports cars — a sort of high-performance machine to be auctioned off and driven.
Peele uses plenty of visual metaphors in Get Out, but one of the most interesting might be Missy’s teacup. She drinks tea, stirring the spoon in delicate China as she hypnotizes Chris. It’s an interesting object to choose both because the daintiness of a fine teacup belies the brutality of what’s happening, but also because historically tea played a huge part in global imperialism. Wars were fought for tea, and nations colonized, all so Missy can stir it to further subjugate a brown body for her family’s financial and social gains. It’s a heady bit of visual metaphor and one that works brilliantly to emphasize Peele’s point that white spaces are still incredibly threatening to Black people.
It’s no coincidence that during the denouement, when a police car pulls up, it’s seen as a terrifying threat rather than a saving grace. The audience knows that the police are likely to believe Rose over Chris, no matter what’s happened. And it’s crushing to see those blue and red lights.
Verdict
Jordan Peele’s debut film is in turn funny, harrowing, and deeply meaningful. Take a look at this gem and you’ll see why he’s one of the most interesting working filmmakers of his time.
Get Out is rated R and available to rent/buy from your favorite VOD service.
