Get Out (2017)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Get Out (2017) – J. Peele

A horror movie with something extra – it’s told from the African-American perspective and it is really about racism.  Yet, it never feels didactic and it somehow manages to be fun, creepy, and in the same ballpark as films like The Stepford Wives (1975).  You see, Chris, an up-and-coming photographer (played by Daniel Kaluuya) is going to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time at their posh country estate.  He’s Black, she’s White – the parents don’t know and he’s (justly) apprehensive.  Writer-Director Jordan Peele captures the awkward moments as the White people bring up everything/everyone they know in Black culture and treat Chris as _the_ representative of his ethnic group (played nearly as satire).  But then it gets weird and weirder.  Peele knows how to manage the tension and Kaluuya is expert at reacting naturally to the bizarre events that unfold (which start with his girlfriend’s mom, played by Catherine Keener, hypnotizing him, purportedly to get him to stop smoking).  Unlike many horror films, the script manages to depict its hero as someone with a brain, who seeks to Get Out when things go from bad to worse. And for all its strangeness, the weird elements get nicely tied together at the end, when the big reveal happens.  (So, you might want to go back and watch it again to see the clues that you might have missed the first time).  In the end, the film turns out to be a fun ride that still manages to raise an alarm, shining a light on a particularly vexed and vexing aspect of American culture that shows no signs of getting better – true horror indeed.