Review: Get Out

The most terrifying monsters are the ones we encounter in our everyday lives. In the brilliant race-conscious horror film, Get Out, the monsters are white liberals, whose enlightenment masks a darker nature.

"My dad would have voted for Obama for a third term!" Rose (Allison Williams) assures photographer boyfriend Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) when he expresses concern that she hasn't told her parents Dean and Missy Armitage (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) that he is black. They're upper-class liberals and they're the good kind of white people, she promises, Chris has absolutely nothing to worry about. Indeed, neurosurgeon Dean gives Chris the warmest of welcomes, though he perhaps goes a bit too overboard in his efforts to be buddy buddy with Chris.

More obviously unsettling is Missy, a psychiatrist, who offers to help Chris kick his smoking habit via hypnosis. Though he initially declines, she quietly but firmly imposes her will, and Chris finds himself revealing the guilt he still carries over his mother's death before falling into a void that Missy calls "the sunken place." Chris can't help but feel that something is very amiss, especially since the other two black people in the family's secluded house behave as if lobotomised - housekeeper Georgina (Betty Gabriel) gazes at her own reflection whilst groundskeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson) races around the grounds during the night. Yet Rose keeps insisting that everything is all right and that he is only being hypersensitive.

Perhaps Chris should have listened to his best friend, TSA officer Rod (a hilarious Lil Rel Howery), who had half-jokingly warned him to never go to a white girl's house and who, upon hearing Chris' worries over a series of phone calls, believes that the Armitages may be trapping Chris in some sort of sex ring operation. At this point, a sex ring operation may be a far better alternative than what the Armitages have in store for him.

A dexterous debut from Jordan Peele (one half of the Key and Peele sketch-comedy pair), Get Out is the most thought-provoking examinations of racism in post-Obama America. That it is told within the framework of the horror genre is even more impressive. Peele doesn't stint on the thrills and chills, and neither does he hold back on shining a light on the perils of complacency from both sides of the racial divide. Good intentions, Peele argues, can be as corrosive and hindering as barefaced racism, possibly even more so since racism is bred in the corners of deceptively innocuous conversations and becomes even more of a presence by the very virtue of its enforced absence.

Racial commentary aside, Peele proves himself a director to watch, possessed of a keen eye for detail, pacing and performance.

Get Out

Directed by: Jordan Peele

Written by: Jordan Peele

Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener, Caleb Landry Jones, Marcus Henderson, Betty Gabriel, Lakeith Stanfield, Stephen Root