Get Out: really vicious satire on race in a horror movie context where slaves are zombies
Get Out is a phrase I once heard used brutally as someone was thrown out of a gay talk group for his willful insularity in New York City back in 1975.
And in the movie by Jordan Peele by this name, the phrase occurs as an African-American slave zombie orders (black) Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), by autonomous bark, to leave a social gathering on the Alabama estate, hidden deep in southern pine forest, of his white and rich girl friend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams).
Get Out is another road horror film, and this one is even more vicious in its satire than “A Cure for Wellness” (February 19), and not just because it exploits the interracial dating angle, as well as modern day slavery. The film is cleverly shot and written, with lots of metaphoric speech, and creepy twelve-tone music by Michael Abels (himself African-American, but obviously well-schooled in Schoenberg’s style of composition, with a touch of Shostakovich sometimes, with a four-note motive).
Chris has a best friend at the TSA (Rod Williams) who scours Bing to find out who the docile “servants” really were before they disappeared. The film has an opening shot of the kidnapping of one of the servants, not to be explained for a while, as Peele uses a story setup technique familiar to me in somewhat similar (stylistically) “horror” films by Jorge Ameer, like The House of Adam (2006). (Ameer is a black filmmaker who likes to make erotic mystery films with white gay men as subjects.)
Adding to the chill is, of course, the patriarch of the estate, Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford), who makes the white supremacy of today’s alt-right seem tame indeed. Rose’s brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) turns out to be a rather silly sidekick.
And wife Missy (Catherine Keener)adds a sci-fi element when she hypnotizes Chris, supposedly to get him to give up smoking, fitting in to the fear that he will be converted into a zombie slave. Betty Gabriel and Marcus Henderson are appropriately sincere and robotic in their “The Stepford Wives” (permissively speaking) roles.
Like “Wellness”, the film has an early scene involving a deer accident. And the climax also has an ideal from Hannibal (2000), with skull removal, that doesn’t quite fit the rest of the plot.
Name: Get Out
Director, writer: Jordan Peele
Released: 2017/2/24
Format: 2.35:1
When and how viewed: Ballston Quarter, Regal, large auditorium, nearly sold out, 2017.2.25, late afternoon; audience clapped at end
Length: 103
Rating: R
Companies: Blumhouse, QC, Universal Studios
"A Cure for Wellness" trailer above.