Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is black. Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) is white. They’re headed to Rose’s parents’ in what looks like upstate New York, but Chris is apprehensive; Rose hasn’t told them he’s black. She shrugs it off, but Chris’s anxiety only grows when they arrive. The Armitages, from their H.P. Lovecraft-referencing name on down, are white as hell. Dad Dean (Bradley Whitford) rhapsodizes about traveling the world and seeing “through the eyes” of another culture (foreshadowing!), while mom Missy (Catherine Keener) practices hypnosis. Their son, Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), is an aggro douchebag who all but salivates over Chris’s “frame” and “genetic makeup.”
The Armitages have what appear to be black servants. Dean is fully aware of how this “looks.” There’s the maid, Georgina, and the gardener, Walter; when Chris tries to talk to them, they respond in a bizarrely formal diction studded with outdated exclamations. Rose, for her part, tries to sympathize with Chris’s discomfort but there’s a gulf between them; rather than make a scene, Chris repeatedly lets it go.
That is, until Missy hypnotizes him, and things get weird.
Peele directs the setup with aplomb (and a lot of jump scares)…except for one mistake. He keeps cutting away to Chris’s friend Rod, who figures out Chris has gone missing, even after shit pops off at the Armitages’. The Rod material is broad and corny; an unwelcome intrusion from Peele’s sketch comedy past. It’s tolerable: until Peele lets it undermine the climax. We’ll get there.
There isn’t a twist in Get Out so much as it takes the underlying tensions built into its premise and makes them extremely explicit. Black bodies as objects of desire, envy, exploitation, fascination; Peele’s script literalizes this in an absurd way. Think John Frankenheimer’s 1966 Seconds, but racist. Or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), but racist. Peele has talked up “social thrillers” in the press, stuff like People Under the Stairs (1991) or Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) or Rosemary’s Baby (1968); all vastly different movies, but united by visceral progressiveness delivered with exploitation-film bluntness.
Get Out doesn’t quite land among this company; it, frankly, is not nasty enough. The microaggressions and forced nicety of its early going is abandoned for generic violence. In its final stretch Get Out is nearly interchangeable with recent home invasion thrillers like You’re Next (2013) and The Invitation (2015); the protagonist needs to escape, and they need to kill everyone to do it. The comeuppance is satisfying, of course, if slightly muted.
Unfortunately, Peele stages a tableau in the final scene that he immediately whiffs on. A black man stands stock-still as the cops pull up, lights flashing. He raises his hands. We know where this is going; most recently we’ve seen it on the news, again and again, since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 sparked a years-long firestorm. Peele doesn’t go there, though. It’s not the cops. It’s Rod.
Maybe echoing real-life tragedies would be distasteful. Too much. Exploitative. Or maybe not. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead ends with an image that has only grown in power since 1968: our hero, a black man, having survived a zombie outbreak, is gunned down by a roving band of armed white men. Get Out sets up a moment like this only to go an easier direction. Peele has great instincts for directing actors, for pacing a conversation, for focusing a scene on one element or motif. He doesn’t trust himself to really put the screws on the audience, and eventually undercuts the power of the entire film. Still; it’s a debut. Give Peele a few more movies in this vein and see what he can do.
Get Out
3 out of 5 stars.
Directed by Jordan Peele
Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, and Catherine Keener
In theaters Friday, Feb. 24
This article appears in Feb 16-23, 2017.