Get Out
Low-budget horror is scarily smart
Filmed for peanuts, this racially charged horror from American comedian Jordan Peele is one of the year’s biggest success stories, making more than $200 million at the box office and inspiring its own meme. Not bad given it’s Peele’s debut feature.
Skins’ Daniel Kaluuya stars as Chris, a talented photographer whose white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) takes him back South to meet her middleclass, liberal elite parents. They’re the type of people who “would have voted for Obama a third time”, but still employ oddly docile African American housekeepers, their smiles more sinister than reassuring to Chris. His suspicions don’t go unfounded.
Horror has a long history of social commentary (look to Dawn Of The Dead for cinema’s best satire of American consumerism), and Get Out is a thrillingly relevant vehicle for the black American experience, essaying exactly the kind of benign but insidious racism encountered by millions of African Americans on a daily basis. Rose’s parents, for example assume Chris is good at sports, simply because he’s black, while he’s treated like the main attraction at an annual get-together of fussy old white folk.
But Peele’s film is never preachy, and works on another level: it’s also a laugh-out-loud funny, blood-soaked crowd pleaser, that also goes to some riotously entertaining (and cathartic) places while deftly straddling a perilous tonal tightrope. As far as modern horror debuts go, Peele’s film is electrifying. Get out? Get in, more like.