GET OUT’S ‘THE SUNKEN PLACE’

Jordan Peele’s game-changing Oscar-winner explores what it’s really like to be the only black guy in the room. With some reluctance, New York photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) goes home with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) to meet her rich, liberal parents Dean (Bradley Whitford), a neurosurgeon, and Missy (Catherine Keener) a hypnotherapist. Though they make all the right noises about Jessie Owens and Obama’s third term, they also employ black servants, setting the stage for an awkward dance of privilege and apology. But it is with this pivotal hypnosis scene that their evil, Stepford Wives-style scheme begins to reveal itself.

During a late-night chat between Chris and Missy (a shortening of “mistress” associated with slavery), she begins needling at a painful memory of his mother’s death while stirring her tea with a – silver – spoon. As the stirring takes on a repetitive, hypnotic quality, he begins to open up, the camera moving closer and closer until their faces fill the screen. It’s then he realises that he can’t move. “Now sink into the floor,” Missy commands with a wolfish smile, “Sink!” Cue shots of Chris falling through the endless darkness of The Sunken Place, while his body sits mute, his blood-rimmed eyes leaking silent tears. He was not the only one. “I literally cried writing this scene,” admitted Peele.

Shot to resemble the intense Starling/Lecter interrogations in The

Silence Of The Lambs, this superficially simple duologue took an entire day to film, with Kaluuya nailing two takes with perfectly timed tears. As for The Sunken Place, it was recreated on a soundstage with wires, a fan and a high frame-rate – the same “dry-for-wet” techniques that have been previously used to make things look like they’re happening underwater in movies such as The Abyss.

Although the scene is inspired by a dream of falling, The Sunken Place is as much a metaphor for uncomfortable racial truths as it is a nightmare. “The Sunken Place means we’re marginalised,” Peele explained on Twitter. “No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us.” You only need to glance around right now to see what he means. MG