A true horror in every sense
Keener and Bradley Whitford), are warm and welcoming, with Dean addressing Chris as “my man” and showering him with hugs. But Walter (Marcus Henderson) and Georgina (Betty Gabriel), the African American grounds keeper and cook, seem suspended in a state of constant glazed docility. Rose’s brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) seems determined to give Christopher Walken’s “Annie Hall” brother a run for his money as creepiest movie sibling of all time.
The answers come eventually in Get Out, but not before Peele has established a note-perfect tone of both dread and sharp-eyed humour when it comes to race. If his first sequence grievously recalls the death of Trayvon Martin, Chris’s misadventures with Rose’s family and their seemingly well-meaning friends bring to mind everything from 19th-century slave auctions to James Baldwin in the recent documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Here are the “moral monsters” of which he speaks, committing unspeakable acts borne of their wilful blindness and heedless, voraciously self-perpetuating privilege.
The precise form that sense of superiority takes remains a progressively more disturbing mystery throughout most of Get Out during which Chris makes frantic calls to his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), a fast-talking man who provides most of the film’s comic relief by way of such timeless observations as: “Don’t go to a white girl’s parents’ house.” Peele assuredly ratchets up the tension until an action-heavy final act in which the gore splurts and splatters with particularly cathartic satisfaction.
Anyone expecting Get Out to be a shallow take on racial animus is in for a far more nuanced, unsettling experience: Peele, who is biracial, does something far more sophisticated in taking notions of assimilation, cultural appropriation, white liberal pieties and the fetishising of black bodies to their most existentially fatal extreme. Get Out faithfully obeys the conventions of its genre – while getting at profound psychic and political realities. The shocks and the laughs are entertaining, but it’s the truth of Get Out that’s so real. – Washington Post