Daily Dispatch

Dark satire gets to grips with racism

- By TIM ROBEY

GET Out, which opens in East London tomorrow, is one of the first films expressly to be set in a postObama era, even if writer-director Jordan Peele, having shot it about a year ago, couldn’t have known exactly what ghastly frights this era would bring. Either way, there is not a Trump voter in sight, because this is a horror-satire about covert racism – liberal racism – not the out-and-proud kind.

The movie rattles with provocatio­ns, among them an opening sequence in which a young black guy (Lakeith Stanfield) walks down a suburban street, talking on his phone, and is pounced upon by a kerb-crawler in a sportscar. Grim echoes of the Trayvon Martin case thud around in your consciousn­ess, setting the tone for feature-length paranoia about being a black outsider in an allwhite enclave. It’s less Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, more Guess What’s Being Served.

Perfect, white Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) wants to allay the concerns of her boyfriend, black photograph­er Chris (British-Ugandan star Daniel Kaluuya), about the family he hasn’t met yet, five months into their relationsh­ip.

He’s anxious about their trip upstate, even if the initial reception from her parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener) is all hugs and bonhomie, and they don’t bat an eyelid about his skin colour.

Peele makes the interestin­g choice of showing this first encounter from afar, in a long master shot, not close-ups. The body language all seems perfectly aboveboard. But the closer we get to the Armitages, the more an eye-widening belowboard­creeps in. Why is their basement locked? Why are their two employees – a housemaid and groundsman – both black, not to mention stricken and socially paralysed?

And is their house not a little like some Rhode Island equivalent of an antebellum plantation, with iced tea being served on the lawn? (The movie was largely shot in Alabama for tax reasons, and there’s another nod to the South when someone uses “One Mississipp­i . . .” as a counting chant.)

All those questions will be answered as the film heads towards its grisly and breathless­ly suspensefu­l last reel – which Peele, until now a comedy specialist, handles with an impressive grasp of pacing, considered shock, and restraint where it counts. Still, the explanatio­ns are less interestin­g than the uneasy edge in the build-up, the escalation of sly microaggre­ssions coming at Chris from all sides.

We begin to realise that Rose – despite her seemingly relaxed attitude as a “woke” white liberal – can barely interact with her boyfriend without somehow policing racism on his behalf. When a cop suspicious­ly requests his driving licence, it’s she who makes an awkwardly big issue of it.

Chris is used to this sort of thing, and equally used to dealing with it. Kaluuya’s glum acquiescen­ce, faultlessl­y conveyed, is a statement in its own right: Chris accepts his lot politely but unhappily as a prisoner of white attitudes, however self-congratula­tory they may be.

The horror elements of the film lie in wait, just as they did in satires of a former generation – The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby. One aspect of Chris’s predicamen­t involves being forcibly detached from reality through hypnosis, disappeari­ng through the floor into a dark netherworl­d which Keener’s character calls “the Sunken Place”.

Visually, it’s reminiscen­t of that tarry trap in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. But this borrowing works because of the film’s stark political awareness – it becomes a floating, flailing image of being impotently shafted by white hegemony.

Whitford, among the white cast, plays off Kaluuya’s discomfort beautifull­y, and seems especially alive to the comedy in this scenario. With his foreground­ed Ivy League complacenc­y and cringy mantra of “my man!”, he suggests where West Wing characters lock up all their least politicall­y correct thoughts.

The very ending could have been stronger – you can sense Peele edging in a too-full-on direction, then backing out of it with a too-facile fix.

But it’s still the most forceful and inventive American horror film since It Follows. — The Daily Telegraph

● Director: Jordan Peele. Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener, Caleb Landry Jones, Stephen Root, Betty Gabriel, Lakeith Stanfield, Lil Rel Howery, Marcus Henderson. Horror/mystery. 16HLV, 104 mins

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