For most films I try to avoid the trailers and ads and just go in blind. For Get Out, I did see the opening trailer, and I did feel like I understood a lot about the film, things I would have liked to not guess on.
Going into the film, I had my whole theory ready on why the events of the film would happen. It is a horror, mystery, and potential for comedy, and I was worried the trailers gave it all away. (Don’t worry, they didn’t).
Either way, the trailer did a good job of hyping up the film. Add on the excitement of Jordan Peele directing his first film ever, and writing this one on his own. He wants to show he has the chops to create content on his own.
Aw, look at the happy couple.
Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is a photographer, good dude, and he is black. Don’t worry, his color matters. Because he is dating Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) a white woman for a few months now. And he has agreed to go and visit her parents home for a weekend, and no, they don’t know she is black.
But he heads up. They are in a rich mansion by a lake, very secluded. His friend Rod (LilRel Howery) is watching his dog, and he hopes they don’t get upset. But hey, they don’t! After all, her dad (Bradley Whitford) would have voted for Obama for a third term, so he can’t be racist. The mom (Catherine Keener), is a psychiatrist who uses hypnosis and is willing to help him quit smoking.
Hypnosis! Yay!
Despite their totally not racist antics, they do have two people who work at their house, who happen to be black. Georgina (Betty Gabriel), their maid, and Walter (Marcus Henderson), their groundskeeper. And they act very strange. Like they have no real personality, like they are…trapped.
Nah, white people can’t be that crazy. Right?
Featuring Caleb Landry Jones as the brother, Lakeith Stanfield as the first victim, and Stephen Root as a blind art dealer.
Should he get out or are they just out to get him? Who knows!
Get Out is amazeballs and that is not a word I get to use to often in a review. Last year we had an early horror film get a 4 out of 4, and it was The Witch, for feeling truly evil, authentic, and scary. Get Out is a horror film with tense scenes, but it is wildly different.
First of all, yes, it has comedy elements. It isn’t a horror comedy like Scary Movie 5, which is not horror, and also not comedy. Some of the scares will make you laugh, for being ridiculous. Some of the scares though will make you cringe back. And some of the scares are deeper than that. They are the societal pressures that are ever present today coming out and haunting us.
Get Out is extremely topical, with the current level of race relations in America. It refers to the past and calls out those who are not outwardly racist, but still end up being racist to some degree. The minor way people will act different if there is a minority present, like a change of language or your choice of dinner conversation.
And honestly, in the third act when it becomes a sort of revenge flick, the deaths are graphic, unexpected, and they had me clapping along with others ready for some of that juicy justice.
Get Out is funny, frightening, and fucking relevant. But what really brings the whole thing together is LilRel Howery. He is the single greatest thing to happen to the TSA since…well, he is the single greatest thing to happen to the TSA. Because literally nothing else before this has been great for the TSA. But they finally have something they can look on and be proud about. A fictional movie character.