Get Out - Review

The opening scenes of Jordan Peele's debut feature Get Out get to the heart of what the film is about. A person walking round dimly lit streets at night is bundled into the back of a van by some unknown assailant The Silence of the Lambs style. We've seen it before. Only this time, the dimly lit streets belong to an affluent middle class neighbourhood and the victim is a black man. This kind of manipulation of genre tropes is when the film is at its best, breathing fresh life into played out clichés with a sharp critique of the idea of a post-racial America. Get Out is an undeniably smart film that, whilst leaning on traditions of the horror genre, gives them a provocative update that feels particularly vital in the age of Black Lives Matter. 

First and foremost though (and very importantly I think) Get Out is a thriller - complete with the requisite jump scares - any social commentary is packaged beneath a genre surface which is made all the more potent by the uneasy implication of the plot. This omnipresent layer of tension is used cleverly in the early stages of the film, aptly reflecting the not so harmonious state of race relations in America. 

However, Peele doesn't take this in the direction you might expect; here the villains aren't white supremacists but white progressives, staunch in their defence of racial equality. Armed with his challenging premise, he shows brilliant disregard towards the ruffling of feathers, taking aim at the self-congratulatory liberalism of middle class America. When our protagonist Chris asks his girlfriend if she has told her parents that he is black before they go to visit them, she bats away the suggestion, assuring him that her father would have voted for Obama for a third term. No need to worry then.

It was moments such as this in the early portion of the film that I found most compelling. A very sharp script is coupled with some great performances in an strange blend of social satire and standard horror tension building. As Chris - played with a polite air of resignation - manoeuvres his way through some small talk, he is warned about the "black mould" in the basement, told tales of Tiger Woods and Jesse Owens for no apparent reason, and finally informed that "black is in fashion!". These sequences of odd fetishisation not only serve to foreshadow the nature of the carnage that is to come but also playfully parody the treatment of black men in America.  

Unfortunately though, at times the film making is not as interesting as the social commentary. Indeed, the film falls down a little in the final act when it struggles to deliver on the fabulously uncomfortable setup, getting bogged down in a slightly heavy handed reliance on genre tropes. The already expressive score gets turned up to eleven, really cramming the tension down your throat and, as is often the case, the nightmare that we see unfold doesn't quite live up to the one you had imagined. Regardless, Get Out has much to admire. It is an impressively well put together horror that when combined with a pointed politically aware edge, is transformed into something uniquely unsettling.