Get Out

I know that I am SUPER late to the party on this one. But better late than never, and I'm really glad I finally got around to this. In a scene about a third or halfway through the movie (those who have seen the film will know it as the "teacup scene," I thought to myself: "This movie needs to be taught in film school."

Having now seen the movie, I can see why it won an Oscar for original screenplay. The level of narrative economy in this film is fantastic. There are a thousand little details you might not notice at first but that all come together to contribute to the chilling narrative.

The acting is also fantastic, and... I don't really know how to put this, but it all seems so perfectly calibrated to the needs of the film. It's not something I often think about when it comes to acting - because an actor is playing a single character in most cases, there's a kind of internal process that we can often recognize as really brilliant performance. Indeed, we sometimes see great performances in movies that are otherwise mediocre. But here, the performances, particularly of Daniel Kaluuya (Chris) and Alison Williams (Rose,) work in such synchronicity with the needs of the film that... I don't know, it's really good.

Now, this movie was spoiled for me pretty heavily before I saw it, which did allow me to catch a lot of details I might have otherwise missed, but also prevented me from being terribly shocked by its developments (though the truth of its big twist was more horrifying than I realized, for reasons I'll get to after the cut.)

Anyway, beware of spoilers beyond this point.


There are, I think, two big twists in the movie. We know going in that it's a horror film, and the clear scenario we are meant to expect is that the Armitages are using hypnosis to turn black people into their slaves. We see Walter (Marcus Henderson) and Georgina (Betty Gabriel) working at the house in roles that, in America's past, were often the jobs given to slaves - groundskeeping and housekeeping. That these two seem to be so happy in their roles is the first clue that there's some sort of mind control at work here - which is actually a red herring.

Chris' friend Rod (Lil Rel Howerly) serves as the audience surrogate here - when Chris goes missing, Rod begins to theorize from what Chris has told him that this is some kind of human trafficking operation, and when he brings this theory to the cops, they all laugh in his face - which seems to be Jordan Peele laughing at the obvious theories the audience has landed on.

In fact, the plot is far more outlandish. The fact is that Walter and Georgina are very much "part of the family," because they are actually bodies stolen and given what appears to be brain transplants - allowing the grandparents of the family to live on in youthful, healthy bodies.

Indeed, there is a discussion when Chris first arrives at the Armitage house in which Dean (Bradley Whitford's character) talks about how his father had been an athlete, but had lost out in the qualifying rounds to Jesse Owens. Dean makes a comment about how wonderful it was to see Hitler's propaganda of the superiority of white people crumble as this black man won at the Olympics. In the moment it sounds very much like a white guy trying to convince a black guy he's not racist, but instead it seems that this creepy order of body-thieves have simply decided that black people have superior physical capabilities that they wish to take for themselves.

But it's not just that they scoop people out of their own bodies. Instead, the "Sunken Place" that Chris is sent to via hypnosis is actually the state of consciousness that victims are stuck in after only part of their brains are left intact while actual control over motor functions is left to the white person's brain implanted in their head. So they are essentially left to the fate of John Cusack's character at the end of Being John Malkovitch, forced to watch their life stolen from them.

The other big twist is the role of Rose, Chris' girlfriend. Throughout, it seems as if Rose is unaware of what her parents are doing. While her brother is following in her father's profession, she seems to be outside of this horror. However, we realize later that her role is actually to seduce men (and in one case a woman, who becomes the body for her grandmother's brain) and bring them to be transformed.

Here I feel I need to give credit to Allison Williams' performance, because she comes off so empathetic and caring that, even after the con is revealed when Chris finds a box of clearly couples photos of her with many different black men (after having told Chris that she had never dated a black guy before,) and finally a photo with Georgina, we understand why Chris is still tempted to think she's on his side.

We later find out how sociopathic she is - after Chris is subdued and being prepared to have his body stolen, she answers his cell phone when Rod calls. Her voice carries worry and distress at Chris having gone missing, while her face shows no emotion whatsoever.

This is also my kind of horror movie, in that it's 95% building tension, without a fixation on graphic violence. Chris manages to free himself and escapes the Armitage house and kill off his captors, save Rose, who is killed when Chris manages to briefly reawaken the real man whose body Walter has stolen. The violent struggle to escape carries with it a deep sense of betrayal - Chris has gone out here in good faith, and it's clear that Rose was very important to him, or rather the person he thought she was. Her mother, Missy (Catherine Keener), used his mother's death to get into his mind and condition him to enter the Sunken Place, and they've weaponized his loneliness and his trust against him.

The movie works on many different levels, and raises some very uneasy questions about society. Right now, however, I'm just sitting in amazement at how tightly packed and effective a thriller it is. I was a huge fan of Jordan Peele's work on Key and Peele (I mean, both of them, obviously,) and I always appreciated the cinematic eye they had for the sketches they produced. But seeing Peele's first feature as director, I'm very excited to see his next film, Us, which is coming out... really soon, I think?