Get Out (Review)

Jordan Peele began his career as a comedy writer, and achieved fame as a member of the Comedy Central due Key and Peele. That is part of why his 2017 directorial debut was such a surprise; Peele’s Get Out, starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Stephen Root, and Catherine Keener, fell firmly in the genre of horror. More specifically, Get Out is a story about the racism of positive stereotyping, and the commercialization of Black experiences and bodies.

Get Out follows Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) a young black man who is a successful photographer, as he visits the family of his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams). During his stay in their remote home, Chris witnesses increasingly disturbing and uncomfortable occurrences, which hint towards a dark truth about the Armitage family.

Peele’s greatest strength in Get Out is the speed at which the story moves. The film is 104 minutes long, and not a single second is wasted. This has the added benefit of making the movie feel shorter than it actually is, and has the same satisfying feeling as watching a virtuoso pianist play a perfect piece. Moments land at exactly the right moment, and nothing feels out of place. Even the movie’s more quiet and contemplative first act, in which the horror mainly comes from cringeworthy social interactions with clueless white people (“I would have voted for Obama a third time…”), does a fantastic job of establishing Chris’s growing discomfort and unease, which Rose continually defers but never quite dissipates. It derives from attitudes that are not inherently negative towards Black people, but still lead to harmful actions when taken to their logical conclusion.

It is also a credit to Peele that he is able to take the “default” of an upper class white home and turn it into a horrifying and hostile landscape, not because of some invasive influence, but because it simply is horrifying and hostile to the main character. The mayo-whiteness of the Armitage family and their guests later in the movie is suffocating, and ensures that the main character is always on guard, never able to relax.

Overall, Get Out is one of the better debuts in film history for a new director, and Peele has continued his success with future films. Few critics dispute that Get Out has earned a place in film history already, as a timely and biting critique of American racism in the 21st century. For this reason, I give it a 10 out of 12 stars.