The Alamo Cinema Massacre Presents: GET OUT

This week on Considering Stories, we offer an original review in the style of our sister column The Alamo Cinema Massacre, which appears monthly at Cinema Knife Fight. We hope you enjoy this take on a modern screen gem.

~*~

Synopsis: When Carl (Daniel Kaluuya) agrees to head out of the city and to remote upstate suburbia, one of the first questions he asks his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) is “Do they know I’m black?” Even in today’s enlightened era, the idea of an interracial couple can cause ill feelings. She proceeds to set his mind at ease, with the easy humor that a couple who have been seeing each other exclusively for a few months share. Then, the two head upstate. After hitting a deer causes an incident with the local police – Carl was not driving and yet the cop wants to see his identification, ultimately backing down when Rose leaps to her man’s defense – the situation continues to take on a deepening eerie tone. When they arrive at Rose’s parents’ house (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener play Rose’s folks while Caleb Landry Jones plays her strange brother), Carl finds himself on the receiving end of even stranger behavior both from her “trying too hard to be accepting” parents as well as the all black staff who speak without conjunctions and smile like robots. And when her parents reveal the lovestruck couple have arrived just in time for a gathering of the old and wealthy set, Carl finds himself in a peculiar hell.

However, an even bleaker fate is waiting in the wings. Carl gets his first real hint that there is more wrong here than casual racism, when a young African American lover of a much older Caucasian woman loses his cool and begins to scream “Get out! Get out of here!” Soon after, Carl and Rose are caught in a tense situation one part satire, one part horror story fueled by a sober and unforgiving view of suburban systemic racism. Will they make good on the frantically delivered advice, escaping this remote situation and getting back to the city? Or will they learn the ugly horror brooding underneath the benevolent layers of these isolated yuppie mansions?

DANIEL’S TAKE

Just as with the beginning of 2016, a horror movie has arrived that seems to have struck a chord with critics. While last year’s darling THE VVITCH (2015) divided audiences, this year’s offering has been uniting audiences and critics in praise.

GET OUT (2017) is a critical darling and it has made some serious waves for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is: writer/director Jordan Peele’s horror debut is a quality film that builds an atmosphere of dread and unease through careful attention to visual and audio details, excellent dialogue, and intense acting. In other words: it’s actually a good movie that happens to also be an effective horror film as opposed to settling for being simply a good horror film. GET OUT is an unusual picture in that it does not try to be like other films. Sure, there are thematic motifs that nod to other features from the past, but the movie stands on its own legs as opposed to trying to announce intentions to be “like STEPFORD WIVES (1975) but with African-Americans!” This piece is interested in what it is doing and not at all interested in overusing familiar tropes.

Also, the movie has a wicked sense of humor. It pokes fun at lots of targets, including race, the TSA, jealousy issues, socio-economic divides, and a dozen other relatable issues with deft jokes and a keen eye for human behavior and human failings. Sometimes the humor is gentle, often it is pointed, and ultimately it is satisfying.

There are a couple of jump scare sequences, but they are the culmination of an atmospheric build and not thrown in for their own sake. On at least three occasions, people run out of the darkness or surprisingly appear around a blind corner. However, due to the mood and tone, these are not the payoff scares but moments in a continuously building train of dread. Like spikes on an EEG, they are part of a larger picture not the picture itself.

Much of the movie is given to the sorts of images that belong in the real world, though that world is slightly twisted. Garden parties, candlelit dinners, bedroom meanderings, and late night walks in the eerily dark yards and suburban streets. However, there are a couple of beautifully executed sequences that use stunning, surreal visuals to contribute to the isolation and unease.

The most stunning of these is Peele’s realization of The Sunken Place, a visualization of either a mind undergoing hypnosis or the nightmarish fantasy of a hypnotic state. The victim hangs in empty space, like a body in some subterranean lake, while far overhead a small rectangle shows the world that perception had once inhabited. The floating figure stares up, claws towards the sight of the cheerful hypnotist stirring a spoon in a cup of tea, as the hypnotist leans forward and closes the paralyzed eyelids, casting the floating figure into permanent darkness. The effect is appropriately off putting, appealing to a similar unease as the floating figures awaiting their macabre disembowelment doom in UNDER THE SKIN (2015).

Another beautifully executed sequence is utterly without dialogue, a view of what can only be a backyard auction where the thing up for sale is revealed to be nothing less than a human being. Greedy faces make their bids using an unlikely but brilliant replacement for bidding paddles, while the auctioneer’s hands tell us a little about the denominations being bid. I am guessing that the number of zeroes after the fingers are at least five, probably six. The little, perverse details are what make this scene memorable and inspired.

The script has several clever strokes, but its strength lies in writer/director Jordan Peele’s attention to how people actually talk. The dialogue is littered with those funny observations friends make to one another, the cadences that couples develop, the awkwardness of meeting someone’s parents for the first time, as well as carefully observed views that one race has for another. As well, there are several instances where Peele intelligently flips the script on worn to hell tropes.

Take the opening teaser sequence. We have a young man walking through dark streets, worriedly trying to find his way to a girl’s house. She is on the phone, and he complains about how little sense the street naming scheme makes. When he promises to be there in a few minutes, and keeps going on his way the visuals are especially rich. He keeps his hands shoved in pockets, he looks around nervously at the deep shadows he passes, and even opening mutters about “I know what happens when these people catch someone like me out in their streets”. By the time a sporty looking car with dark, dark windows spots this guy, performs a slow U-turn, and then idles by the curb in a menacing fashion, we are hit by just how easily this could be a scene of an uncomfortable suburbanite lost in the minority heavy neighborhoods of the big, bad city. In such a scene, that suburbanite would be on the verge of getting into trouble with a known urban threat – gangbangers or the other sorts of ne’er-do-wells that make regular appearances on COPS or FOX NEWS – and about to get a lesson in venturing into the “wrong neighborhood”. Instead, Peele has reshuffled the backdrop but left the mounting suspense, making the uncomfortable soon-to-be-victim-of-trouble a clean cut African-American city dude weirded out by being caught out in upper middle class suburbia. The scene is funny, the suspense is gripping, and the sequence does not overstay its welcome.

One of the characters not touched upon in this entry’s opening synopsis is Carl’s best friend Rod Williams (LilRel Howery), a TSA officer who learns of his friend’s trouble and tries to help. At first, he is a friendly voice on the telephone, a person to trade pictures and one-liners with. As the story unfolds, he becomes much more. There is a priceless scene where Rod takes his findings and suspicions to the police, only to get laughed at. The scene works on several levels. First, it is a tension relief from the previous sequence where the young couple are placed in danger. Further, it is a slick way to exclude the authorities from the subsequent action. Finally, it is also a pointed jab both at Rod, who tries to place himself on a level with the officers (“I’m TSA. We have the same training.”) only to get smacked down.

I look forward to more works from this filmmaker. Already an established comedian, Peele understands how horror can work. Even if his next feature is not in the same genre, it will undoubtedly be worth watching. Here is a director with a personal vision and the assuredness to follow it.

This article copyright © 2017 by Daniel R. Robichaud.