Get Out (2017)
In 1992, Jonathan Demme's psychological slasher, The Silence of the Lambs, dominated the 64th Academy Awards, becoming one of only three motion pictures thus far in history to score the "Big Five" Oscars: Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins, Best Actress for Jodie Foster, Best Adapted Screenplay for Ted Tally, Best Director for Demme, and most prestigiously (and uncommonly) of all, Best Picture, the latter of which makes it the first and currently sole horror film to achieve such an honor. While this would mark the final instance of a 20th century horror film actually leaving the ceremony with any bronze statuettes in its hand, eight years later, M. Night Shyamalan's supernatural magnum opus, The Sixth Sense, received nearly the same level of appreciation from voters, earning a total of six Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Haley Joel Osment, Best Supporting Actress for Toni Collette, Best Original Screenplay and Director for Shyamalan, and Best Editing for Andrew Mondshein.
Over the next 18 years, the Academy seemingly turned a blind eye to the value of the horror genre, dismissing an abundance of critically acclaimed entries in favor of more "serious" cinematic achievements. That would all change on the night of March 4, 2018 at the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, which witnessed the celebration of the directorial debut of Jordan Peele, known previously as one half of the duo of a sketch comedy TV series titled, Key and Peele. Get Out became the first horror movie of the 21st century to be welcomed into the Academy, earning four nominations in prestigious categories: Best Actor for Daniel Kaluuya, Best Director and Original Screenplay for Peele (the latter of which he won), and most strikingly of all, Best Picture, making it the 5th horror film in history to receive the most honorable nomination, alongside The Exorcist, Jaws, The Sixth Sense, and The Silence of the Lambs. (As of 2025, there are now six horror films to have been nominated for Best Picture courtesy of Coralie Fargeat's sci-fi body horror, The Substance.) While there is no shortage of genre titles deserving of widespread recognition and bronze-crafted adoration, if only one could walk away with the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in particular, none deserved it more than Get Out.
Deliciously tense, darkly humorous, and conceptually terrifying, Get Out presents an exhilaratingly original take on "mad scientist" horror that lays bare a lesser known form of racism while heralding breakthrough performances from Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, LaKeith Stanfield, Lil Rel Howery, Betty Gabriel, and Caleb Landry Jones.
Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is a 26-year-old black photographer preparing to meet the parents of his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), over the weekend. Because he's the first black man Rose has allegedly ever dated, Chris is racked with apprehension that he's going to be "chased off the lawn with a shotgun," to which Rose assures him that her parents are liberals who will welcome him with open arms. Watching his dog, Sid, over the weekend is his best friend, Rod Williams (Lil Rel Howery), a TSA agent who jokingly warns him against visiting his potential future in-laws. During their peaceful drive along the quiet stretch of road, Rose accidentally runs over a deer, a classically ominous portent of the horrors that await Chris (however, in the first of only a handful of flaws, it looks more like the deer is thrown at the windshield more so than run over in the street).
Upon arriving at the Armitage family's posh, wooded country house, Chris is greeted warmly with affectionate hugs and accommodating smiles by Dean (Bradley Whitford), a neurosurgeon, and Missy (Catherine Keener), a psychiatrist. Despite their pleasant personalities and seemingly tolerant attitudes regarding the color of their daughter's new beau, Dean and Missy still can't help but make Chris a little uncomfortable in their well-intentioned but overly obvious and cautious efforts to connect with him socially, especially Dean. The one member of the family who isn't so concerned with alleviating Chris' discomfort is Rose's younger brother, Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), who feels no shame about stating assumptions based on Chris' race regarding athleticism and physical superiority. Exacerbating Chris' feeling of not belonging is the presence of the Armitages' black servants, Georgina (Betty Gabriel), the maid, and Walter (Marcus Henderson), the groundskeeper, both of whom appear almost robotic in their docility and outward displays of friendliness.
Late on the first night, unable to sleep, Chris wanders outside to sneak a cigarette, and once he returns inside, he's invited to an impromptu therapy session by Missy, who puts him under hypnosis in the guise of curing him of his addiction to nicotine. In the process, Chris is forced to relive the death of his mother, who was run over and left to die in the cold when he was 11, leaving him with a lifetime supply of grief and guilt. Waking the following morning, Chris has little memory of what occurred in Missy's office, unsure whether his descent into a black void called "the sunken place" was real or imagined. Either way, his paranoia heightens during a get-together with the wealthy, elderly white friends of Dean's deceased father, who shower Chris with unwanted admiration regarding his color more so than his personality.
As he wanders off to take pictures, Chris comes across the only other black man in a sea of overwhelming whiteness, providing a momentary sense of relief. The man introduces himself as Logan King (LaKeith Stanfield), although his eerily stilted behavior, especially in the presence of his white wife who looks to be thirty years his senior, puts an instant dart in Chris' comfortability. When Chris furtively takes a picture of Logan on his cellphone, Logan reacts with hostility, coming at Chris and screaming at him to "Get out!" before being pulled off and sedated by Missy. Realizing that something sinister is afoot and convinced it's no longer in his imagination, Chris resolves to heed Rod's advice and go home with Rose, an early exit this family isn't prepared to accept.
Straight from the opening sequence, in which Andre Hayworth (who will later be renamed Logan King) is abducted on a suburban neighborhood sidewalk while searching for his girlfriend's house in the night, Peele suffuses his directorial debut with a sensation of heart-stopping dread that will only ratchet upward. However, in a subversion of the conventional horror movie opening, he doesn't kill his victim outright, merely knocking him unconscious before subjecting him to a fate much more unnerving and original. Peele exploits this simple scenario for a dual purpose: to pay homage to the suburban nighttime horror of John Carpenter's Halloween while addressing the very modern, racially specific anxiety of being followed in an all-white neighborhood as the single black man, lost. In the bargain, he makes chillingly unforgettable use of the 1939 song, "Run, Rabbit, Run," by Flanagan and Allen, juxtaposing its child-friendly buoyancy with the real-world cruelty of racially motivated violence.
In his Oscar-nominated, breakout leading role, Daniel Kaluuya portrays Chris Washington with an empathetic everyman quality that immediately attracts our affection and instills rooting interest. He's quiet, agreeable, and apprehensive about meeting the family of the young woman he's been dating for the last five months. Despite his increasingly enveloping anxiety as this diminutive, black fish in a pond dominated by wealthy, white aristocrats, Chris puts on an exterior of politeness for his aggressively cordial hosts, dismissing a series of condescending microaggressions for the sake of Rose, with whom he's already fallen madly in love. The frustration of watching a character put themselves in an obviously dangerous environment and refuse to heed the warnings of the audience as we scream at them from behind the screen to get out is part and parcel of horror, but Kaluuya disarms with his innate sweetness and guilelessness. From the second he steps through the door of his hosts' estate, Chris would love nothing more than to turn around and hightail it back to the safety of his apartment and love of his dog, but he's determined to put in the effort to bond with his girlfriend's family. After all, it's only for two days, right? As Chris grows increasingly uncomfortable with the artificially benevolent behavior around him, Kaluuya adopts an expression of perpetual befuddlement, visibly suppressing his gut feelings of insecurity and alarm.
The source of his discomfort isn't limited to the currently unfolding pressure cooker. Chris is carrying the tremendously burdensome cocktail of grief and guilt over his mother's untimely death, which comes rushing to the fore in his therapy session with Missy. In the scene that unquestionably earned him his Oscar nomination, Kaluuya utterly sheds his armor of stoicism and strips himself emotionally bare, allowing 15 years' worth of pent-up heartache and self-loathing to bubble up to the surface. At first, he keeps his emotions carefully in check, flashing a smile of disbelief at the concept of hypnosis. As Missy's questions become more personal and invasive, Chris almost imperceptibly finds himself opening up and laying the defining tragedy of his life out on the table. Just as soon as he begins to tell all, Kaluuya's eyes turn pink. A cascade of tears stream down his cheeks, onto his lips, and drip beneath his chin. He scrunches up his face, struggling to withhold his confession, but unable to resist the hypnotic force of Missy's sinisterly soothing voice and sadistically straightforward interrogation.
As the girlfriend responsible for bringing Chris into this nightmare of surreal mystery and toxic whiteness, Allison Williams presents Rose as a sexy, kindhearted liberal who sees past the differences of color and genuinely desires to make the love of her life apart of her family. Although, even as she looks through a refrigerated donut display case, there's a touch of the sinister behind her smirk, like that of a hunter carefully picking out her prey ("Which of you donuts are going to dissolve in my stomach acid?") Straight from their first scene together in Chris' apartment, Williams exhibits a passionate, tender chemistry with Kaluuya. Sensing her boyfriend's reluctance to meet her family, Williams provides comforting assurance of their racially accepting benevolence, insisting that her father would have voted for Obama for a third term if he could have. She performs the challenging task of portraying two sides of the same character: the innocent, loving girlfriend and the heartless deceiver who feeds black men to her family like helpless mice to the mouths of snakes.
To earn the trust of both Chris and the audience, Rose inserts herself into the inappropriate interaction between Chris and a police officer asking for his identification despite the fact he isn't the one driving, subtly accusing him of racial profiling to shame him into backing off. Once in the company of her supposedly accepting family, Williams projects empathetic embarrassment at their ignorant attempts to get to know Chris, proclaiming convincing disbelief at her father's newly acquired affinity for Ebonics and her brother's aggressive behavior. While sitting beside Chris in the woods, freshly free from the prying eyes of her family and their equally ignorant friends, Williams shows empathy for the guilt that's been eating away at Chris' psyche for the majority of his life, her eyes welling with tears of compassion, wrapping her arms around him as a wave of relief washes over her that he's not going to abandon her.
When the time comes to remove her mask of passionate affection and color-blind naivete, Williams transcends the predictability of her character's true nature with a ferociously effective performance, transitioning seamlessly from confusion and rapidly mounting fright to a soulless reveal of unadulterated evil. In the snap of a finger, her bright smile and soft voice are supplanted by an expressionless, ice-cold visage and robotic voice. The red-and-gray-striped turtleneck sweater is exchanged for a white, characterless blouse, and her hair, previously down and hanging over her forehead, is pulled back into a ponytail, a drastic appearance change that starkly symbolizes Rose's transformation.
Bradley Whitford works overtime to ingratiate himself with his latest target by appealing desperately to his culture. For the sake of disarming Chris, Dean ironically speaks down to him in a condescending black dialect, asking how long "this thang" has been going on between him and Rose, and greeting him at the front door as "ma man." Just as Rose had accurately predicted, he offhandedly affirms his love for Barack Obama, insisting he would have in fact voted for him a third term and hailing him as the greatest president of his lifetime. When in the presence of Chris, Whitford plasters a phony smile across his face, highlighting how desperate Dean is to make a good impression and project tolerance. Less concerned with putting on a warm facade is Catherine Keener. The casting of Keener and Whitford as an antagonistic married couple is inspired. A decade prior, both starred in the true crime telemovie, An American Crime, in which Keener portrayed Gertrude Baniszewski, one of the most sadistic female murderers who, aided by children both her own and those of her neighborhood, abused and starved 16-year-old Sylvia Likens over the course of three torturous months, and Whitford portrayed her prosecuting attorney. It seems Keener's evil has infected him from across the witness stand because these two are a match made in heaven, with Keener complementing Whitford's try-hard exterior of excessive friendliness with a more down-to-earth calmness and authenticity. Her voice is both raspy and soothing, as befits a psychiatrist who spends her days talking to patients, and she uses it to potent effect. Similar to how the therapy set piece captures Kaluuya at his best and most vulnerable, so too does it showcase Keener at her most manipulative and chameleonic. To enforce obedience, she transitions from soft-spoken and approachable to commanding and taunting, the warmth previously shown in her eyes superseded by a startling vacantness of emotion or sympathy.
As the sort of black sheep of the Armitage family, Caleb Landry Jones raises a middle finger to the upstanding exterior adopted by his parents and sister, infusing Jeremy with an unabashed creepiness that readily exposes their less-than-pure-hearted intentions. While Dean, Missy, and Rose conceal their villainy behind innocent-looking sweaters and hospitable grins, Jeremy feels no such obligation, flaunting his aggression and passive-aggressive racism like a badge of honor. This is reflected plainly in his off-putting appearance (a mop of unkempt, dirty-blond hair and a thin mustache) that makes him stick out like a sore thumb right off the bat. Jones is solely responsible for the most uncomfortably tense scene in Get Out, a family dinner that occurs on Chris' first night. As everyone sits around the dining table, Jeremy dominates the conversation, spilling tea about a party he and Rose once threw in high school, which involved Rose's bloody mishap of a first kiss. Once he turns his attention to Chris, putting him under the spotlight, Jones sucks the air out of the room as well as our mouths, provoking feet to tap against the floor in excruciating awkwardness. He gives Jeremy a somewhat Italian intonation that descends into a menacing whisper, flashing an unmistakably sinister smile and creating nail-biting tension with momentary silence. Like a mentally stunted child whose enthusiasm is suddenly restrained by his ashamed parents, Jones transitions from drunkenly upbeat and overly forthcoming to intimidatingly petulant.
LaKeith Stanfield, Betty Gabriel, and Marcus Henderson portray the only three other black people in the story whose minds have already been enslaved. Together, they capture the psychological horror of Get Out with a trio of excruciatingly stilted-by-design performances. Andre, Georgina, and Walter are all united by an identical (and heart-wrenching) fate, and so appropriately, their actors play them in an identical vein: grinning creepily from ear to ear to project the appearance of contentment and inexpressible gratitude to their white masters, delivering their lines in a robotic tone, allaying Chris' suspicion with nervous laughter that contrasts sharply with tearful eyes screaming for help and freedom.
More than the obligatory best friend of the protagonist, Rod Williams fulfills the dual role of the audience surrogate. Much like how we the audience are seated behind a screen, powerless to break Chris out of this house of indescribable horrors, Rod's only form of contact with Chris (up until the denouement, that is) is by phone. Therefore, he can talk to him, receive the latest developments, and offer sage advice, but other than that, he's as powerless to help Chris as we are. But that doesn't stop him from doing everything in his limited power to try. As played by the thoroughly and effortlessly endearing Lil Rel Howery, Rod is a big, cuddly teddy bear in human form who does the TSA proud by taking his job as seriously as law enforcement. He's been given the same training as detectives, and as he quickly suggests, may even know more sometimes because "we dealing with terrorist shit." Yet at no point does he come off as pretentious or self-parodic, thanks to Howery's fast-talking charisma, undefeatable confidence, and warm heart.
Rod is the primary source of comedy in Get Out. Even though his appearances are initially relegated to phone calls with Kaluuya, Howery makes the absolute most of his archetypal best friend role with boundless loads of personality. He recites the greatest lines in the script with improvisational relish, which checks out considering he was given free reign to ad-lib the majority of them. Peele restricts the comedic dimension of Get Out to the stellar supporting performance of Howery, utilizing him, perhaps as a personal stand-in, to offset the strain of palpable discomfort that courses through his movie's veins with a comforting undercurrent of goofball humor. However, one that provokes smiles of amusement more so than guffaws, and never comes at the expense of his character's dignity and humanity. Rod doesn't just verbally expel a never-ending supply of witty and vulgar one-liners for the sake thereof; rather, his lines are buttressed by observations and actions that reflect intelligence, loyalty, and determination, as he acts primarily on intuition without caring how ridiculous his theories may sound to others. In the end, Rod doesn't necessarily emerge as the hero -- Peele endows Chris with the resourcefulness and ferocity to save himself -- but his final appearance provides an automatic, intoxicating sensation of relief for both Chris and the audience, cutting through the trauma with an impeccably timed witticism ("I mean, I told you not to go in that house.") before driving his best friend back to the safety of his home, even though the psychological healing process hasn't even begun.
The plot constructed by Peele is thrillingly creative and largely unpredictable in regard to the nature of its horror. Granted, the only aspect that I saw coming was the villainous unmasking of Rose. Honestly, all it took was taking a second to think about it the day before I first saw Get Out in theaters. She's bringing her boyfriend home to meet her family, and she has no idea what her own family has been up to, what they have in store for Chris, and why the conspicuously bizarre behavior from her servants? Not likely. But no matter. The predictability of her involvement is more than compensated with a brilliantly written and directed reveal sequence (complete with a subtle Nazi stance) that confirms Chris' worst fear with brutal, gasp-inducing pitilessness that grants enough time to convey his mounting anxiety and heartbroken, rage-fueling betrayal. As original as the story is, it isn't free of the DNA belonging to an old-time psychological horror classic that delivered a similar message: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're wrong. Peele adopts a comparable flavor of intimate, character-driven paranoia to Rosemary's Baby in service of a suspense-soaked exploration of interracial prejudice that spotlights an underrepresented color of racism while assigning literal meaning to the term "cultural appropriation."
The villains in Get Out, members of a cult called "The Order of the Coagula," don't fit the mold of conventional, shotgun-toting, plaid-clad, redneck racists. They don't greet Chris with glares of murderous contempt. They don't come in white hooded robes threatening to hang him from a tree. Instead, they present themselves as affable, liberal-minded, well-to-do citizens, welcoming Chris into their home and community with hospitable embraces, accommodating smiles, and upbeat conversations. That's what makes them both a breath of fresh air to the genre and a scarier danger to someone like Chris. Their motives are more surreptitious and arguably more horrifying. They don't hate black people, they commodify them. Rather than white supremacists, these cultists technically (albeit silently) identify as black supremacists, operating under the assumption that black people possess superior physical attributes: height, strength, unspoiled attractiveness, and penis size. If you were to call these people out as racists, they'd most assuredly respond, "How can I be racist if I envy black people?" That's because racism isn't restricted to hatred, that's just the most overt and deadly flavor thereof.
Nonetheless, a racist admiration for black bodies isn't what places these people among the most evil in modern horror; it's how they go about acting on that admiration. They enslave black people within their own bodies, relegating their consciousness to the sunken place for the rest of eternity while their white, elderly owners take possession and control their motor functions. As I've said, it's a fate worse than death because the victims are aware of what's happening. They can see what their inhabitants are doing, but their existence is that of a passenger, deprived of bodily autonomy. It's internalized slavery, disgusting, nightmarish, narcissistic, and inhumane, stemming from a selfish desire to avoid, if only temporarily, the cold hand of death and be reincarnated in a new body perceived as younger, cooler, faster, stronger, and healthier. As for the person whose life they're savagely destroying in their pursuit of immortality? Who cares, they'd argue? Their intellects aren't strong enough to grasp what's happening. It's like stepping on a family of ants or swatting a fly that landed on your window.
Dean and Missy Armitage share a similarity with Victor Frankenstein: all three are geniuses who abuse the gift of science in an attempt to obliterate or delay the impermanence of human existence. Victor combined the body parts of fresh corpses with the brain of a criminal to create a brand new human being, only to realize its strength and childlike disorientation made it a hazard to the community; Missy uses hypnosis to transplant the consciousness of black people into the sunken place, while Dean transplants the brains of his elitist friends into the bodies of his victims, neither giving a second thought to the inhumanity of their endeavors. Frankenstein and the Armitages want to create or prolong life, but none of them understand its true value or care about the pain they're inflicting in the process.
Peele combines the mad scientist sci-fi horror of Frankenstein with the bodily possession of The Exorcist to produce a trailblazing concoction that's entirely its own monster. It's scientific possession, not demonic. The explanation of the Armitage family's conspiracy is fantastical and complicated, to say the least, but Peele finds a way to express it through two back-to-back instances of verbal exposition that register as organic rather than contrived, fluent and taut rather than overwhelming and excessive. In another stroke of genius, he slyly sprinkles subtle hints of his antagonists' plot onto seemingly innocuous conversations that wouldn't raise the red flags of any rational human being. Three of these hints alone come from Dean while he's giving Chris a tour of his home. "It's such a privilege to be able to experience another person's culture." What better way than to physically inhabit their bodies? "That's the basement. We had to seal it up. There's some black mold down there." That's all black people are to him: inconsequential specimens designed to be molded into something that suits his own desires. "My mother loved her kitchen, so we keep a piece of her in here," he says as he introduces Chris to Georgina, standing gingerly in the kitchen. To justify the look of a white family hiring two blacks as servants, Dean explains, "We hired Georgina and Walter to help care for my parents. When they died, I just couldn't bare to let them go." Yeah, he literally reincarnated them in his servants' bodies. (And they say there's no wrong way to grieve.) "The Armitages are so good to us," Georgina assures Chris. "They treat us like family." Hmm, I wonder why that could be.
Get Out transpires over the course of two days, and Peele benefits from that slender timeframe, moving his story along at a breakneck pace while conjuring a suffocating atmosphere of steadily encroaching apprehension through artificially gregarious personalities and awkward interactions centered on black envy and white overcompensation. Peele has a very clear target in his path -- white liberal hypocrisy -- and he fires his shot with blunt, blistering effectiveness. In no scene is this more apparent than the all-white shindig in the Armitages' backyard, in which Chris is the only black person (excluding the white-possessed Andre), and the white aristocratic guests remind him of it every time they open their mouths. Peele utilizes the interactions between Chris and the party guests to paint a satire of white ignorance. In an effort to pacify Chris, the attendees shower him in attention and compliments for his race, treating him more as a prized possession than a person. "Fair skin has been in favor for the past, what, couple of hundreds of years, but now the pendulum has swing back. Black is in fashion." What they're too ignorant to realize is their condescending remarks and inappropriately forward questions are making Chris feel more othered and uncomfortable than accepted. One of Peele's few directorial missteps is his unnecessarily juvenile employment of a musical sting to accentuate a shot of Georgina walking briskly across her kitchen in the background. It would've been creepy enough without that.
When he finally permits himself the freedom to indulge in some well-deserved, long-gestating bloodshed during Chris' climactic confrontation with the Armitage family, Peele chooses to keep what would be his most gruesome images off-camera, with editor Gregory Plotkin cutting away at the precise moment of impact. For the kills of Missy and Jeremy in particular, Peele emphasizes the suggestive potency of sound to complete the gory picture. A shot of the tip of a knife facing Missy's eye is followed by the sound of it slicing into her eye then being yanked out. After Jeremy is kicked onto the floor, Chris begins stomping on his face repeatedly. Jones' face is kept out of the frame, blocked initially by the side of a wall, and Kaluuya is filmed stamping his foot, accompanied by a thud and finally a splat evocative of a skull cracking open. Frankly, after the torment both scumbags subjected Chris to, I would've preferred a more graphic depiction of their deaths. Nonetheless, Peele uses his climax to unleash the pent-up fury boiling within Chris, and by extension the viewer, allowing his patiently engineered atmosphere of mystery and gaslighting to explode into an all-out bloodbath of righteous vengeance. In the process, he selects weapons that either hold symbolic significance to the person injured by them (for Dean, who despises deer, that entails being impaled through the throat with the antlers of a deer whose head he has severed and mounted on his wall), or are simply clever (using a billiard ball to bludgeon Jeremy over the head).
As gruesomely cathartic as this climax is, it also serves as the home to Peele's most glaring credibility gaps. For starters, how does Chris, whose hands are strapped to the armrest of a chair, manage to shove balls of cotton into his ears? The irony of a black man using cotton to aid him in his escape is empowering, but in this case, it's not physically possible. After Jeremy is smashed in the back of his head twice by a billiard ball, how does he manage not only to survive, but summon the physical strength to put Chris in a headlock, continuously slam his foot against the door, and nearly succeed in suffocating him? There's resilience, and then there's plot armor. While this commotion is going on downstairs, Rose, who is sitting on her bed, eating Fruit Loops and selecting her next would-be victim online, is unable to hear it through her ear buds -- yet ever so conveniently, they don't prevent her from hearing Georgina collide with Chris' car. Apparently, Rose shares her brother's implausible resilience because, after being shot in the stomach by her own rifle and nearly strangled to death, she still musters the strength to smile evilly and innocently call for help when she thinks the police have arrived to arrest Chris. The depletion of logic doesn't start here, however. While Chris is hurriedly packing his bags after learning the truth of Logan King's identity, he develops an arbitrary, plot-driven urge to suddenly stop what he's doing, crawl inside a cubby, and search through pictures of Rose. If you kept a shoebox full of pictures of your previous victims in a secret cubby in your bedroom, and had your current target sleeping with you in said bedroom, would you leave the door ajar and the box in plain sight?
Working alongside cinematographer Toby Oliver, Peele crafts some indelible, distinctive visuals that will forever be chained to Get Out. The most instantly iconic is his rendering of Missy's so-called sunken place, a nightmarish void that doubles as a metaphor for the isolation, helplessness, and voicelessness experienced by many black people who may feel disenfranchised in modern America. However, this hellscape would be terrifying to anyone regardless of color. Accompanied by an unnerving violin score by composer Michael Abels, the sunken place is visualized as a pitch-black sky scattered with miniscule, white stars. Chris' view of the world unfolding before his unconscious eyes gradually shrinks to the size of a TV screen as he sinks lower and lower in slow motion, his scream silenced. In a general sense, the sunken place is a visualization of our collectively shared nightmares of being alone in the dark, falling, and opening our mouths to scream, but no sound escapes. Then jolting awake with that knot in the pit of your stomach. For the interaction between Chris and Georgina in the former's bedroom, the pinnacle of agonizing awkwardness in a film that thrives on such, Oliver films Kaluuya and Gabriel in extreme facial close-ups to accentuate the mounting unease of Chris and the silent plea for help from Georgina, which sits at odds with her desperation to reassure Chris of the Armitages' loving-kindness. Once Dean and Missy greet Chris and Rose at their doorstep, the camera slowly tracks backward, the two couples shrinking in the distance, before pausing behind a motionless Walter.
When it comes to delivering scares, Oliver rotates his camera slowly to reveal a horrifying image, such as Jeremy disguised in a ballistic face mask, coming straight at its target silently. On his first night, Chris sneaks outback to smoke a cigarette, and is startled by Walter, who materializes out of the darkness and seems to be sprinting angrily toward him, only to then make a turn. As Chris catches his breath, he turns around and is issued a second jolt by the reflection of Georgina, who's standing motionlessly in the kitchen, admiring her appearance in a one-way mirror. Walter's action isn't a random occurrence to scare Chris; Roman Armitage (Richard Herd), Dean's father who's in possession of Walter's body, was a track star in his younger years who lost the 1936 Olympics to Jesse Owens, and is using his supposedly fitter and faster body to strengthen his agility. Peele's attention to character consistency and pinpoint timing illustrates that a false scare doesn't have to equate to a cheap one.
While Get Out may have received an appropriate share of Oscar nominations, winning the one for which it was most deserving, the Academy cheated it out of one: Best Original Score. Composed masterfully by Michael Abels and employed sparingly by Peele, following the chilling prologue and over the poetic closing shot and end credits, "Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga," a Swahili phrase that translates to "listen to your ancestors," is a theme song as eerie, bold, and fresh as the movie to which it's tethered. A choir of distinctly African-American voices who represent departed slaves and lynching victims, they appear to be reaching out to Chris from beyond the grave to implore him to run away from his duplicitous captors lest he suffer a similar fate. The music establishes an ominous mood of impending danger, sounding like a mournful chant with an undertone of ghostly whispers. It's a classic modern horror score unlike any other you've heard.
Our country has come a long way from the days when it was illegal for white and black people to marry. Nowadays, it's so common and acceptable to see men and women of different races come together in unity and love that commercials frequently depict them as married couples. My personal belief is that if two people love each other and wish to spend the rest of their lives together, they have every right to do so. However, no matter how accepting and tolerant attitudes may have evolved, the stench of bigotry will always linger in the air, whether toward a certain race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, or gender. Just because a single black man was finally elected president of the United States doesn't mean we're now magically living in a post-racial America. We've just grown better. Slavery may have been abolished, and the influence of the Ku Klux Klan has diminished severely since conception, but that doesn't mean the movement has been vanquished. It's just fragmented into smaller, independent groups of anonymous purveyors of hatred. Rather than hang blacks from trees or set fire to their homes, they gather online and exchange white supremacist ideologies, passing out pamphlets to advocate racial dominance or defacing private property and objects of religious worship.
Jordan Peele uses his groundbreaking first foray into the unlimited cinematic world of horror to convey an urgent reminder that no matter how far we've progressed and continue to do so, there will always be those who seek to take us backward, to silence those they discriminate against, to enslave them in the sunken place. And the scariest thing about them is that they don't announce their mal-intent with white hooded robes and burning torches. They come with smiles and hugs, looking like any one of us. They could be our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends, or ourselves. After all, we all have a sliver of racism lurking in the recesses of our psyches. Anyone who insists otherwise is likely lying. What matters is that we keep it in check and treat others with respect, as we'd like to be treated. But please, God, whatever you do, never volunteer that you would have voted for Obama for a third term!
8.3/10
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