[9.8/10] In recent years, when it comes to horror films, I’ve come to appreciate mood over scares. Scares have become cheap, with scads horror flicks offering monsters popping out of nowhere or surprise deaths or gruesome images to the point that it’s all too easy to become inured to them. Instead, I’ve come to really like films that do well at establishing an atmosphere, something that may not make you jolt out of your seat in a given moment, but that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up on end for the entire runtime.
*Get Out* has that in spades. Long before anything goes bump in the night, there is a tension in the air, the sense that something just isn’t right or comfortable, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it.
Writer/director Jordan Peele does that perfectly through blending multiple kinds of anxieties into one unsettling collage of moments. There’s the horrorful text of the piece, with hints that maid and groundskeeper on the Armitage estate are not all there, and ominous portents like dead deer or rustling trees. There’s the anxiety of meeting your significant other’s parents for the first time, the relatable sense of being off balance as you’re both trying to be on your best behavior while also feeling out a group of people who are likewise feeling you out.
And then there’s the fact that Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), is made to feel like a curiosity, like something out of place, as he steps into a lily white world where seemingly well-meaning folks patronize or unwittingly insult him. One of the great achievements of *Get Out* is how it steps into the proud tradition of using social anxieties and real world fears and discomfort to undergird the textual horror the film slowly unspools. Peele manages to wrap so many facets of that sort of experience in this work -- belittling compliments, a sense of being out of place, and questionable, othering comments -- in a way that fits perfectly, and gives force to, the straight horror movie he’s presenting.
This seems as good a place as any to acknowledge that, as a straight white male who grew up in the suburbs, there is a limit to how much I can speak to the way those experiences are depicted. *Get Out* touches on any number of ideas -- how even committed progressives can have old prejudices behind their facades, the appropriation of black bodies and black labor for white needs chief among them -- that I’m simply not qualified to do anything but note with appreciation. Those elements, and the social commentary that comes with them, are one of the most striking and effective parts of the movie, I’m woefully ill-equipped to analyze them in the depth that someone who’s lived those experiences could.
But one of the stellar things about *Get Out*, and well-made movies in particular, is how they can convey those experiences even to those who will never live them. Peele uses all the tools in the cinematic toolbox to make you feel Chris’s discomfort, the way in which he’s ill-at-ease in this place that seems unfamiliar and off-putting. He combines that cross-cultural discomfort, the awkwardness of meeting your significant other’s family, and the hints at something more supernaturally sinister to create a film that affects the viewer on multiple levels.
That’s just one of approximately fifty things *Get Out* does incredibly well. It’s a nigh perfect film at nearly every level. The acting is superb across the board, from Kaluuya who carries the film, to the familiar sense of the different Armitages, to a superb turn from noted character actor Stephen Root, to a gobsmacking scene from Betty Gabriel as Georgina, done almost entirely in close up with nowhere for her to hide. The pacing is outstanding, with the hints, uptick, build, and climax of the mysterious events each coming at just the right time.
Technically, the film is just as remarkable. The use of color in the film is incredible, with golden hues in the background that symbolize visually how out of place Chris is, lush naturalism, and spooky blues and grays in the dark. The cinematography and editing are just as superb, with Peele, director of photography Toby Oliver, and editor Gregory Plotkin able to make an impromptu hypnosis session in a well-appointed den feel like the most intense thing in the world, and manage to make chases and close calls feel just as dramatic. In the same way, Michael Abels’s score perfectly accents the unsettling quality of each scene and moment.
The most miraculous thing about *Get Out* is that as terrifying, tense, and thematically rich as it is, it’s also a damn funny film. Chris’s friend Rod (LilRey Hower) initially seems like minor comic relief in the film, but his role goes much deeper than that. Still, between his amusing dialogue and the wry tone to Chris’s less creepy interactions with the Armitage’s well-heeled friends, there’s plenty of laughs, naturally, in Peele’s script, even as he’s just as able to bowl you over with the complex commentary and horrifying developments at play.
It’s also as sound a screenplay as you’re likely to see realized on screen anytime soon. More than a few horror films mix their haunting with a layer of social commentary, but few of them balance the text and the subtext as well as *Get Out* does, with the film working just as well at both levels. At the same time, its reveal is impressive, a swerve from the predictable read on the Stepford quality of the situation that deepens both the horror and the metaphor. And it’s a tightly-written script to boot, with details like the stir of a spoon, the taking of a picture, or a childhood memory each established and revisited at the perfect time. It all comes together to tell a story imbued with that deeply unsettling atmosphere with seeds planted that bloom in horrifying splendor.
But as great as that atmosphere is, as much as it primes the audience for what’s to come and sets a tone that makes the film unnerving even when nothing particularly dramatic is happening, *Get Out* has just as much virtuosity in delivering its scares. When the scales fall and the reality of the threats and machinations at play unfurl, Peele and company are equally adept at delivering that tension, intensity, and fear that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
There’s been no shortage of outstanding horror films in the last few years. Everything from the moody inventiveness of *It Follows* to the period paranoia of *The Witch*, to the psychodrama of *The Invitation*. But with *Get Out*, Peele has set the new standard by which each of these modern artistic successes must be judged. It’s a film that works on every level, bringing wit, atmosphere, story, metaphor, horror, sight and sound with equal success. It’s a film that wants to scare you and wants to challenge you, while never letting the one get in the way of the other.
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