Get Out Review

Horror cinema feels like its picking back up, it had become so monumentally generic and stale, Hollywood had seen it as the easiest genre to make a cheap buck in and would give formulaic scripts to workmanlike directors. Thankfully, in the last couple of years or so there has been a revival, the horror output has gotten better and new voices have been found in the likes of Corin Hardy, Robert Eggers, Jeremy Saulnier, Fede Alvarez and David Robert Mitchell. You can also add another name to that list, because with Get Out Jordan Peele has become a very big player.

Get Out focuses on Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) a talented photographer who is in a relationship with Rose (Allison Williams). It's finally time for Chris to meet Rose's parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), only Chris is worried that because he is black and Rose is white that they wont approve. This leads to a weekend spent in Chris' worst nightmare, the lone black man in a mass of middle class white Americans. After an awkward but polite start, things start to deteriorate and not everything may be as it appears.

Jordan Peele is mostly known in America for his work as a comedian as part of a writing and acting duo with Keegan-Michael Key, and has co -starred and co-written a very successful sketch show is the US. This might seem like a complete change of pace for Peele but what is evident in Get Out is how much the boundaries between comedy and horror are blurred. Peele's script is incredibly smart, every sentence seems to have underlining meanings, people are saying one thing that might seem innocent, but upon second viewing you realise the far more sinister connotations. Event's in Get Out do eventually deteriorate into a great cathartic violent climax, but everything done before that is so subtle and smart it earns that ending.

The tone of Peel's writing is matched fantastically by a collection of wonderful performances, Daniel Kaluuya is brilliant as Chris, the way he speaks and holds himself in front of certain people and the register he adopts with others is important in identifying the race divide in the film. Whitford and Keener are the standouts in the cast of racists, the racism developed in this film is actually a more important one than is more often depicted in cinema, liberal racism is rife in this film as it is in American society, Whitford's Father character is excited to tell Chris how much he loved Obama because he feels it's something that shows how not racist he is. In a party sequence the liberal racism is depicted in full force as Chris is introduced to various elderly white people who panic and try to name all the black sports stars they like. If this film does only one important thing it will be to show people that you don't have to wear a hood and burn crosses to be racist.

Jump scares are all well and good in horror and Peele isn't adverse to deploying them here either, but what really makes a horror is creating a tone of unease and a sense of dread that stays with people long after they've left the theatre. In his debut film Jordan Peele has created something that is as funny as it is horrific, as smart as it is fun, he might not necessarily stay in the horror genre going forward, but he'd definitely be welcome back to it at any time.


(5 Stars)