Revisiting Get Out

Every genre has conventions, and one of the things that interests me the most about Jordan Peele's Get Out is how even its most basic elements subvert them. We naturally associate a subset of visual tropes with horror movies, namely cobwebs, haunted houses, and masked killers, but this one eschews those cliches. It is a maze of upscale suburban neighborhoods and sub-mansions, cast in an unsettlingly upright light. Some horror movies deliberately evoke the past. This one lives obsessively in a hierarchical present.

My friend Ryan first showed me this movie in my freshman year of college, and since then, it's lived rent-free in my head. Get Out is a tightly wound and elaborately simple thriller yarn about a black man, Chris, meeting the wealthy parents of his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage, for the first time, only to discover that they are not all that meets the eye. I avoided watching its all-too-revealing trailer beforehand, and you should too; the less you know about this movie, the more fun you'll have. It is less a strict horror film by the letter of the genre's law, more a perpetual, creeping feeling that something is wrong. It is almost a wholly unique emotion, an unsettling and even cultlike experience leading towards inevitable violence: you'll know it when you feel it.

This movie is a thriller commenting on racial tensions in America, though it's more thriller than commentary; that's a good thing. It's rarely overwhelmingly political and doesn't get distracted from what it wants to do for the sake of what it wants to say. Maybe I'm just desensitized, but Get Out isn't distractingly incendiary, or at the very least, being a vessel of activism isn't its main focus. It also runs at a lean hour-and-forty-four minutes, with very little attached fat. It is a well-told story first, and everything else after that.

Most of the movie is set in a single house, an unusual and fun playground that never adheres to any expected tropes. It is a McMansion evocative of a day trip to your boss's home, a maze of Colonial Era trappings with one foot in a troubled past and the other in an uncertain present. Let me put it this way: the house is very white. On the other hand, the wonderful score of this movie is very black, an eccentric and unique sound that I likened to a church choir whispering some forbidden ritual before going out to listen to soul music at their favorite coffee shop. The sound design is equally impactful - you'll be tapping your cups with metal spoons for weeks after watching Get Out.

This movie mostly benefits from rewatches. You will notice things about it the second time around that you didn't notice at first: details hiding in the production design, off-putting mannerisms of characters whose motives are no longer a secret to you, and little pieces of dialogue with more than one meaning that fall perfectly into place when put in the context of the whole movie. The subtle shots at aspects of suburban life are there to be seen, too, and they're as uncomfortable as the movie's sinister undertones. Something is wrong in this corner of safe, low-crime America, and it's obvious, but until the bigger picture comes into view, it's hard to know exactly what. The answer is first unsettling, then shamelessly thrilling.

Get Out runs at a lean hour-and-forty-four minutes, and is a tightly wound movie with nary an ounce of fat attached to it. The star of the movie is its cast, and they're brilliant, an amusing, sinister, well-acted, and emotionally diverse collection of characters who walk a brilliant line between earnestness and heart, comedy and satire. Chris is stuck somewhere between The Boondocks and The Shining, and his girlfriend Rose is an exciting character for reasons both immediately apparent and unexpectedly shocking. She sets a good precedent for the movie's unpredictability, which is crowned by one of the better twists I've seen in recent years. Again, do everything you can to avoid spoilers for this now-nine-year-old film.

Without a doubt, there are so many wonderful things to say about it, but watching Get Out as a more experienced critic, one thing that doesn't mesh with the movie as a whole is the amateur investigation of Rod, a TSA-affiliated friend of Chris, into the mysterious disappearances of black people in the area surrounding the Armitage home. By the time he sits down at his desk and puts his fingers to the keyboard, the movie has already unveiled all the answers to the questions he's asking us, the audience, and so this entire tangent ends up being an irrelevant excursion in an otherwise tightly wound thriller. But even if it doesn't always know how to add layers to its already brief story, Get Out ties its small details together effortlessly, and I was constantly amazed by its attention to detail and devotion to the little things. Some movies will try to distract you from their flaws. This one rewards you for paying attention to its subtlest characteristics.

If you ask me, Us is Jordan Peele's best movie between its ambition, its well-balanced cast, and a screenplay that fits together like a puzzle, but Get Out is pound-for-pound his most efficient effort, a small-scale thriller where, if something exists on the screen, it's probably relevant to the story in some way. It's one of my favorite horror thrillers because, though its inspirations are evident, it blends them into something totally different from anything you've ever seen before. I might sound like I'm spitting cliches at you, but they're true. This movie is a trip. Peele himself has publicly admitted that he smoked weed while coming up with ideas for it.

While I won't advocate doing drugs for any reason, Hollywood needs to think outside the box more when it comes to their creativity. I'm not against a good prequel or sequel, but they'll never capture the magic of an original movie like Get Out. Relishing in the past and playing with the present are two completely different games, and this movie proves it can respect what came before it while also setting itself up as an inspiration for movies that will rightfully evoke it in the future.

Get Out - 9/10

1 Corinthians 4:1-5