Get Out review: Terrifying, socially conscious horror – SBS

Jordan PeelesGet Outis thesatirical horror movieweve been waiting for, a mash-up ofGuess Whos Coming to Dinner?andThe Stepford Wivesthats more fun than either and more illuminating, too. Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, a black photographer who travels to an affluent suburb with his white girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), tomeet her family. Before they leave, he learns she hasnt told them hes black, and hes a bit nervous and so are we, given that the movie opens with a young black man getting snatched from a suburban sidewalk and thrown into a white car playing the 30s music-hall ditty Run, Rabbit, Run (Run rabbit run rabbit/Run! Run! Run!). No worries, though. Roses parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), turn out to be conscientious liberals and hugely welcoming. Dean tells Chris hed have voted for Obama a third time. And Dean is mindful of the awkwardness Chris feels in the presence of their black housekeeper and gardener, who are a couple. Dean insists that the two have been with them a long time and that theyre like family. Hes not far off.

This is Peeles directorial debut, but it feels like the work of someone who has been making features for years. He uses the wide screen like John Carpenter inHalloween,to lull but decenter you. His Boo! moments make you jump and then laugh at yourself for jumping then steel yourself to jump again. His surrealist sequences are gorgeously lyrical, his gore, when it finally comes, Pollock-splattery. His years craftingsketches forKey & Peelehave taught him the difference between parody and satire. There are plenty of savoury horror tropes,but Get Out wouldnt work as well if, in the real world, white people werent so unconvincing in their assurance that black people have little to fear apart from those fascist-racist cops and their fascist-racist Republican enablers. Peele is after less obvious targets: rich white liberals as black soul-suckers.

The performances are devilishly clever heightened but without a whisper of camp. Whitfords Dean is too chummily direct to be hiding anything, right? A villain would be more evasive. Keener is the psychiatrist as warm, tousled Earth Mother: Should Chris fear the way she gets into his head into the feelings he has about his own mom, killed in a hit-and-run accident so many years before or welcome her attempt to get him to confront his repressed guilt? Caleb Landry Jones, one of the more interestingly weird actors in movies, plays Roses brother, who cant seem to control his competitive instincts and always wants to start some kind of street fight. The vivaciously pretty Williams makes Rose the biggest mystery. She picks up on the strange, threatening vibes in the house and lets Chris know hes not imagining anything. A true conspirator would assure him that everythings okay. But shes in there helping him sort out whats real and whats imagined. She really cares.

Kaluuya, a Brit, is a perfect hero for a movie like this. Chris registers on some level that hes a character in a horror movie he cant believe how bizarre these people are behaving but the dislocation is deeper and more disabling. LilRel Howery is Chriss boisterous TSA-agent friend who tells him not to go into suburban white peoples houses, which is a twist on white people telling innocent girls not to walk down dark urban streets.Get Outis a ludicrous paranoid fantasy, but that doesnt mean its not alive in the unconscious. Having it out there in so delightful a form helps us laugh at it together and maybe later, when weve thought it over, shudder.

In keeping with Vulture's house style, there is no star rating on this review.

'Get Out'screens as part of the Monster Pictures travelling sideshow from March 9. Full screening infohere.

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Get Out review: Terrifying, socially conscious horror - SBS