Get Out (2017)

Get Out (2017)

IMDB Rating : 8.3/10

A young black man visits his white girlfriend's family estate where he learns that many of its residents, who are black, have gone missing, and he soon learns the horrible truth when a fellow black man on the estate warns him to "get out". He soon learns this is easier said than done.

Director: Jordan Peele

Writer: Jordan Peele

Stars: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford

R | 1h 44min | Horror, Mystery

IMDB link Here

In ‘Get Out,’ Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (Bad Idea!)

In “Get Out,” an exhilaratingly smart and scary freakout about a black man in a white nightmare, the laughs come easily and then go in for the kill. The writer and director, Jordan Peele (of the comedy sketch show “Key & Peele”), knows how to make shadowy streets into menacing ones and turn silences into warnings from the abyss. His greatest stroke in “Get Out,” though, is to have hitched these genre elements to an evil that isn’t obscured by a hockey mask, but instead throws open its arms with a warm smile while enthusiastically (and strangely) expressing its love for President Obama.

Those arms and smiles all but engulf Chris (the British actor Daniel Kaluuya, going deep in a breakthrough performance), a photographer with a sweet pad, adorable dog and equally frisky, adoring girlfriend, Rose (a perfectly cast Allison Williams, from the HBO show “Girls”).

Mr. Peele is best known for his work with Keegan-Michael Key on their titular comedy sketch show, where politics mixed freely with the laughs. Together they starred in the 2016 comedy “Keanu,” a lampoon of action cinema that was a (slack) piece with the movie love that was a mainstay of their show. In one memorable bit from the show, heckling cinephiles voice their complaints (“this movie has an inconsistent visual language!”); in another, two friends realize that the reason the zombie hordes aren’t attacking them is they’re flesh-eating racists. “Get Out” expands on, and considerably deepens, a similar idea by turning white racism into disquieting genre shivers.

But Mr. Peele is after more than giggles and shocks; he’s taking on 21st-century white racism and its rationales. The opener — a black man talking on a cellphone on an empty suburban street — briskly sets the tone, unsettles the mood and announces Mr. Peele’s way with metaphor. He’s working within a recognizable horror-film framework here (the darkness, the stillness), so it’s not surprising when a car abruptly pulls up and begins tailing the man. You may even snicker because you think you’ve seen this flick before. Except that when this man anxiously looks for a way out, the scene grows discordantly disturbing because you may, as I did, flash on Trayvon Martin.

It’s a jarring moment that might have been catastrophic for the movie if Mr. Peele didn’t quickly yank you back into its fiction. (He’s got great timing, no surprise.) There’s relief when the offscreen world recedes just then. Yet part of what makes “Get Out” both exciting and genuinely unsettling is how real life keeps asserting itself, scene after scene. Our monsters, Mr. Peele reminds us, are at times as familiar as the neighborhood watch; one person’s fiction, after all, is another’s true-life horror story. ” For his part, Chris, separated existentially, chromatically and every other way, spends so much time putting the white world at ease that he can’t recognize the threat coming for him.

Mr. Peele knows that threat, plays with it and eviscerates it with jokes and scares, only to top it off messily with full-on Grand Guignol splatter. But some of his finest, most genuinely shocking work is his quietest. One of the best scenes I’ve seen in a long while finds Chris talking with one of the parents’ black servants, a maid, Georgina (a fantastic Betty Gabriel). Chris confesses that he gets nervous when around a lot of white people, an admission that Georgina answers by advancing toward him with a volley of “no, no, no,” cascades of tears and a smile so wide it looks as if it could split her face in two. Something has gotten under her skin and it’s frightening.

Read full review at New york Times

Movie rating ★★★★★  

Fantastically twisted horror-satire on race in America   

This fantastically twisted and addictively entertaining horror-satire on the subject of race plays like an Ira Levin rewrite of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. I can imagine Drew Goddard or Sam Fuller wanting to direct it. In fact, it is written and directed by Jordan Peele, whose recent movie Keanu, which he co-wrote and co-starred with his longtime comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key struck me as a bit lame. And to my embarrassment I knew nothing of their much admired TV work. Well, this is a hypnotically nasty gem.

British actor Daniel Kaluuya is Chris, the black boyfriend of Rose, a beautiful young white woman played by Allison Williams (from Lena Dunham’s series Girls). They’ve dating for a few months and she plans to take Chris back to her family home to meet her hugely wealthy and excruciatingly liberal parents Dean and Missy (wonderfully played by Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), a surgeon and psychotherapist, respectively. Rose predicts that her embarrassingly well-meaning dad will assure Chris that he would have voted for Obama a third time if that was possible.

But when Chris arrives at their colossal home, he is deeply disconcerted to find that Rose’s family, though impeccably progressive, are surrounded by black staff, who lock eyes with the family’s honoured guest with glacial correctness. (Watching the movie, I found myself thinking of Michael Gove’s legendary, gushing description of arriving for his interview with Donald Trump last year: he was “whisked up to the president-elect’s office in a lift plated with reflective golden panels and operated by an immensely dignified African-American attendant kitted out in frock coat and white gloves.”)

 Get Out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.

Read full review at The Guardian

A breathlessly suspenseful exposé of the horror of liberal racism

Get Out is one of the first films expressly to be set in a post-Obama era, even if writer-director Jordan Peele, having shot it about a year ago, couldn’t have known exactly what ghastly frights this era would entail. Either way, there is not a Trump voter in sight, because this is a horror-satire about covert racism – liberal racism – not the out-and-proud kind.

The movie rattles with provocations, among them an opening sequence in which a young black guy (Lakeith Stanfield) walks down a suburban street, talking on his phone, and is pounced upon by a kerb-crawler in a sportscar. Grim echoes of the Trayvon Martin case thud around in your consciousness, setting the tone for feature-length paranoia about being a black outsider in an all-white enclave. It’s less Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, more Guess What’s Being Served.

Peele makes the interesting choice of showing this first encounter from afar, in a long master shot, not close-ups. The body language all seems perfectly above board. But the closer we get to the Armitages, the more an eye-widening below-board-ness creeps in. Why is their basement locked? Why are their two employees – a housemaid and groundsman – both black, not to mention stricken and socially paralysed?

And is their house not a little like some Rhode Island equivalent of an antebellum plantation, with iced tea being served on the lawn? (The movie was largely shot in Alabama for tax reasons, and there's another nod to the South when someone uses "One Mississippi..." as a counting chant.)

All those questions will be answered as the film heads towards its grisly and breathlessly suspenseful last reel – which Peele, until now a comedy specialist, handles with an impressive grasp of pacing, considered shock, and restraint where it counts. Still, the explanations are less interesting than the uneasy edge in the build-up, the escalation of sly microaggressions coming at Chris from all sides.

We begin to realise that Rose – despite her seemingly relaxed attitude as a “woke” white liberal – can barely interact with her boyfriend without somehow policing racism on his behalf. When a cop suspiciously requests his driving licence, it’s she who makes an awkwardly big issue of it.

The horror elements of the film lie in wait, just as they did in satires of a former generation – The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby. One aspect of Chris’s predicament involves being forcibly detached from reality through hypnosis, disappearing through the floor into a dark netherworld which Keener’s character calls “the Sunken Place”. Visually, it’s reminiscent of that tarry trap in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. But this borrowing works because of the film’s stark political awareness – it becomes a floating, flailing image of being impotently shafted by white hegemony.

Whitford, among the white cast, plays off Kaluuya’s discomfort beautifully, and seems especially alive to the comedy in this scenario. With his foregrounded Ivy League complacency and cringey mantra of “my man!”, he suggests where West Wing characters lock up all their least politically correct thoughts.

The very ending could have been stronger – you can sense Peele edging in a too-full-on direction, then backing out of it with a too-facile fix. But it’s still the most forceful and inventive American horror film since It Follows. Leaving it, I stumbled straight across a joshing coach party of elderly white folk in black tie, and the fact that I instinctively shuddered is some testament to Get Out’s clammy charge.

Read full review at Telegraph

Jordan Peele, half of 'Key & Peele,' makes his directing debut with a race-conscious horror film.

One of the most satisfying thrillers in several years, Get Out proves that its first-time director, Key & Peele co-star Jordan Peele, has plenty of career options if he should grow tired of doing comedy in front of the camera. Moreover, its timing couldn't be better, as it exploits racial fears that have become substantially more potent (not to mention more comprehensible for many white Americans) since the events of Nov. 8. Fans of K&P (RIP) may have had unrealistic hopes for Keanu, the duo's debut feature vehicle, which underperformed when released last April. But behind the camera, Peele has delivered an unquestionably commercial genre film that should buy him a lot of leeway for future projects.

When the film moves out of the paranoiac realm and into action, the violence is deeply satisfying, the twists delightful. Any teenager with a bucket of popcorn will get his money's worth. But Peele, a biracial man whose comic sketches have taken race-relations humor to surprising new places, doesn't stop there.

"Why us? Why black people?," Chris asks, when the nature of Rose's parents' plans is finally explained to him. "Who knows?!," his torturer replies, before rattling off several reasons that, for those ready to dig, go beyond simple racism — suggesting a critique even of whites who celebrate the coolness and talent of black people in a too-proprietary way. Early in the film, Chris is shown to be a man unruffled by everyday racist sleights, treating them as part of the cost of existing in this world. Get Out, in between its scary moments (and yes, the funny ones scattered throughout), may be suggesting it's time to pay such signals more mind.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' Is A New Horror Classic

The good news is that Jordan Peele's chiller has had five weeks of prime trailer positioning in front of every print for the James McAvoy thriller, meaning $124 million-worth of domestic audiences have seen the buzzy trailer for Get Out.

Since we're talking about a $5 million release, there isn't much at stake other than building off the momentum of Split and announcing to Peele to the world as a bold new voice for horror. And, if I may, if Blumhouse is going to support and distribute and support the likes of Get Out and The Purge, I'm very willing to let them have their easy money with a Halloween reboot or whatever becomes of M. Night Shyamalan's Split sequel.

Jordan Peele's Get Out is an unmitigated triumph of the form. It's a primal campfire story born of very real and all-too-plausible fears, and it very much has its fingers on the pulse of our current insane zeitgeist. Peele has taken to calling it a "social thriller" in recent press rounds, and that's as good a description as any. It uses the obvious discomfort built around its premise to create tension and uneasy suspense even before we find out if there is any real danger.

Get Out mines discomforting tension from everyday racial inequities and microaggressions, and it makes no bones about the useless or counterproductive bravado of would-be progressive white folks whose attempts at self-congratulating tolerance reeks of patronization and condescension. Chris is at a constant disadvantage over the course of the weekend and Peele rubs our noses in that unequal playing field even as everyone around him is jumping through hoops to proclaim their alleged indifference to, or envy of, his blackness. It adds an obvious level of tension to what is already a relatively stressful scenario, as Chris is forced to grin and bear it even as his spidey sense continues to tingle.

The film takes its time getting to the would-be genre pay-offs, and yet there is plenty to keep you entertained in the meantime. Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel are deliciously creepy as two employees of the estate who seem just a bit off, while Lakeith Stanfield (as the new lover of an older neighbor) has his own quirks. Rose's mother isn't crazy about the fact that Chris still smokes, and her attempts to eradicate the problem through hypnosis is in itself a dynamite sequence of claustrophobic horror even absent its potential relevance to the main plot. Stephen Root brings gravitas in a small role as the only levelheaded guest in town.

Peele has not been shy about discussing his inspirations for his directorial debut, but Get Out works as its own unique concoction. It is a true original, harkening back to the classic socially-minded EC Comics that so scandalized America by blending horror, gallows comedy and angry social commentary into a kid-targeted stew. Since it is a story of a minority experience told by a minority, it has an extra kick of personal experience and doesn't give a crap about offending the white folks who happen to buy a ticket.

 It is wonderfully smart, wonderfully funny, wonderfully scary and not-so-wonderfully topical popcorn entertainment.

I know Peele is best known as a comedian, and there are plenty of earned laughs to be found here as the fine line between humor and horror is readily apparent from the opening frames. But if he wants to make a run at being the next Wes Craven (and there is no law saying he cannot be floor wax and a dessert topping), the genre would be lucky to have him.  If the crowd with which I saw it is any indication, the writer-director already knows how to play his audience like a piano.

Read full review at Forbes

Movie rating ★★★★★  

A cutting social critique balanced with humour and horror

There’s no questioning why Get Out has been so rapturously received. Peele - best known across the pond for the Comedy Central sketch show Key & Peele - manages to perfectly balance suspense, humour, and horror while making a hard-hitting political statement about liberal America; a remarkable and timely feat considering the state of the world in 2017.

Williams’ adds some levity to proceedings, with one set-piece in a police station practically being a Key & Peele sketch, but also logically works through the same motions as the audience, making the final twist all the more effective.

While the first two-thirds of Get Out act as a psychological thriller, the final third is all-out horror, pulling out all the stops for an absolutely intoxicating and terrifying final act. Peele finally cashes in on the tension, leaving the audience cowering. And Kaluuya - who shines throughout - finishes an incredible performance on an absolute high.

It’s wonderful cinema that offers so much to discuss, particularly about racism among middle America. Whether you feel uncomfortable throughout or relate to Chris, Get Out masterfully makes us question this post-Obama world, no matter your political allegiance. More horrors with this much depth, please.

 Read full review at Independent

Movie rating ★★★✮☆  

Jordan Peele's directorial debut is a devilish meet-the-parents thriller

It's a point of pride with any horror film, or any thriller verging on horror: Used correctly, a perfectly innocent song suddenly sounds like the scariest bleep in the world.

The opening sequence of "Get Out," one of the most bracing surprises of the new moviegoing year, finds a young man walking along a dark suburban street, looking for an address somewhere on Edgewood Lane. He is alone. A car, driver obscured by the streetlight shadows, slowly rolls up alongside him. The gently macabre old ditty "Run Rabbit Run," the one about the farmer who wants his rabbit pie, plays inside the car.

But today is his day. Before he knows it, the young man, who is African-American in a presumptively all-white part of town, instigates the storyline in writer-director Jordan Peele's satirically shrewd, sensationally effective thriller. With no apologies, this prologue preys on black moviegoers' anxieties about being cornered in the wrong place at the wrong time, running afoul of the wrong adversary. And, yes, there is a universal element to the setup, beyond the racial specifics. The movie's sharp that way.

Fans of the late TV sketch comedy show "Key & Peele" know how deftly Peele (his partner on the show was Keegan-Michael Key) plays with fire. It's no surprise that "Get Out" offers some choice comic details in its main character's journey into the land beyond the pale. The surprise comes in how solidly director Peele handles the thriller part.

You may know where this is heading. Here and there in "Get Out" director Peele struggles to find the right mixture of tones. Too much comedy, and the story falls apart as a thriller worth our investment; too little, and Peele's personality threatens to disappear inside the results. But the movie works; its shift into splatter mode for the climax feels both earned and, on an exploitation level, satisfying. Slivers of Ira Levin's "The Stepford Wives," and a hint of L.Q. Jones' bizarre cult item "A Boy and His Dog," can be found in the woodwork here. Chris' friend, a TSA agent deadpanned just so by comedian Lil Rel Howery, rolls in and out of the picture just long enough to slay the crowd.

And this one really should be seen with a crowd.

Read full review at Chicago tribune

Jordan Peele's Extraordinary, Inventive Get Out Is the Horror Movie We Need Today

I wanna be black,” Lou Reed once sang, reflecting the largely unspoken feelings of many white people everywhere. The addendum, of course, is that there are some white people who want to be as cool as black people but without having to suffer any of the bigotry and oppression. That’s just one of the many potent subthreads of Get Out, Jordan Peele’s extraordinary and genuinely creepy directorial debut. Peele succeeds where sometimes even more experienced filmmakers fail: He’s made an agile entertainment whose social and cultural observations are woven so tightly into the fabric that you’re laughing even as you’re thinking, and vice-versa.

Even though all self-proclaimed progressive people like to think we’re comfortable talking about racial divisions in America, we’re really not. And that’s what makes Get Out—in addition to being an unsettling, and occasionally very funny, thriller—pretty close to a work of genius. As one half of the dazzling comedy duo Key and Peele—the other half is Keegan-Michael Key—Peele has always been attuned to thorny race-related questions. Why is it that well-intentioned white people who try so hard to be attuned to “the black experience” can be so deeply annoying? And even though we should all be accepting of interracial relationships, there can be misgivings on either side. Peele—who also wrote the script—wrestles with all of those ideas, and much more. His movie is sardonic but never bitter. He’s inquisitive but never sour-spirited—he prefers asking questions to scoring points.

But if there’s a lot to unpack in Get Out, there’s also pure pleasure to be had just in watching the plot unfold—you never quite know where Peele is going next. This is inventive and lively horror filmmaking: Peele uses simple elements—a taxidermied deer’s head hanging on a paneled wall, an old-style console TV set—to build a sinister suburban-Gothic mood: It’s as if the world of affluent white people, with its status symbols and self-congratulatory broad-mindedness, were itself a kind of dark magic, impenetrable and at least vaguely untrustworthy—not to mention very, very uncool.And while the last thing you generally look for in a horror film is terrific acting, Get Out is loaded with it. Kaluuya’s Chris, handsome and sweet, is the quintessential great boyfriend, working hard to connect with Rose’s family in spite of the unwitting insults they keep dropping: He’s instantly sympathetic, the guy whose side you’re on no matter what. Lil Rel Howery, as Chris’s best friend (and stalwart TSA officer) Rod, steps in with breezy comic relief just when the movie needs it. Even the actors in smaller roles—like Gabriel, as housekeeper Georgina—spin subtle spells: You’re never sure if these characters are malevolent or just understandably resentful, but by the end, when you’ve put all the pieces together, you begin to understand just how delicately calibrated these performances are. They’re all part of a picture that asks difficult questions and offers no easy answers. Get Out is the movie for the world we live in today. If we stop thinking, we’re dead

Read full review at Time

Movie rating ★★★✮☆  

A comic thriller that’s scary as all ‘Get Out

When your car hits an animal along the way, it’s best to turn around and forget about reaching your destination. That has been a motif in films such as “The Invitation” (2o15), the recent “A Cure for Wellness,” and now “Get Out,” the feature debut of Jordan Peele (of Comedy Central’s “Key and Peele”). It is not only the best horror film since “Under the Skin” (2013), but a subversive and often hilarious commentary on race as well.

We’ve come a long way from “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) but Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a talented photographer, is still pretty nervous about visiting the parents of his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) without letting them know he’s black. “They’re not racist,” she reassures him. “My father says that he’d vote for Obama if he ran for a third term.”

Chris’s misgivings don’t improve after he and Rose arrive at the family estate, an opulent property tended by an African-American housekeeper and gardener who are somehow both zomboid and haughtily facetious. Rose’s father Dean (Bradley Whitford), a neurosurgeon, tries too hard to be cool with black people, but her mother Missy (Catherine Keener), a hypnotherapist, intercedes to tone down the glad-handing patriarch. Richard Herd as Rose’s drunken brother Roman almost spoils the welcoming dinner — and the movie — by what seems to be an attempt to imitate Christopher Walken in “Annie Hall” (1977).

Even without the diabolical and expertly derivative thriller that Peele develops, these preliminary scenes drive home the message of exploitation and entitlement. The awkwardness felt by Chris in these social occasions and the heedless boorishness of the hosts and other guests should offer a shock of recognition to black and white viewers alike. This awkward tension is so thick that the expertly executed horror conventions — creepy masked assailants; tiny doorways leading to secrets; scary figures passing quickly in the background; occasional, sudden, subtle gore — at times provide comic relief, though none top the comedic brilliance of Lil Rel Howery as Rod, Chris’s best friend and the pride of the TSA.

Read full review at Boston Globe