MOVIE REVIEW – Jordan Peele’s latest movie is part horror, part comedy in a surprisingly refreshing way. While they seem to be contradictory, those two genres have a lot in common, in particular with their reliance on timing to evoke a physical response. A pause can either extend the tension or make a simple sentence even funnier. Rhythm lets the audience know what to expect — or throws them off intentionally, creating an even bigger reaction.

 

From its very first moments, “Get Out” puts viewers in a strange mood – inducing a state of discomfort and also utter hilarity that doesn’t let up until its go-for-broke final act. The crafty, sure-footed directorial debut of Jordan Peele – one-half of the brilliant comic duo Key and Peele — this horror film has roots as firmly planted in the works of Jonathan Swift as John Carpenter, intertwining acidic social satire between the jump scares.

Meet the parents

In “Get Out,” Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, a 26-year-old black man who is uncomfortable about traveling to meet the parents of his white girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams). She assures him that he has nothing to worry about: “They are not racist. I would have told you.” However, from the moment Rose’s dad (Bradley Whitford) greets him with a “My man,” Chris feels uneasy in the remote house. The presence of the eerily obedient black maid (Betty Gabriel) and groundskeeper (Marcus Henderson) doesn’t make him feel better.

Rose’s psychiatrist mother (Catherine Keener) seems friendly, but she may have hypnotized him without his permission. Each interaction escalates his discomfort, culminating in the world’s most awkward party with the family’s all-white group of friends and a lone black man (Lakeith Stanfield) who is acting strangely. Calls home to his best friend (LilRel Howery) only elevate his suspicions, but is Chris paranoid or is there danger lurking for him on the grounds of the isolated, seemingly perfect home?

Grand Guignol is strong in this one

In the opening moments of Get Out, as a mysterious, threatening figure in a white car stalks a wary black man who’s lost his way in a suburban neighborhood at night. Peele lets the scene play out like a familiar horror movie sequence, complete with stabbing musical jump-cues, canny tension-building camera movement, and sudden, shocking action.

In “Get Out,” an exhilaratingly smart and scary horror 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”), understands how to make shadowy streets into menacing ones and turn silences into warnings from the abyss.

His greatest achievement 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.

Top notch tension

From the start, Peele uses racial tension to crank up the narrative tension. When Chris’ white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) invites him to meet her parents at their beautifully appointed, isolated lake house in a rich suburb, he hedges. She hasn’t told her parents he’s black, and he anticipates a potentially uncomfortable scene. But her folks, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), are welcoming and friendly. Dean is an awkwardly forceful would-be liberal ally — among other things, he claims he wanted to vote for Obama for a third term, and brags about what an honor it was when his father lost a potential Olympic competition slot to Jesse Owens. But otherwise, the entire Armitage family seems genuine enough.

Still, Chris is unnerved by the alternating aggression and beaming artificiality of the Armitages’ black housekeeper and groundskeeper, Walter, and Georgina (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel, who deliver memorably eerie performances). As the family hosts an annual gathering, the aging white guests pile up the microaggressions, taking every opportunity to grope Chris’ muscles without asking, or to pointedly, proudly mention their admiration for Tiger Woods. And much more significant bizarre events leave Chris wondering whether something inimical is going on, or he’s just paranoid.

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 the great timing, no surprise.) There’s relief when the offscreen world recedes just then. 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.

“I got you… under your skin”

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.

-BadSector-