'Get Out' holds disturbing mirror to racism disguised as comic horror
"Do they know I'm black?"
Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, asks this question to his white girlfriend Rose, played by "Girls" star Allison Williams, as they depart for their first weekend visit with her parents.
"They are not racists," Rose laughingly assures him.
But we suspect they might be something, because Jordan Peele's savage social racial satire "Get Out" opens with a black man being assaulted in a quiet, white suburban neighborhood and stuffed into a car trunk.
We know whatever happens next won't likely be "Meet the Parents" or "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."
When Chris and Rose arrive at her parents' upscale home, neurosurgeon Dad (Bradley Whitford) and hypnotherapist Mom (Catherine Keener) seem cool with Rose's new boyfriend.
Sure, Dad tries a little too hard to impress Chris with his white liberalism ("I'd have voted for Obama for a third term!" he boasts). He speaks awkwardly about his own father who raced with Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Chris dismisses it as good intentions.
Until he notices the strange behavior and glazed eyes of the black groundskeeper (Marcus Henderson) and black maid (Betty Gabriel). And the odd way Rose's brother (Caleb Landry Jones) acts and speaks. Chris' internal warning bells sound off.
Even his best friend (and the movie's comic relief character) TSA agent Rod (Lil Rel Howery), warns him to get out before the whites turn him into a sex slave.
"Get Out" masterfully mixes scares and mounting suspense with well-timed comic punches, accentuated by the plucked strings and unnerving orchestrations in Michael Abels' sinister score, one that recalls both Robert Colbert's iconic "Dark Shadows" soundtrack and music from the original "Twilight Zone" TV composers.
"Get Out" performs a service that only high-end horror and comedy films (plus some science-fiction) can: present a disturbingly honest, critical analysis of the status quo safely disguised as an entertaining genre work.
Writer/director Peele (half of the cutting-edge comedy duo Key and Peele) cooks up a zesty, cinematic stew of comedy, horror and scathing criticism of hypocritical whites - not racist right wingers as we'd expect, but elite lefties who discover a subversive way to format American slavery that allows them to preserve their liberal facades.
In this movie, Peele pulls no punches, takes no prisoners and bars no holds. He doesn't even resort to cheap cliches like the three I just wrote.
"Get Out" can be placed on the same critical plateau as George Romero's original "Night of the Living Dead" with its blistering racial subtext eating away at our consciences like zombies dining on brain food.
No movie better exemplifies the late film critic Roger Ebert's description of movies as "empathy machines" capable of allowing one group of people to observe and understand another group of people.
Black audiences may be the base for "Get Out," but white audiences are the real target of Peele's twisted tale, for it explains to them why one group doesn't fully trust another group professing equality and justice.
"Get Out" has a blunter message for its base: Keep hope alive. But watch your back.
“Get Out”
★ ★ ★ ★
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener, Caleb Landry Jones
Directed by: Jordan Peele
Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated R for language, sexual references and violence. 103 minutes