Review of Get Out (2017) by Travis W — 08 Jan 2018

By the time the cops arrive, Jordan Peele's Get Out has already done its work. The scenario may be an outlandish bodysnatching conspiracy, but the subject is everyday and familiar. The police are either co-conspirators with the bodysnatchers or part of the institutional consensus that criminalizes black bodies. Either way, a black man standing over a bloodied white woman is in trouble when the police pull up, and everyone in the audience knows it.

Get Out is an education for white audiences and, perhaps, a documentary for black audiences, as Peele has suggested. Before he introduces explicit elements of horror into the film, Peele allows the microaggressions to mount. Whereas allegories risk the distance of interpretation, Get Out doesn't code racism as anything other than what it is. Nearly every line of dialogue, every gesture, every insinuation relays the uneasy politics of race-relations.

Thus, the horror doesn't emerge from a vacuum. These aren't the actions of deranged malcontents, isolated, shut off from society, ensnaring victims unfortunate enough to stumble into their little world. The horror arises from a familiar place, lurking in plain sight, yet hidden behind facades of self-conscious interactions and pseudo-progressive politics.

Get Out indicts the supposed welcoming spaces of white liberalism, and, in so doing, implicates the theater and the white audience members who've come there to exercise their esteemed cultural enlightenment.

Peele tools this pervasive entrapment that is the black experience as not only the film's subject but as its formal register, as well. Few actors have been hounded by such an insistently watchful camera. Daniel Kaluuya, who plays Chris, is under the microscope-the camera poised for that one false move. In this way, he and Chris are mimetic twins. They share the onus of making everyone around them feel comfortable with their presence.

Can Chris keep it together? Can he hold our sympathies? Be gracious? Level-headed? Understanding?

Kaluuya shoulders that burden. Full-center in the frame, staring back, he reflects to us the torment of constant surveillance. He's trapped, a deer in the headlights, and we, the audience, just hope to god he can get out alive.