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May 23, 2017 Web Exclusive By Jason Wilson

To try to separate politics from Jordan Peele’s new film Get Out – in an interest to focus primarily on entertainment instead of something more flammable and contentious – is both idiotic and attempting to make the film less than it is.

A young, interracial couple – Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) – face the daunting prospect of visiting the Rose’s parents for the weekend. Chris, who is African American, asks Rose point blank if she’s told her parents that she’s dating a black man. She laughs this off, makes a joke of it, and they move on. There is no conceivable way that his question wouldn’t be awkward, but that doesn’t make it any less relevant or resonant.

The key word is ‘awkward.’ Without the horror trappings, this could have easily been made as a cringe-comedy of errors mixing the tones of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Chris, upon meeting Rose’s family, is thrust into a world of polite-but-unaware white people who try desperately to relate to him. They do this not by identifying who he is as a person, but by focusing on his physical attributes – namely the color of his skin – and making a leap in understanding. Rose’s dad adopts slang, perhaps it could be perceived as unconsciously in the screwball comedy version, not because he’s racist but because he’s a lame dad. Or, that’s Rose’s explanation. The same goes for the party guests at an annual function during the visit. One older man says he’s a former golfer and asks Chris if he’s ever golfed. The conversation is genial enough, but also distant due to generational differences. The older man fills the silence by adding that he knows Tiger Woods, even though Chris has established that he’s not a golfer.

In the grand scheme of things, this kind of behaviour probably isn’t seen as capital ‘R’ racism, but it does speak to a societal issue that people of color do get lumped together for no good reason. Get Out, in addition to diving into the worst-case-scenario element here, explores this discomfort and condescension with depth and nuance. The film teases at the more overt scares to come while focusing more on the mundane, casual dismissiveness or tokenism that made Chris reluctant about visiting Rose’s family in the first place.

Which is to say Peele doesn’t overplay his hand, and he doesn’t move too early with his reveals. The scares don’t come out of nowhere because the opening scene involves an abduction of a young black man walking in the suburbs. Instead, there is a constant feeling of unease that slowly rises with every scene. As far as plotting is concerned, Peele astutely understands when to pull the trigger on the action and when to shy away. One of the movie’s greatest strengths is perhaps its relative lack of blood and gore. There is some, but the horror is far more psychological in nature and he achieves it to a visceral enough level that punctuating it with too much red liquid would be overkill.

For those who haven’t had Chris’ experience, it might be easy to dismiss him as being paranoid or overly critical. Don’t. It’s more imperative to listen and understand the different social realities that permeate the world we live in. Get Out is uncomfortable, and it should be. Peele, in one a Q&A featurette on the Blu-Ray, talks about how one of his primary goals with the film is to start a healthy dialog about race and racism in the United States and that one of his inspirations for making the film was what he called the “post-racial lie.” Racism isn’t over, and pretending it is actively hurts those who are still being oppressed by racist tendencies.

In another brief featurette called ‘Unveiling the Horror of Get Out,’ Peele mentions the element of tokenism in horror films. For so long, if there happened to be a black character in a horror movie, you could all but guarantee that he or she would be among the first to go. Get Out may not be the first horror movie to flip the switch, or to have such a political bent to its themes – it is horrifically relevant to today – but it’s among the best. Because when horror is at its most successful, the creative minds take something familiar and believable only to escalate it into absurdity. Stephen King’s novel The Shining is mostly a parable for how alcoholism was destroying his family. Get Out can be seen as a criticism of insidious, condescending racism that is often peddled with a smile. Get Out peels back that surface.

The Blu-Ray is relatively sparse, though there is also a feature-length commentary with Peele as well as an alternate ending that is so much bleaker than the original theatrical cut. Peele made the right decision, though the alternate ending does have a certain cruel poetry to it despite its nihilism. Peele performs a tightrope act by making a socially caustic and perceptive horror movie that is deeply uncomfortable and frightening in equal measure. It’s one of the best movies of the year so far.