Alt-right thriller for the Trump administration

Rating: 8/10 (30 March 2017)

If you re-imagined 'Meet the Parents' and 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' for the horror genre, then 'Get Out is as close to what you'd end up with. But this is far more than just a culture clash comedy or satire on the racial tensions that are as relevant to Sidney Poitier's times as they are today. Instead, writer/director Jordan Peele has crafted a deeply disturbing, gripping and often hallucinatory thriller for our times, manifesting the often 'right-on' desires of white liberals to get in touch with black culture (be it through music, films or indeed presidents) into a story that drip-feeds its building menace for an hour before unleashing its horror credentials in a bloody climax that - in its over-familiarity - nearly derails a film that had hitherto avoided many of the pitfalls of the modern jolt-shocker.
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is making his first home visit to girlfriend of four months Rose's (Allison Williams) family in their luxurious country estate, already perturbed by the fact that she has omitted to inform her parents that her latest beau is, indeed, black. On the way their car hits a deer, and the attending police officer is more interested in seeing the credentials of Rose's black boyfriend than her own driver's licence. If this proves to be a marker for a film about a young black man in unknown pure-white territory, then things escalate quickly when the pair arrive at Rose's home. Father Dean (Bradley Whitford) comes over far too strongly as a wannabe black campaigner, extolling the virtues of Obama, Jesse Owens and Chris himself in turn, while mother Missy (Catherine Keener) runs a lucrative byline in hypnotism and CBT, offering to relieve Chris of his nicotine addiction in what proves to be a pivotal moment in the film. So far, so creepy.
Chris' first, sleepless, night also sees him almost railroaded by one of the Armitages' black servants, Walter; seemingly hell-bent on running him down before swerving away at the last moment, and explaining his actions away the next morning as his 'training exercise'. Fellow servant Georgina (Betty Gabriel) also ranks high on the weird-ometer, all fixed smile and unnatural bonhomie as she pours drinks and mysteriously observes her hairline in the mirror while Chris observes. The presence of seemingly docile and 'converted' members of the black community in servitude to an affluent white family may itself set off alarm bells if it weren't already commonplace today, but here they ring hollow with Dean's assertions to champion both black culture and the athletic prowess of its people. Son Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) even challenges Chris to a dinner-time one-on-one, an event which itself will pay off in the final act; and for all the awkwardness and cultural mismatch Chris himself was expecting, nothing prepares him for what follows as the family hosts its annual get-together of their well-off friends and neighbours.
Here Chris is interrogated, probed and even physically examined by a crowd of similarly earnest and 'right-on' black idolaters. One elderly lady even comes with a young black companion, dressed like a white person's idea of a 'civilised' black man, all muted flannels and by now accustomed fixed grin. But when Chris inadvertently flashes him with his camera-phone, the man erupts in a furious tirade, telling him to 'Get Out', before being restrained - and retrained - by Missy's miraculous mesmerism. Chris himself has by now also succumbed to her wiles, criticised for continuing to smoke and unwittingly subjected to her tea-cup trigger to send him into the kind of existential realm that recalls Renton's overdose experience in 'Trainspotting'.
The film then ratchets up the revelations towards its kinetic and furious climax. Chris discovers a boxful of Polaroids showing that he is far from being Rose's first black boyfriend; the off-limits basement is revealed to be the lair of Dean's devilish brain surgery - compounding on his wife's hypnotism with some viscerally applied lobotomy surgery - and the dark secret at the heart of the Armitage set-up is at last revealed: harvesting the mental and physical attributes of Afro-American men and women for the improvement of themselves and their equally privileged white friends. Here the film most resembles Polanski's 'Rosemary's Baby', as the cloying and overly attentive 'friendship' offered by relative strangers yields to a secret cabal of demented demonics. As the ambiguous mantra of Missy reveals, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
'Get Out' works just as well as a horror thriller without even reading any subtext into its satire of white liberalism and the white man's need to integrate and understand its black brethren. But in a political climate increasingly charged by race-hate, exploitation and the need to homogenise diversification into one, palatable whole, the film provides a telling and provocative examination of white/black relations at a time when (at least in America) 'black lives matter' has become a mantra for anti- discrimination and equality against a backdrop of police brutality and videos that recall the dark days of the Rodney King trial. White supremacy rewritten as cultural harvesting is nothing new in a post-colonial rhetoric, but 'Get Out' proves that irrespective of living in such 'enlightened' times, the undercurrent of race relations is still close to boiling point if you push the right buttons. Especially subliminal ones.