Get Out is a Sleeper Hit for a Reason, it's Creepy, Inventive and Topical

Rating: 8/10 (10 March 2017)

*Minor Spoilers Ahead* Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) are packing to go away for the weekend. They're both a little anxious, she's introducing him to her parents Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener) and there's some pressure on the event. They've enlisted their friend Rod (LilRel Howery) to watch their dog for the weekend and they head out. Chris is worried how her parents will react to him but Rose sees race as a non-issue and is sure her parents will feel the same way. After a minor incident involving a collision with a deer and a slightly racist encounter with a cop, they finally arrive. To Rose's relief, her parents are courteous but they're interactions with Chris are awkward at best. It doesn't help that the staff are any less friendly, Walter (Marcus Henderson) and Georgina (Betty Gabriel) smile and do their jobs but something is off about them. Chris wakes up in the middle of the night to go have a smoke and he runs into Missy. She's a licensed hypnotist and offers to help cure him of his bad habit. He's reluctant but he more or less consents. What he fails to realize when he's under her care, she has the ability to make him quit more than just his smoking habit.
This is Jordan Peele's debut film as a director which he also wrote. I've got to congratulate him, this premise is pretty inventive. It feels like a twist on the Stepford Wives but they do a good job mixing things up enough to make this fresh. The setup works and as the story progresses, things only get darker and more twisted from there. The movie goes in directions that you don't expect (you can guess the reason that the villains do what they do from seeing the trailer but their endgame could surprise you) and I was impressed by that. So many movies are just content to follow the formula and deliver the basics, after seeing Get Out, it made me happy to see that people went out to support a movie that delivered something different to it's audience.
The acting in the movie was really good minus one or two exceptions. Daniel Kuluuya is great in this role, what he's faced with wouldn't be easy to handle and that's even before things take a turn for the weird. He helps make Chris easy to relate to, you go through the stages of anger he feels and you're completely on his side. Allison Williams was also great, she does a nice job helping you get attached to her character. You want Chris and Rose's relationship to succeed and she functions as the audience avatar almost. Some of the supporting performances were flat-out impressive. Whitford, Keener, Stephen Root all hit their notes and add to the mystique of this strange family. I would single out Betty Gabriel, she was super creepy and I thought she did an excellent job. The only performance I didn't like was Caleb Landry-Jones, while everyone else was relatively subtle, he was so much of a jerk if I hadn't seen the trailers, he would have given away that something was up.
Get Out bills itself as a horror/comedy but to me it turned out to be more of a scary thriller. The movie doesn't shy away from making you uncomfortable and the tension really escalates as the movie plays out. Its effective at that and deserves the praise its been getting. The problem I had is that when they try to relieve some of the tension with jokes, the movie isn't nearly as funny as it thinks it is. The character of Rod seems to have been inserted to provide comedic relief but it just didn't sell for me. For a movie that was so forward, the character's comedic styling felt like a step back and instead of making me laugh, it just made me more uncomfortable.
This isn't my favourite horror movie to come out recently but I think it also has a lot of topical value. The movie addresses racism in a way you don't see in very many movies. The racism isn't so in your face or vile, its done in a realistic way where there's a lot of subtext when people are talking to Chris that just makes you wince. There were so many times during the movie where I wanted Chris to leave because he was having to deal with so many inappropriate questions or insults. It was well done and progressive.
I'm happy I got a chance to see this in theatres, I almost didn't go but I had a chance to go with a couple of friends and we all left pretty satisfied with it. Get Out doesn't revolutionize the horror genre but it does have interesting and important things to say. For a guy who's known for comedy, Jordan Peele knows his way around the horror genre and he made something worth watching. If you get a chance to see this, check it out.