watch it twice

Rating: 10/10 (17 March 2017)

It's a good idea to see Get Out twice. The first time you experience the film much the same way the main character does, as in any thriller where we are looking at things through the protagonists eyes - the best comparison I can make is to how Roman Polanski does this in his films, not just Rosemary's Baby (though this is what is closest to in horror movie spirit) but also Chinatown and The Ghost Writer, with the sense of oddness and outsider-ness becoming clearer with each encounter - and while there are some surprising revelations there's a greater sense of 'Oh, I hope what I actually suspect about this supporting character isn't true... oh, but it is, so why is he/she acting this way'. The last act is the most conventional as far as where it needs to go as a horror film, but the intensity comes more from character revelations and interactions, the meat of the drama in the suspense of who the 'other' is and what information is being withheld from us (also Hitchcock comes to mind as the typical but surefire comparison). Also, it's entertaining as all hell.
The second time, you get to experience things in a different way and can try to spot subtler things, or moments that reveal things that are curious. For example, after the main couple Chris and Rose hit the deer, two things: 1) does Peele mean for the deer to be analogous to our protagonist, the old "deer in the headlights" bit? Or is it something to do with the roadkill aspect, or how a deer is used as a prop (we see this later in the basement level of the house). 2) that scene with the cop, where he asks Chris for his ID. What I wondered this time was not if Chris ever experienced this before, which he clearly has (it's a given for practically every black man or woman in this country when it comes to dealing with the police *at their best*), but if Rose has. Is she doing what she does in front of this cop, acting in the credulous "WTF Cop?!" manner to get on Chris's good side, or is she genuinely posing the white, ignorant-innocent side of it where, hey, you shouldn't have to do something that's unfair, like, c'mon, you know? Although Rose ends up (spoiler) being an extremely deceitful character - she's a pro at what she does, we later learn, which is both expected but kind of a bummer - this interaction with the cop feels genuine... or is it? There's a surface level part of it and a lower level that could be dissected further, but I'll leave others to speculate.
Another thing along these lines is the brother character Jeremy, played with a special level of sleaze (like out of an exploitation film, or even blaxploitation like one of those white villains in the 70's movies) by Caleb Landry Jones. He's the only white person who doesn't put on an air of sophistication - even Stephen Root, who may be the one who can try to talk without some level of condescension, is still part of the "system" that is controlling and enslaving blacks - but while Jeremy doesn't come out and just say it (he can't because, you know, story reasons) - and it makes for an interesting dynamic. He doesn't have many scenes, but those few he has stands out; among the whole white cast he's the one who isn't a phony, or at least he's not exactly putting on an 'act' like those at the white auction party midway through the film. You (or at least I) can feel the contempt he has for Chris right away. It may arguably be too much, like it's giving too much away how there's something not right with him, and it's different than with the Walter and Georgina characters.
The second time around too the best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery, who is mostly a stand up comic, and it kind of feels it) worked better for me. He was funny and a good presence the first time, but I also wondered if it felt not tonally consistent with the rest of the film (not that it's jarring in the sense of completely taking me out of it, clearly in the quasi-conventional sense as a script, Chris needs a best friend character), but that his humor was a different tone than that of the rest of the movie. However he is integral to the plot, at least to an extent (Chris may be one segment of the audience, but Rod are the ones who will talk at the screen - and at times in this movie it's not completely wrong to do so, depending on the crowd one's with), and I found him funnier the second time too; he is a capable person and is not dumb, which is refreshing in any thriller/horror movie. There are no dumb characters here, only characters who know more than what's going on at times than others, and that can make for a compelling film when done right.
Get Out is a movie that is familiar in its construction in some ways, but is completely fresh in execution, with its sense of surrealism - the "Sunken Place" feels like it could've been an element out of Under the Skin's "Other" place - its befuddlement as much as rage at such a system that in many ways is analogous to how whites have treated blacks over the past centuries (whether as actual slaves or as the servants that are seen here), and that it is as sharp and vicious a social satire as George Romero at his best, not to mention every performance firing on all cylinders (Williams and Keener by the way have a lot of subtlety to explore on a second go around).