Skeleton Key and Peele

Rating: 5/10 (30 November 2019)

Welcome to a world where you really can judge people by the color of their skin. In case you forget which race is superior, a character will be sure to inform you, and the odd thing? they all agree. Moving past this, the film has other issues.
I missed the "hype" just saw this on a recommendation. It's a well written adaptation of a less well known film Skeleton Key (2005) Unlike the original, Get Out completely fails to be scary. Part of it is it fails to place us on the protagonist side. Washington is plenty sympathetic, but he lacks that feeling of powerlessness that would make it horror.
Second, it fails to even make it to Noir, when the film's director is clearly on the protagonists side. Instead of Murphy's Law ruling the twists, things tend to happen which are conventient for Washington to notice everything going on and be able to do something about it.
I don't really have a third, there are just little writing things that bugged me all the way through, subtle details, traits of his character, profession etc fail to come into the fold as dominant story arc drivers and are more window dressing.
That said, the film has some genuinely creepy moments, and outside of some extraneous out-of-setting scenes with characters who have no narrative impact, it's mostly believable. There's some definite Guess Who's Coming to Stepfordness to it all, but there's not enough here to forgive it for fanning the flames of racism. It's an entertaining watch if you have nothing else to see and don't mind being ranted at about the Peele's feelings of racial superiority.