"Liberal" white family seduces and enslaves African-Americans.

Rating: 9/10 (25 February 2017)

The pre-title scene encapsulates the film. An African-American man is puzzled by the "crazy" layout of the fancy suburb. An expensive white sports car trails him. With classical music on its radio it stops. The driver overpowers and abducts him. "Run rabbit run" now takes over the sound track, supporting the advice of the title: Get Out. This polished, witty horror film is a parable for post-Obama American racism.
The central couple is the liberal dream. The young beauty Rose Armitage brings her handsome black beau Chris to meet her wealthy intelligent parents. Mom Missy is a psychiatrist, dad Dean a neurosurgeon, so despite Rose's assurance they are going to mess with his head. Chris feared his unannounced blackness might mess with theirs. Missy hypnotizes him with the tinkle of her tea-cup, ostensibly to stop his smoking. Dean starts to transplant his brain into the skull of a blind art dealer. That exposes that liberal dream as a delusion.
That revelation is set up by the family's arch friends and servants. All but one of the friends transparently strains to seem to accept the black guy. One portly gent evokes Colonel (finger-lickin good) Sanders. One old wreck's wife feels Chris's body hungrily.
The one exception is the Brooklyn jazz musician who was earlier abducted, to be made a much older white woman's sex slave. The Armitages' maid and groundskeeper have already been reduced to smiling subservience, just like on the old plantation. The new Northerners are on a Tara of their own.
As Dean repeats, he would have voted for Obama a third time had the law allowed. Best pres of his lifetime. But this cheery liberalism is a deception, a lure too enslave another generation of suppressed and exploited blacks. Turns out Rose is a serial seducer for this collective. Before Chris is done with, she's already on-line trolling for a black NBA prospect. Her whacko brother Jeremy — a replay of Annie Hall's Duane — was the abductor in the opening scene, his victim the jazzman.
In a minor theme, the African American community is tricked by its impression of progress not to band together. Chris's security guard friend is sufficiently paranoid to suspect the sexual enslavement plot. But the three black cops who hear him out erupt into laughter. They've come a long way, baby, so they're not about to believe the ancient prejudice persists. Well, it does, as the election campaign and first month of Trump's supposed presidency confirm.
The film is written and directed by the COMEDIAN Jordan Peele. Like the classic horror, it bodies forth our desperately suppressed fears. Horror and comedy are closely related, as Hitchcock often observed. The child laughs at our "Boo!" and we laugh at our adult nightmare films ever after, however nervously. The is an excellent film, both entertaining and chillingly prescient.
The film's last suspense is the flashing police car. We assume it's the white cop on whom Rose earlier unleashed her liberalism. She calls out to him for help, clearly prepared to hang the killings on Chris and deny his story. But it's Chris's friend so all's well. The police lights like the camera flashes earlier snap the deadened back to life, from their trance back to reality, from passivity to aggressive survival. Obama didn't herald a post-racist America but a revived insanity.