My ‘Get Out’ review six years later
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- May 28, 2023
- 782
I’m a movie freak, and summer movie season is upon us. I don’t do many movie reviews except for ones that really affect me. “Interstellar” (2014) was one and “Get Out” (2017) another. If done right, horror movies drip mounting dread directly into your veins. I love the rush.
“Get Out” is not a typical horror movie, but one that did start a reality-based horror trend. Jordan Peele, its creator, is a master. His movies after “Get Out” have been stellar. While exaggerated, the themes ring true. As one half of an interracial couple, I recognize we’ve come part way in reconciling the rift in racial bias but have moved swiftly backward in recent years. If you’re uncomfortable with this review, ask yourself why. Let’s unpack “Get Out.”
We begin with interracial couple Chris and Rose. He packs his suitcase and readies to travel with her to meet her parents. She reassures him her folks will not be upset he is black. He isn’t reassured, and I recognize the tone in her voice that says, “All will be OK,” and the unsure look in his eye as he doubts her. I have used that tone.
Their car trip is interrupted by a collision with a deer. It’s designed to unsettle you, and when he goes into the woods to see if it’s alive, you want to scream at him not to.
They arrive at her parents’ home, who appear overly cool about them dating. The parents and especially the brother represent the bougie rich enclaves that dot our landscape. Dinner is weird with strange testosterone challenges from the brother. The brother is a bit off and written as such.
Chris meets their live-in housekeeper and groundskeeper. Both are eerie and off kilter, and it’s with them that we see the movie begin to take shape. Their eyes seem vacuous, and he cannot place what’s wrong with them.
Chris struggles with quitting smoking. In the middle of the night, he slips outside to have a cigarette but is disturbed by two run-ins with the groundskeeper and housekeeper. When he heads inside, Rose’s mom is awake, and she invites him to sit with her. She is subtly terrifying to me. She is a psychiatrist and says she’s created a technique to help people quit smoking, a sort of hypnosis, and he resists until it’s too late.
There’s teacups and spoons, and suddenly, we’re in the sunken place.
I will not give this part away, but fear shot through me during this scene. It was unnerving and the setup for the entire rest of the story. The storytelling here was pitch perfect.
There is an annual party the parents hold with their upper crust friends that begins the next day, and the couple cannot avoid attending. I’ll go through this quickly. The friends are overly nice to Chris, touching his arms, examining his features, enough to make me squirmy. I thought I knew what was going to happen at this point, but I was wrong.
There are so many racial innuendos I shuddered. Yet I have found we’re much more comfortable laughing at racist gags than we are at seeing reality, albeit slightly exaggerated, play out on screen.
Chris meets another man at the party who is there with a much older lady. He begins to speak in a years-past sort of vernacular. I still think I know where it’s going, and I’m still wrong. Chris becomes uncomfortable with the tone of the party, and the couple takes a walk.
What happens when they’re gone is bone-chilling. No one utters a word as events unfold, which makes it scarier.
We start building to a climax here as the party winds down. There have been incidents with phones, the housekeeper and Chris’ innate sense of impending doom. It becomes urgent, and he tells Rose they need to leave. I want to believe she will be with him until the end.
When all is lost and Chris realizes he is alone in a trap he hasn’t yet figured out, he’s knocked out and wakes up in the basement.
This is when we descend into what I can only describe as a ‘70s cult movie, the kind Super Host showed on channel 43 Saturday afternoons. There is hypnosis, subliminal messages and secret operating rooms. But Chris finds a way out. I wish it hadn’t happened the way it did, but I was shouting in my chair, “Go Chris!” I do believe the movie couldn’t have ended any other way.
“Get Out” is a study of our culture. It shows us where the monsters still exist, hiding in plain sight.
We want to believe we are racially sensitive, that we plug into what other cultures and skin colors face daily. I was rooting for Rose until I wasn’t. She disappointed me like so many others. She offended me because I have been Rose. I lament that.
You can take the monstrous middle and end out of the movie and insert events from the past or tomorrow. Normalization occurs at rapid pace. And that fact alone is the biggest horror movie ever made. I give this movie 4.5 stars out of 5.
Melissa Herrera is a columnist, published author and drinker of too many coffees based in Holmes County. You can find her book, “TOÑO LIVES,” at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives or buy one from her in person (because all authors have boxes of their own novel). For inquiries or to purchase, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com.