Get Out

Get Out (2016) is an ingeniously written horror film.  The picture is directed by the comedian Jordan Peele (part of the comedy duo Key & Peele) and has been portrayed, in some reviews, as primarily comedy.  This is misleading.  Peele has made a classical horror film, a movie that respects the genre and that is, in fact, remarkably restrained and, even, earnest.  Horror films are almost all satirical on some level -- they project fears in amplified form so that we can understand the social, political, and psychological aspects of those things that frighten us.  Frankenstein is a grave and alarming satire about science, optimism, and medicine; on some level, Dracula satirizes the concept of romantic love and its Byronic practitioners.  Indeed, I would argue that the greater the horror film, the more meaningful and pertinent its satiric component.  The writers who call Get Out, a comic horror picture are confusing satire with comedy.  Except for a few amusing sequences, intended to relieve the audience's suspense, Get Out isn't very funny and, in fact, people who go expecting to laugh out loud will be disappointed.  In common with many of the best horror films, Get Out is also not too scary -- gross-out special effects and gratuitous shocks would be a distraction and Peele eschews these elements.  The picture is intelligent, dignified, and, even, a wee bit tedious -- Peele is concerned with establishing in a lucid way all of the pictorial and plot elements that he needs for his complex narrative.  Accordingly, the film is disproportionately exposition -- a lot of things have to happen for the audience to grasp clearly what is happening.  When the gory climax finally arrives, Peele's approach is reticent -- the violence is a lot less shocking, although still disturbing, than we might expect.  An example of Peele's tact and his use of implication as opposed to gruesome imagery is a surgery scene close to the end of the picture.  The operating theater is elegantly appointed and the surgery is performed on an unconscious man with his head inserted into a kind of stark white halo.  The surgeon intends to remove the man's scalp and, then, saw through his skull to expose his brain.  This is accomplished but by imagery that never directly shows the surgery -- we see the brain, for instance, exposed as a reflection in the surgeon's glasses.  When the surgeon saws through the skull, the camera angle is beneath the halo-like enclosure and so we see only the slightest trace of blood outlining the incision.  Most horror directors in the last fifty years would have shown the surgery in close-up and emphasized the gore associated with the procedure -- this tendency dates back to Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face (1960) and has continued ever since.  Peele is working on a very low budget -- the movie cost less than 5 million dollars -- and the movie's horror is philosophical, even metaphysical, and, so, there's no point in wasting money with elaborate and lurid special effects involving the surgery.  This doesn't mean that there isn't a certain grim visual elegance to the sequence -- indeed, as a kind of sop to convention, the surgical theater is illuminated, in part, by two candles mounted on tall candelabra.  (The presence of the candles is highlighted when someone bursts into the operating room and knocks one down.)  In general terms, Peele's direction is modest, intelligent, and impeccably tasteful -- in some respects, Peele's visual style reminds me of John Huston:  there's no unnecessary grandeur or spectacle; the scenes simply accomplish what they set out to accomplish.

The film's satire involves race relations and, in fact, the movie is a not-so-subtle attack on White liberals.  At its heart, the movie involves a scheme to reinstitute a kind of slavery.  In fact, one of the most chilling scenes in the movie is a silent course of competitive bidding that we discover to be a slave auction, a Black man's body is being sold to the highest bidder.  The movie toys with issues relating to interracial romance and there is a lot of cringe-inducing racial insensitivity on display among the White people, all of them Obama supporters.  This is the sort of movie that suffers if you know the plot and can anticipate the twists and turns in the narrative and so I will try to avoid spoilers.  It suffices for me to say that the story involves an African-American photographer who is invited to his white girlfriend's house for the weekend.  A group of sinister people appear for the birthday party of a deceased patriarch -- a celebration of the dead man's life is held every year at the same day in the upper class suburban neighborhood where the hero's girlfriend lives.  This aspect of the film suggests Rosemary's Baby with its coven of Manhattan devil worshipers and, of course, the progenitor of this sort of secret society film, Val Lewton's indelible The Seventh Victim.  The white people gathered for the party are very, very white and they don't really know how to interact with a Black man.  This is peculiar because there is another, weirdly mismatched inter-racial couple.  The other Black people at the party, however, have their faces frozen in rigor-mortis smiles and speak in an oddly formal way.  Alison Williams plays the Black man's girlfriend -- she is exceptional:  her long, rigid jaw here signifies something implacably Caucasian about her and she can be either meltingly romantic and sentimental or horribly cold and cruel.  The heroine's parents are played by Bradley Whitford, best-known as a political operative on The West Wing, and the comedian Catherine Keener -- Keener as a psychiatrist is, also, both frighteningly bland and highly sinister.  The film's satire, focusing on White America's love/hate relationship with African-Americans is thought-provoking and highly incisive. 

The best horror films are operatic and feature imagery that is both horrible and beautiful at the same time -- they are, in fact, "sublime" in the sense that they show us images that both intrigue and attract as well as repel.  Peele is too rational and lucid to achieve the kind of effects that the greatest horror films have attained -- but his film is clever, fascinating, well-written, and brilliantly directed.