Saturday, December 16, 2017

Get Out (2017)

Get Out (2017): written and directed by Jordan Peele; starring Daniel Kaluuya (Chris Washington), Alison Williams (Rose Armitage), Catherine Keener (Dr. Armitage), Bradley Whitford (Dr. Armitage), Caleb Landry Jones (Dean Armitage), Marcus Henderson ('Walter'), Betty Gabriel ('Georgina'), LilRey Howery (Rod Williams of the TSA), and Stephen Root (Jim Hudson): 

A zippy, suspenseful horror movie about racial relations. Rod Serling, who did so many allegorical stories on The Twilight Zone, would be proud of Jordan Peele's creepy, satirical story about an extraordinarily bad visit to the country by art photographer Chris (a great Daniel Kaluuya) to meet the parents (creepy Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) of his girlfriend of four months (Alison Williams, perfectly cast). 

Peele builds the suspense gradually over the first half, lightening some scenes with comic-relief TSA agent/Chris's best pal Rod on the phone (one of the jokes is that Rod's paranoid fantasies about what rich white people want with black people is neither paranoid nor fantasy). The ending descends into cathartic violence that seems to comment on both current events and the tragic ending of George Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead, with its heroic African-American protagonist. 

Peele has a nice director's eye, giving us colour-saturated scenes of privileged gentility and night-time scenes of startling horror. The movie also nods to The Wicker Man (the original), Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and Star Trek episode "Spock's Brain" in interesting ways. I think Peele's just-announced Twilight Zone reboot should be a blast. Highly recommended.

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