GET OUT

(Jordan Peele, USA, 2017)

Horror movies – especially the great ones – are all about subtext. This genre, perhaps more than any other form, heavily relies on metaphor by employing their fantastical monsters and otherworldly fears as allegories for whatever is troubling society at the time. The Xenomorph in ALIEN represents sexual violence. The Thing in THE THING symbolizes AIDS. The Brundlefly in THE FLY exemplifies the ravages of old age and, again, AIDS. Etcetera. It is thus unsurprising that Jordan Peele’s GET OUT, the debut horror feature from the sketch comic, is brimming with subtext. Only it would not be fair to call it subtext precisely, as the film operates almost entirely on the surface level, with little-to-no hidden meanings or metaphorical symbols. Concerning a young black man meeting his white girlfriend’s parents for the first time, it is a cautionary racial tale, with the dangerous white liberals standing in for… dangerous white liberals. In GET OUT, the subtext is the text.

Opening in some unnamed affluent American suburb, the film catches a young black man – not our protagonist, notably – wandering the streets at night, attempting to find a confusing address. He is tailed by a white sports car, and so immediately doubles back, obviously not wishing to become embroiled in any sort of domestic disturbance. The car stops, with the strains of 1940s musical standard “Run Rabbit Run” wafting through the air, giving the scene a darkly comic flavour; shades of Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin abound, especially once the man is attacked and abducted by the masked driver. Most horror films, especially those of the slasher variety, open with this kind of self-contained, isolated sequence, establishing the danger to come – think HALLOWEEN or SCREAM – before settling back into the conventional three-act structure of mainstream movies. GET OUT is little different, but its formal assuredness and thematic boldness place it near the top of its genre.

The film quickly refocuses on Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a professional photographer in a blossoming romance with Rose (Allison Williams). The pair are preparing for a weekend trip to visit Rose’s parents, whom have not met Chris and are as yet unaware that he is black; this concerns Chris, but Rose quickly assures him that her parents are “not racist”. Even so, racial tensions abound throughout the first act, as the couple sideswipe a deer on their drive from the city to the country (the location wisely left unspecified by Peele, though it was filmed in Alabama) and are forced to deal with the casual bigotry of a state trooper asking for Chris’ ID, even though he was not driving. Once they arrive at the parents’ colossal property, the tensions deepen, with Rose’s psychologist mother (Catherine Keener) disdainfully offering to hypnotize Chris to rid him of his smoking habit, and her brain surgeon father (Josh Lyman himself, Bradley Whitford) speaking of his grandfather losing to Jesse Owens in an Olympic qualifying trial with a slightly condescending tone. The bizarre behaviour of the estate’s black gardener and housemaid only heightens the unsettling atmosphere, which skews closer to Polanskian black comedy than Hitchcockian horror – especially once a forgotten garden party gets underway and Chris must deal with a cavalcade of old white folks displaying their social ignorance and offhand prejudice. Of course, as with all great horror movies, the first two acts are merely chess-piece positioning for the grand finish to come: a flourish of shocking reveals and narrative rug-pulls that will not be spoiled here.

Released at a time of great racial disharmony and societal change in the United States (but really, when hasn’t that been true?), the film speaks to a specific subset of discrimination: the well-meaning, left-leaning, wealthy Caucasian parents who pride themselves on their progressive views and “would have voted for Obama a third time”, and yet likely have never met a black person who wasn’t in some way servile to them. It’s an insidious trend, less overtly racist than the neo-Confederates of the Deep South or the alt-right of modern white nationalism, but no less treacherous. Writer/director Peele, both the child of an interracial marriage and part of one himself, is likely more aware than most of the subtle threats of white liberalism, and uses the symbolism and exaggeration of the horror genre to make these threats explicit and frightening. Rose’s parents – rich, liberal, well-intentioned and yet sinister in their insensitivity – are promoted to the level of evil masterminds in order to clinch Peele’s ultimate point about the surreptitious omnipresence of racism.

But by elevating the simmering, subliminal racial tensions to the surface level, Peele strips away much of the symbolic value found in the genre. The film is about exactly what it’s about, and even a third-act stray into science fiction-adjacent territory can’t quite augment its nakedly explicated themes. The greatest horror films succeed because they utilize abstract and oftentimes supernatural elements to comment on some aspect of humanity, uncovering the true terror lying just beneath the surface of polite society. Peele is not quite so subtle, preferring the bold approach of using no metaphor or symbolism at all: the film’s villains represent themselves precisely. Though this grants the film an easily-read social commentary analysis for the budding film-school types, it also lessens its climactic impact, ending with a great sense of “that’s all?”. Admirable for its audacious look at race relations in the United States, if slightly disappointing from a purely genre standpoint, GET OUT is nonetheless one of the strongest horror films in recent years – and a brazen shot across the bow of those who would champion it the most.