Get Out

Not surprisingly, "Chris" (Daniel Kaluuya) is apprehensive of his first meeting with the parents of his girlfriend "Rose" (Allison Williams) as the couple arrive at their remote country home. Now what we can plainly see from the outset comes as a bit of a shock to the folks, but they are cordial enough and it seems that maybe this weekend isn't going to be so very bad for "Chris" after all. Thing is, as their stay continues the young man starts to feel distinctly uneasy. He can't quite put his finger on it and the arrival of some close friends to help observe a family tradition (that Rose appears to have forgotten about) only serves to increase his anxiety. To add to this intangibly toxic mix, there is the behaviour of her brother "Jeremy" (Caleb Landry Jones) and the almost robotic behaviour of the family's two retainers - who seems oddly detached from any reality. Regrettably, he isn't and as his race becomes more of an issue, we sense that danger might not be far away. Satire can be very difficult to pull off with subtlety on a big screen, but Jordan Peele uses some clever writing and a great deal of the nuances of human nature to do some characterful manoeuvring here. There are some fairly obvious issues simmering away, but there are also quite a few subliminal ones that are disguised - to varying degrees - in politeness, however shallow. Is it an horror film? Well I'm not sure about that, at least not in any typical sense for the genre. It's not scary at all except in attitude and by the start of the denouement I was beginning to feel the point maybe a bit laboured. Indeed it rather runs out of steam having so intricately laid the foundations for something just a little more sophisticated than what we get. Still, Landry Jones delivers well as the odious sibling and Betty Gabriel presents us with a characterisation that wouldn't have looked out of place in the "Stepford Wives". Maybe it will resonate more in the USA but it's still quite a potent look at prejudice in many of it's different guises.