I decided to finally watch Jordan Peele directorial debut Get Out from 2017, again slow day at the shop so decided to kill some time. The movie made me have mix feelings about, not because it was bad in any sense but because it confused me in too many ways. Entering the directing field from comedic background, Peele took the horror genre in his hand and the way he did it really gets your attention, not so much of classic scare jumps but there is some dark humor into it plus the psychological aspect that I love about horror movies.
The plot of the film is set with a very simple idea and then develops into something entirely different and sinister, starts with a young black man named Chris Washington; role played by one of my favorites actors Daniel Kaluuya, he goes to meet his girlfriend’s family and that’s where mild horror turns into horror nobody could predict. It is this that makes the movie so brilliant because it turns stereotypical situations such as meeting your partner’s parents for the first time or having to deal with microaggressions such as being told to "not let the race thing get under your skin", Chris has close to zero luck on this department because his girlfriend’s parents; Rose parents, were deeply racist but in a more sinister and calculated way than usual that even falls into the political aspect but all as a strategy to not bring up forward they been racist but take politics as an excuse.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5052448/
- Platform: AppleTV+
Rottentomatoes Rating
Chris and Rose decide to spend the weekend together to introduce Chris to her parents, Rose even then mention Chris "I told you my parents aren’t racists", tf are you serious?... they would vote for Obama thrice if it were possible, like that's some kind of shield, that's like saying I'm sorry but not really. When they get to the Armitage estate, Rose's parents name Dean and Missy, greet Chris with more than friendly warmth, maybe even a little too much affection than he expected. The Black servants that the family has, Walter and Georgina, caught Chris’s interest because they seem so programming like, probably because of the many years working there. It gets more creepy when Missy who was a hypnotist, hypnotizes Chris against his will and takes him to what she refers to as the “sunken place”, there is even an event during a garden party when some of the white rich guests were bidding the body of Chris while he was completely unaware of this, a day after he was hypnotize, the most sinister part of all this is how they handle things like there is nothing wrong doing going on and how when Chris was hypnotize he had this memories of his childhood about his mother's death.
The Armitages are not only racists but they are also the ones who are running a most heinous business of putting into Black bodies the consciousness of white people, meaning they are slave masters in the present day. Rose was completely faking her relationship the hole time, she is not the innocent girlfriend that she looks like, she was only pretending to get a hand to Chris as part of her family's scheme, total manipulator who had done this in the past many many times and had many black men victims on her belt.
Daniel Kaluuya is excellent as Chris, which is quite impressive since he manages to describe all aspects of his character transformation from annoyance to genuine horror, he already felt annoyed before going to met Rose parents but once he got there things started to escalate real quick. During the hypnosis scene, against his will, he shows a lot of effort to come up with all this pain while talking about his mother’s death. Kaluuya makes Chris feel real and relatable which makes his struggle for survival feel more real, he is a very very talented men and I truly love every time he is on screen, from Sicario, Judas and the Black Messiah, Nope, he has been on quite a few great movies where he just performs, Get Out (2017) is probably now one of my favorite Kaluuya's movie.
Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford as Missy and Dean Armitage shows at first as a bit nosy traditional couple, Keener got to make Missy look incredibly calculating and just a little bit creepy during the hypnosis sequences, like almost saying "I GOT YOU!!!", while Whitford nails the kind of white liberal male who is way too eager to demonstrate that he is not just a man who basically hates black men, as part of his facade he presented himself as a liberal intellectual surgeon who is beyond any kind of racism as part of the trap that he was setting up. Allison Williams plays the role of Rose who is as racist and calculative as their parents with zero remorse, she learn from the two best at it.
When Chris starts to figure out what was going on and why everything around the Armitage felt so weird specially with Jeremy who show her true colors early on against Chris, different than the rest of the family had less control. Chris finds out that Rose collected pictures with previous black men who where her partners and started to understand the full scale of things, realizing where he was standing at against the Armitage. The Armitage manage to control all this bodies through a procedure called Coagula, a fictional procedure from the movie, that was develop by Roman Armitage family where wealthy white people, most of the time whealty people, could transfer their contentiousness into another body so they could life longer life, this itself will get you thinking that they can do this over and over moving form one body to another, almost like Apocalypse in the X-Men but they didn't get into this topic.
Towards the end of the movie when Chris finds out what is going on its when it gets really intense, there were ways to brake the hypnosis or what they call "the sunken place", victims like Walter were fully aware of what was going on, that they were basically trapped, they remain conscious, Walter was a man been controlled by Rose's Grandfather. The psychological aspect of this movie is insane, so the consequences once Chris figures everything out and all goes to hell for the Armitage although I don't want to tell the ending since this is such a great movie.
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