Originally written March 1, 2017

Get Out is so much more of a clever film than it might seem on the surface. It’s a horror movie unlike any that I’ve ever seen before, where the “monster” of the movie is racism. This kind of thing hasn’t really been presented this way in a movie before (at least not to my knowledge), and it succeeds in mostly everything it sets out to be. It’s equally scary, funny, and thought-provoking.

The concept is so simple, yet it works so well and leads to so many different interesting avenues. A black man, Chris, is dating a white woman, Rose. Chris is asked to come to Rose’s parents’ house for the weekend to meet them. Chris is afraid that this white family might be uncomfortable with their daughter dating a black man, so he’s paranoid the entire time. Everything seems fine at first when he meets the parents, but things start to seem off to Chris and he starts to feel like something weird is going on.

The movie is really great at playing with your expectations and overall just making you feel uncomfortable the whole time. This isn’t so much the kind of horror movie that has the jump scares that pop out at you (although they do occur a few times, at pretty well-timed moments) as it is the kind that makes you feel nervous the entire time. It isn’t even like with classic movies where it’s the “atmosphere that makes it scary,” Get Out is just really good at creating an unsettling feeling that persists throughout the whole movie. However, for as scary as it is, I was surprised to find that it’s actually just as funny. This isn’t surprising given director Jordan Peele’s (from Key and Peele fame) comedy background, but it’s pretty difficult to blend horror and comedy so seamlessly together. This is right up there with movies like Evil Dead 2 that blend horror and comedy together really well.

Honestly, I mostly just liked the way the movie played with its concept so well. I can see many ways where this sort of movie could fall flat, but it just worked really well to its full potential. From what I can tell I’m mostly in the minority on this, but the only thing that I personally wasn’t a fan of with the movie is the family’s motivation that’s revealed later in the film. Without spoiling it, I just felt like in a movie that was purely about racism and paranoia, the motivation didn’t fit in well with that. I’ll say no more, but other than that I really loved this movie, beginning to end. It’s really well acted and directed, and it’s just an incredible ride the whole way through. This is one that you won’t want to miss.

4.5/5