Get Out (2017), the first movie produced by the comedy actor Jordan Peele, is a horror story where the scary part are not ghosts, “bad” witches or spirits, but a much more terrifying issue: racism. The production is competing for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars which, for many people, represents that the black filmmakers are receiving more opportunities in the movie industry. It also breaks the idea that only alternative and no commercial productions should talk about social and structural problems, being a pioneer in the horror section.
The movie tells the story of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), an African- American who is dating a white girl named Rose (Allison Williams), and is going to meet her parents in a weekend. Feeling apprehensive since the beginning, Chris decides to go to their house anyway and arriving there he realizes an incommodious situation: all the employees at the house are black an act weird, like they were brainwashed before, having a submissive behavior.
The plot really opens when, during the night, Chris has insomnia, go downstairs, and end up meeting Rose’s mom, Missy (Catherine Keener), who is a psychoanalyst. With the excuse of curing traumas of the past, she hypnotizes him. After that, everything seems to get each time more frightening: since the ambiguous lines Rose’s dad and brother have – Bradley Whitford as Dean and Jeremy Armitage, played by Bradley Whitford and Caleb Landry Jones, respectively –, until the ‘’party’’ where Chris is the only black person among several people, except for another ‘’weird’’ man.
Image Source: IMDb
Get Out is a great allegory of how terrifying racism is for everyone who suffers it. The movie represents the most typical forms of racism: since the veiled ones, such as words and dialogues, and the more literal represented by the kidnapping, Get Out is able to pass for the spectator how racism makes a person feel, since the situations are all seen by Chris’s eyes: terrified, scared, angry, and of course, lonely.
It is also important to highlight the police’s role in this movie too. In the beginning, when Rose and Chris are stopped by a cop on the road, after running over a stag, although she is the one who is driving, the policeman asks for Chris’ ID. Linking with that moment, at the end of the movie, when Chris’s best friend, who is a TSA agent and also African-American realizes he is missing, goes to the police and tells what he suspects that is going on, the police officers laugh at him. It is clear the representation of the police omission, and even guilt, many times, when racism is the central issue.
Betting in a subtle soundtrack, what is uncommon in horror movies, Get Out is a unique representation that racism doesn’t need anything else to be absolutely and completely scary by itself. Get Out is able to make the spectator see in cinematographic resources a structural and old social problem that is the racial disparity in the society and, for that, is a really necessary movie to be watched nowadays.