Tuesday 20 February 2018

Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)

Right from the off-kilter music over the opening titles, you know that the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner set-up of a young black photographer going to spend a weekend at his white girlfriend's parents' plush country house will not run smooth. And as the bubbling menace builds up economically through small gestures and odd incidents, the course is firmly set on horror. But, while paying homage to the style of genre classics such as Suspiria, this is very much its own animal. It manages to deal with a plethora of issues to do with racism, all the way from slavery with the protagonist finding himself surrounded by compliant, anachronistic Uncle Toms (a definite nod to The Stepford Wives here too, without being overt about it), to the pernicious continued presence of positive racism and simply also the sense that for black people, the world outside the big-city cocoon is unsafe. As the evil atmosphere develops, it's impossible to avoid recalling another seminal horror movie, namely Brian Yuzna's Society, but the mix that Peele has created is deserving of recognition on its own terms.

8/10

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