If you haven’t seen Hollywood’s latest ‘it movie’ Get Out, not only are you missing out on the greatest box office ROI since The Blair Witch Project, you’ve likely got a bunch of memes in your feed that you don’t yet understand. But don’t let that be the reason you go see this truly awesome movie from Jordan Peele (of Key & Peele fame); go see this movie because it’s clever, subversive and downright entertaining.
Get Out does what any great horror movie does: it takes contemporary social anxieties and mutates them into a terrifying scenario that is mostly unrealistic with just a smidgeon of plausibility. When The Lost Boys came out in 1987, nobody actually thought there were groups of leather-clad young men roaming the streets at night sucking blood and turning people into vampires. Buuuut, the HIV/AIDS epidemic at that time did have a stranglehold on urban America and the fear mongering was in full effect on every nightly newscast. The terror of “tainted blood” and the stereotypical leather daddy of homosexual subculture was an all-too-real social phobia.
So what is the social phobia/commentary fuelling Get Out? Racism. And with the newly elected… (hmmm, what’s the opposite word for ‘leader’)… ‘person in charge’ down south, boy did this movie time its release for the perfect moment. From the titular nod to xenophobic immigration policy, to lines like “I would’ve voted for Obama again if I could,” to a scene that is able to highlight Hitler’s most embarrassing moment as a supremacist, Get Out absolutely nails the current mood toward racism, which is to say: you laugh when you feel awkward, you cheer when a white guy gets his comeuppance, and you cringe when you recognize some of your family tree in the film’s cast of characters.
I won’t spoil any of the movie that hasn’t already been spoiled online, because Get Out is chock-full of clever background details, easter eggs and hints that are more fun to realize once its over, but I will say that Get Out is the exact type of multi-layered film experience that warrants more than one viewing.
