Rose (Allison Williams) thinks it’s time to take her boyfriend of five months, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), to meet her parents and family upstate over the weekend. “Do they know I’m black” Chris asks her when they pack. “No. But don’t worry. My father would have voted for Obama for a third time if he could have” she responds.
When they arrive, her parents, Missy and Dean Armitage, seem almost overly accommodating. There isn’t a moment of hesitation, an “oh” reflex of any type. It’s as if it was the most normal thing ever. But it turns out to be an unusual family. Dean is a neurosurgeon, Missy a psychiatrist and hypnotherapist. Soon she offers to break Chris’ habit of smoking by administering a ten-minute hypnosis session. But he declines.
Chris is well adjusted and secure, and he deals with the complicated and stressful situation remarkably well. Soon, however, small discoveries reveal that all is not quite what it seems. The black servants of the Armitages are exhibiting slightly “off” behavior, which he finds puzzling. And telltale signs of something not quite right start escalating when party guests arrive.
Get Out is not a movie about racism or race relations at all, even though it looks that way. Get Out is a thriller and its objective is not to educate us, or make us think. It’s to entertain. There is very little more I can say without spoiling things, so I won’t.
The critics on the Tomatometer gave this a 99, the audience an 88. This is a high rating for a movie where I recognized none of the actors, a movie which I watched not because I was interested about the subject, but because of the rating, and because it was highly recommended to me.
I was thoroughly entertained. I enjoyed the suspense. I appreciated the plot and its crescendo. And when it was done, I said “oh well” and knew I would soon forget all about it.
Not a movie about race? I disagree! The tension builds with the subtle racism and minor (not necessarily intentional) prejudiced actions that people of minority groups encounter every day. This starts with the small interactions with the cop and then later with the family and their friends. Chris (the black guy) couldn’t tell if all of these white people were just making non-intentional racist comments or if they actually were extremely racist and wanted to harm him. Something that this community unfortunately feels all the time.
Then later on in the movie when you realize that Chris is trapped in a room and goes back to his slave roots and literally has to pick cotton (out from the chair) to save himself. The end of the movie then foreshadows to the modern #blacklivesmatter movement when we think the cop is going to shoot him by the car. These are just some examples how I believe racism themes were brilliantly woven into a great horror movie.
Actually, on your points, I agree with you. But it wasn’t about race as I would have thought. There is nothing in this movie concerning race that I didn’t already know and was aware of. No new information. I think he used the race thing to distract us from the actual plot, which in the end didn’t concern itself with the race issue – even though you didn’t realize it until the end.
Good point on the cotton, though. I definitely missed that.