Get Out (2017)
Directed by Jordan Peele
Chris and his girlfriend Rose go upstate to visit her parents for the weekend. At first, Chris reads the family's overly accommodating behavior as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter's interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries lead him to a truth that he never could have imagined.
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What critics say influenced Get Out
Get Out takes the initial premise of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and then twists it with The Stepford Wives to create a compelling, thoughtful critique of white power.
That is part of Get Out ’s problem and the joy of the film: the work is its own “thinkpiece,” while borrowing genre notes from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner , The Stepford Wives, and Being John Malkovich .
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” meets “The Stepford Wives” in “ Get Out ,” in which a white girl brings her black boyfriend home to meet her parents, whose superficially warm welcome masks an unthinkably dark secret.
Suffice it to say that Peele has created his own horror-fied version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner that fearlessly goes for broke in a third act that ratchets up the insanity of Chris’ predicament.
A popular reference I’ve seen pointed out is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), though I would update its mention by acknowledging The Dinner Game (1998) in the same breath.
It certainly takes cues from cinematic history, and could be elevator pitched as "The Stepford Wives meets Guess Who's Coming To Dinner," but with a playful sense of tone, amazing performances, and a sharp bite, it resonates with you long after you've left the theater.
To be fair, Peele is clearly riffing on some films he has seen before, including “The Stepford Wives” and “ Rosemary’s Baby ,” although with a charged, racial twist.
Rose’s parents throw a party for their wealthy white neighbors, who show up looking like Satanic extras from “Rosemary’s Baby,” and who proceed to assail Chris with their country-club manners and moronic attempts at conversation.
Cinematically, Peele draws influences from The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby and anything where a secret collective hides behind their portrait of cheery perfection.
“Get Out” is a cutting-edge, fresh and sometimes bat-bleep-crazy mash-up of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives,” with dashes of John Carpenter’s “They Live,” among other films, mixed in for good measure.
Writer-director Jordan Peele is best known as a comedian (he was the Peele in Comedy Central's Key & Peele), but he is also a horror-movie fiend, and is aiming here for the escalating, vise-tightening tension of movies he’s admired (his influences include Rosemary’s Baby, and he’s named his female lead Rose).
Just as “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives” transformed the genre into panicky feminist fantasias, this becomes a mind trip of interracial mistrust.
One has to wonder whether Peele is a fan of Brian Yuzna’s 1989 “Society” and Wes Craven’s 1991 “The People Under the Stairs,” since there are echoes of both here.
It’s the kind of film that couldn’t come from within the Hollywood machine (see: George Clooney’s Oscar acceptance speech), and, considering that it has been twenty-five years since Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs , one of the paltry few horror movies with a black lead which acts as a direct commentary on white suburbia, it’s long overdue.
(The Stepford Wives is the obvious reference point, but it might also remind you of, say, The People Under the Stairs.)
Wes Craven patterning the inner city-exploiting villains of The People Under the Stairs after Ronald and Nancy Reagan, for instance, was clearly a conscious choice.
Like the equally memorable opening scene of the recent horror movie It Follows , the initial moments of Get Out are a reminder that no matter how domestic and low-key the film becomes at other times, it’s first and foremost a horror movie, with an agenda of unsettling the audience, then scaring the hell out of them.
The latest in a great craze of social parable horror (It Follows, Under the Shadow), Jordan Peele’s Get Out begins by turning America’s racist-stereotype of “black man as a threat” into a black man threatened.
"Get Out" nestles into similar territory as recent auteur horror films "It Follows" and "The Witch," which transcend the genre by blending classical dread and shocks with comedy and/or big ideas.
The social critique has lately felt more pointed than usual, with recent popular horror movies about sex ( It Follows , The Witch ), motherhood ( The Babadook ), bullying ( Unfriended ), and even white supremacy ( Green Room ) reminding us that what counts as horror is often simply a matter of who we are.
At the same time, good horror films still preserve visceral terrors: the creepalicious soundtrack of Marienbad , the inexorable march of death in It Follows , and the primal superstition in Babadook that words have more than symbolic power.
A night-time sequence, in which Walter runs out of the darkness towards Chris, has the same sense of American gothic dread as David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows , while the humour vacillates between the broader strokes of Rusty Cundieff’s underrated Tales from the Hood and the insidious cruelty of Lars von Trier’s Manderlay .
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And he demonstrates few first-feature jitters, establishing his confidence behind the camera in an opening abduction that puts a culturally pointed spin on the predatory cinematography and deceptively safe residential backdrop of John Carpenter’s Halloween.
We’re meant to think of Halloween .
The opening scene here, with a black kid being stalked on a late-night suburban street, recalls the classic leafy menace of John Carpenter's Halloween ; and parts of the rest of the film echo such earlier fright flicks as Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives .
And, if I may, if Blumhouse is going to support and distribute and support the likes of Get Out and The Purge, I'm very willing to let them have their easy money with a Halloween reboot or whatever becomes of M. Night Shyamalan's Split sequel.
He uses the wide screen like John Carpenter in Halloween, to lull but decenter you.
Peele also draws inspiration from Stanley Kubrick, most obviously when the man in the opening scene compares the suburban streets to “a fucking hedge maze ,” but also in the hallucinatory scenes in which Chris is placed under hypnosis by Rose’s psychiatrist mother (Catherine Keener), which feature images of Chris tumbling off into space that are soundtracked by micropolyphonic chanting reminiscent of the Györgi Ligety music Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey .
This film is reminiscent of Skeleton Key , Stepford Wives and Scream – even giving a nod to the ultimate man of thrillers Alfred Hitchcock, with the music following the opening scene briefly reminiscent of Psycho .
Peele also is inspired by all the right stuff - the something's-not-right vibe of "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Stepford Wives," the insularity and eerie choral soundtrack cues of "Suspiria," nods to "Psycho" taxidermy and "Deliverance" banjo plucking.
Influenced by films like The Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby , Night of the Living Dead and a bit of Psycho , Get Out is a film based on a reality that touches upon a real social climate.
Get Out is searing satire, with scary/comic riffs on slavery and assimilation, but it’s also a smashing crowd-pleaser of a horror film, complete with mad science, cult-like crazies, and a creep-out homage to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.
His economical style is paired with moments of surreal beauty, particularly in his poetic visualisation – perhaps in homage to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin – of a hypnosis session in which Missy kindly offers Chris some free therapy to cure his nasty smoking habit.
Peele takes some pointers from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin to build our sense of queasy apprehension.
He does indeed end up being hypnotized, put into a state that Missy refers to as “the sunken place,” and Peele visualizes it as a vast ocean of darkness, in a touch that recalls the dead-end abysses of Under the Skin while finding its own unique notes of helplessness.
It is not only the best horror film since “Under the Skin” (2013), but a subversive and often hilarious commentary on race as well.
In scenes reminiscent of the underrated 2013 Jonathan Glazer shocker “Under the Skin,” Missy hypnotizes Chris and sends him to an outer-space-like place beneath.
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Peele has counted the thrillers of Ira Levin (writer of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives) among his inspirations, and most of Get Out finds Chris uncertain whether he’s the victim in a horror plot — or whether everyone just acts bizarre around him.
Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives , would have cracked a wry smile at the cackling satire of this chilling “social thriller”, the directorial debut from MadTV alumnus Jordan Peele.
Mashing up Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner with Ira Levin stories like Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives , it’s a sickly hilarious skewering of liberal paternalism in which white condescension reveals sinister ends.
A reconfiguration of 1975’s The Stepford Wives , the Bryan Forbes adaptation of the Ira Levin novel, about a community of white suburban housewives who become hollowed out robots for their passive aggressive husbands, Peele brings his own new twists to a similar idea.
Slivers of Ira Levin's "The Stepford Wives," and a hint of L.Q.
A popular reference I’ve seen pointed out is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), though I would update its mention by acknowledging The Dinner Game (1998) in the same breath.