Review – Get Out

2016 was a spectacular year for horror films, giving us a number of smart, violent, scary films unlike any we had seen before.  If Get Out is any indication of the horror movies we are going to get in 2017, we are in for an even better year.

Get Out is a wildly original, incredibly smart, genuinely scary, and twistedly funny horror film with an uncomfortable amount of realism.

In Get Out, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black man, goes to his girlfriend’s (Allison Williams) incredibly white family’s home for the weekend.  While there, Chris’s weekend goes from awkward to terrifying as he finds out that these people aren’t who they seem to be.

Writer/director Jordan Peele, known as one half of the comedy duo Key & Peele, knocks it out of the park in his feature film debut.  You can tell Peele has done his homework on the horror genre, as he made a classic slow burning, tension builder.  He knows exactly how to crawl under our skin and make us feel uncomfortable, and Peele keeps this tension up for the entire runtime until shocking, bloody end.  As far as pure horror films go, Peele kills it.

The films greatest success is the intelligence in it’s themes.  Peele has made a movie about modern racism, classism, and slavery.  The tension, violence, and classic horror movie tropes do their job in terms of fright, but what’s scarier is the film’s realism.  This is a reflection of modern America and it is a horrifying image.  Peele shows us the Black-American perspective in the most unique and genius way possible.  Sure, the overall story and David Lynch-like plot might be unrealistic, but what it represents hits hard and true.  This shows the alt-white America that still believe they are the superior race, where they see an African-American’s stature, gifts, and swagger and want them for themselves or want to be them.  This isn’t too far out of the realm of reality of the world we currently live in and that is what’s even scarier than any blood and suspense.

Get Out will stand out as one of the best horror movies of 2016.  It is a tightly wound thriller with relevant social messages and the perfect amount of scares and violence.  Jordan Peele has made his mark on the cinematic universe and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

MY RATING – 3/4

Did you see Get Out?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.