"Get Out": Jordan Peele’s post-racial tale of terror has sharp teeth

In Get Out, the biting new horror feature from writer-director Jordan Peele (one half of sketch comedy duo Key & Peele), the typically fraught milestone of “meeting the parents” comes with an extra dose of skin-crawling unease. Black photographic artist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is wary of spending the weekend with the parents of his white girlfriend of five months, Rose (Allison Williams). Initially, Chris is plagued by typical boyfriend anxieties, albeit with a heaping helping of racial tension. The affluent, lily-white exurb where Rose’s parents live doesn’t exactly put his mind at ease. Ditto Mom and Dad’s (Bradley Whiford and Catherine Keener) tone-deaf obsequiousness, brother Jeremy’s (Caleb Landry Jones) edgy hostility, or the family’s black servants, who seem like dazed refugees from To Kill a Mockingbird. Things get progressively stranger, albeit so gradually that by the time Chris realizes he’s is in grave danger, escape is no longer as simple as walking out the door.

Get Out has an irrepressible satirical side: Its jabs at veiled racism, white liberal cluelessness, and lazy genre tropes are delightfully vicious. In part, the film is a razor-edged rejoinder to (now obviously) paper-thin Obama era platitudes about a “post-racial” America. The film never loses sight of its psychological and survival horror identity, however. Its most direct cinematic antecedents are Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Stepford Wives, but Peele’s influences are manifold, ranging from subversive cult fare like Candyman and The People Under the Stairs to Mira Nair’s pessimistic portraits of interracial assimilation and romance. Admittedly, the story feels a bit padded—a Tales from The Crypt episode drawn out to 100-plus minutes. But Peele’s facility for precise timing and uncanny atmospherics indicates a filmmaker who’s absorbed the work of the genre masters and applied the lessons therein to fresh, stimulating purposes.