Face-Off: Get Out vs. Us

The quest for eternal life has reached a whole new level in the suburbs of upstate New York, where a secret society has discovered how to place a person's consciousness into the body of someone else. It's called the Coagula procedure, and it involves some hypnosis to trap the consciousness of the reluctant body donor in a dark void called The Sunken Place before the consciousness of the other person is placed in their body through some brain surgery. As the new consciousness takes control, the original person will remain in the Sunken Place, a passenger in their own body, able to do nothing but observe. Peele gives us just enough information to make it clear that being a Coagula donor is an awful thing. The idea of being stuck in the Sunken Place for any amount of time, let alone for the intended decades, is deeply disturbing. 

Daniel Kaluuya earned an Oscar nomination as Chris Washington, a young black man who accompanies his white girlfriend Rose Armitage to her parents' place in upstate New York, unaware that they have Coagula plans for him. Although he notices strange things around the Armitage household, Chris tries to remain as calm and rational as possible because he doesn't want to upset anyone. Eventually things do become upsetting. Along the way we see that Chris is harboring a lot of pain over the loss of his mother, who was killed in a hit and run incident when he was a child. That trauma plays into some of the choices Chris makes in the film, and when we see Chris think back on the night when he lost his mom it is very emotionally effective.

The Armitages seem like a fine bunch of people at first. Rose (Allison Williams) and Chris are in love, and she is shown to be a very supportive and protective girlfriend. Her parents – neurosurgeon Dean (Bradley Whitford) and psychiatrist Missy (Catherine Keener) – happily welcome Chris into their home. Rose's brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) is a bit odd, but that's expected from siblings. The Armitages are very deceptive, though, and are secretly up to some terrible things. As evident from the bodies Dean's parents are living in. Any likeability the Armitages had is out the window by the end of the film, by which time it's clear that these people are monsters.

GET OUT takes the psychological approach, this isn't a slashfest with a high body count. Aside from an opening scene where a character gets knocked out, it saves its violence for the climax – after it has spent most of the running time focusing on paranoia and strange behavior. When the violence hits it's quite satisfying, because it's directed toward characters who deserve some comeuppance. Heads are bashed and stomped, people get stabbed and impaled, there's gunfire and regular fire… And all of this is likely to make you cheer.

Some humor in GET OUT comes from the uncomfortable situations Chris finds himself in with Rose's family and the African Americans he encounters who have elderly white people in their heads, but the majority of the humor comes from the comic relief character Rod, Chris's best friend. TSA agent Rod is able to basically deduce what's going on with Rose's family from the information Chris gives him through phone calls; he thinks people are being brainwashed into being sex slaves, which is close enough. Rod is played by comedian Lil Rel Howery, who is fully in comedy mode here, and I find his performance to be a bit too comedic for this type of movie.