This is a hard movie to search the forums for, so if there’s another thread on the topic, can this one be closed, please?
If not, however, I wanna recommend this movie. Setting aside for a moment the razor-sharp social commentary, it’s probably the best-written and most intricate horror movie I’ve ever seen–if not the best, certainly way up there. (I’m thinking The Orphanage is in a similar category).
Have others seen it?
Horror is a genre that I have absolutely zero interest in most of the time, but I thought Get Out was amazing. Hilarious, tense, and genuinely terrifying, all while expertly maintaining a thoroughly creepy atmosphere amidst some brilliant satire.
…and you needed to see it to understand all the funny Ben Carson #GetOut Twitter memes.
Me, I was just plain excited when I heard a great comedian was making a horror movie. I knew there’d be some magic happening as soon as I heard about this project. I wasn’t disappointed.
There’s at least one existing thread about it (I did a Google search on Cafe Society a week or so ago to read Dopers’ reactions):
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=20043615
As for me, I thought it was fantastic. For perspective, I watched a number of Best Picture Oscar-nominated movies in the days prior to the Academy Awards, and “Get Out” has stuck with me much longer than any of them. The movie provides a lot to think about.
Also, it’s immensely gratifying to see Jordan Peele, who wrote, directed, and produced this movie, succeed so completely in an area beyond straightforward comedy (although K&P definitely approached a lot of their comedy through a race-relations perspective).
Dangit! I searched for “Peele,” figuring that’d show up in any thread about the movie. I was wrong. I’ve asked mods if they could merge the threads.
One of my favorite things about the movie is how so many of the small weird actions from early in the movie make sense in retrospect. The gardener’s freakish midnight run at Chris? That’s actually granddad, the sprinter who lost to Jesse Owens. His girlfriend’s freakout at the cop who wanted to see Chris’s ID? She didn’t want Chris to show up in the system in case of a missing persons report. So much stuff fits together so well.
Embarrassingly, I totally whiffed on the auction sequence until after the movie–when they were holding up bingo cards, I was so stuck in the idea that crazy hypnosis was going on, that I thought the dad was doing some sort of weird hypnotic ritual on everyone there, and it wasn’t until I thought about that scene later that I said, “OOOOoooohhhhhh!!”
But yes–excellent movie!
I saw it yesterday for the second time, and assumed the girlfriend was playing at being the typical clueless liberal. But your explanation makes more sense. And another line that made more sense on a second viewing; when the father, Dean, was showing Chris around the house, he said something about keeping a part of his mother in the kitchen, when Georgina was standing there, with his mother’s brain in her.
BTW, what was up with the early scene outdoors, when Georgina froze as she was pouring the ice tea? It seemed with Georgina that the real woman was fighting to get out from under the grandmother. Perhaps Georgina was one of the first attempts at this surgery, and wasn’t as successful as later ones?
Some people are saying that you can hear a spoon clink against glass right before that moment, but I think they’re reaching.
More likely, it’s what you said. She was one of the first and the procedure wasn’t quite as tight yet. The grandfather invented the procedure, so it’d make sense that he and his wife would be among the first to benefit from it.
Or maybe the real woman was just mentally strong enough to occasionally put up a fight. Or maybe a combination.
I like the symbolism of Stephen Root’s character. The guy who literally doesn’t see race. He sincerely doesn’t see Chris as inferior, but he still sees Chris as expendable. He’s still ok with benefitting from a system that destroys Chris and steals his resources. He’s actually kinda scarier than the others.
I’d like to see that scene again. Given how much other stuff made sense in hindsight, I suspect there’s something that happens to set her off, that it’s not random.
I’m thinking the scene in the bedroom, where she’s staring frozen at Chris, tears streaming down her face, will be nearly unbearable on rewatch, possibly the hardest scene of the film.
Ooh, I like that a lot.
There is definitely a spoon clink in that moment; Catherine Keener does it with her iced tea and that scene establishes the whole motif.
Man, I LOVED this movie and can’t believe more people aren’t talking about it here. The acting is excellent, direction and editing both excellent, soundtrack is perfect, pacing is good; really, I can’t think of anything bad about it. The movie operates really well on both the surface thriller level and symbolic social commentary level. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time and the ending was very satisfying.
There are, I believe, a couple of minor plot discrepancies that don’t quite stand up to the light of day, but I was more than happy to suspend my disbelief (and I didn’t really think about them until afterward - I was completely captivated in the moment.)
I’m curious about the plot discrepancies, and whether we can fanwank them into making sense :).
One plot oddity I wondered about; would the grandparents be happy to be transplanted into the bodies of black people so that they could serve as family servants? Perhaps they only played that role for outsiders, but otherwise didn’t do the grunt work?
Yeah, I thought about that, too. I figured that’s the role they played when victims were around, that the rest of the time, they were “normal” family members.
I hope that this is not read as threadshitting but my wife and I saw it, having heard great things about it, and were both horribly disappointed.
The social commentary was heavy handed and a one note bit not enough to sustain a movie. The twists pretty telegraphed. I could see it as a Black Mirror ep but not one that would be considered a better one.
And on the most minor side … a neurosurgeon does not adjust his mask with his gloved hands and then start a procedure. Sorry a little thing but pretty dumb to have there.
The only part I liked and that made me think was trying to understand what parallel they were trying to go for with the hitting the deer, his mother’s death in a hit and run, and the deer head over the tv. Clearly they were going for something and I did not get it.
Thoughts about that?
I don’t think they are acting as servants. They may be dressing the part, but they’re otherwise doing stereotypical grandparent chores. Grandma cooking and cleaning up around the house. Grandpa chopping wood and fixing things. He even affirms to Chris that he enjoys what he’s doing. We don’t ever see then being subservient or treated as such. We assume their position based on their clothes.
That’s definitely one of the ones I was thinking of. The other black guy (who gets abducted at the beginning) is weird but clearly married to his white wife. He’s basically continuing his old life in his new body. But the grandparents as servants doesn’t really make sense, it just makes for a good surprise twist at the end. I agree it can be fanwanked away as “They only do it when company is around,” but that’s not the impression I got - they’ve got a whole servant set-up going on.
The other thing that was slightly problematic was the “flash triggering a return of the original consciousness.” Did no one think it was a problem inviting a professional photographer up? He’s just wandering around taking pictures of everyone! Sure, it ends up being the phone flash that does it, but still. He’s got this huge camera! Maybe someone wants to mention “No flash, so-and-so gets seizures” or something? This can also be fanwanked away with “they never encountered this problem before,” but that doesn’t really wash. They knew exactly what to do when that guy flipped out.
Again, though, these were minor and did not detract from my enjoyment of the film at all.
Not threadshitting, but sorry you didn’t like it! I noticed the mask thing, and I also pointed out to my wife that if I were a mad scientist getting ready to do a brain transplant, I’d make sure the victim was prepped before opening the patient’s skull. My wife pointed out that mad scientists weren’t always very sane. The whole setup for the surgery reeked of poor planning.
I liked it a lot but wasn’t in LOVE with it like a lot of reviewers were. I thought it was simply a very well made mash-up of a lot of stuff I’ve seen before. Little bits of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Meet The Parents, The Skeleton Key, Stepford Wives, Scream, Truman Show etc.
It was a lot of fun and well worth seeing, just not some ground breaking piece of art. Felt a lot like Cabin in the Woods which by coincidence also starred Bradley Whitford.
Nor does a surgeon use sterile instruments presented to him in a cloth-lined wooden box. Where’s the sterility in that?
As for the bit with the deer, yes, that was a bit odd. I assumed the one over the TV had a camera at the eye, and was used to look at the victim. Also, I noticed a minor goof; the closeup of the TV picture showed the sort of pixelization you’d get on an LCD TV but you wouldn’t get that on an old-fashioned CRT image.
My thought is that the deer is operating on a couple of different levels. First, it’s just a good scare when they hit it with the car. Gives the audience a jump and unsettles Chris a bit. Second, it reminds Chris of the hit and run that killed his mother. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what purpose this served other than helping make him a little more susceptible to the hypnosis later. Susceptible is too strong a word, but I can’t think of another one. What I mean is it’s on his mind and the mother uses it in her hypnosis.
Finally, deer = black people in the eyes of the Armitages. They are trophies to be hunted, then “stuffed” with another consciousness. Remember Bradley Whitford’s rant at the beginning about how much he hates deer and wants to see them eradicated? Replace “deer” with the n-word there and it takes on a whole new (disgusting) flavor.
