Get Out
Year: 2017
Rating: R
Length: 104 minutes / 1.73 hours

I’ll admit that I’m not a fan of horror films. The fact that Get Out (2017) was released in that weird, “horror month” of February that merely exists so people trying to catch up on their Oscar nominations don’t have to watch anything new meant that it mostly passed under my radar. When buzz about the movie continued for the rest of the year, I was still skeptical as horror has been known for its cheap tricks and gratuitous violence, both of which I don’t particularly care for. The trick is, Get Out is certainly a horror film, but with the minimum required trappings to be considered one.

With a few jump scares and a violent and bloody ending, Get Out works on a level that’s best described as “blatantly subtle.” It’s not so much that it screams about the racial differences between black people and white people, but that it does so in a way that’s almost natural and unnoticed. So much of the movie highlights some of the weird and eye-rolling habits and likes of white people that you’d likely miss them if you blinked. Of course, this highlights the terror of the premise, but the comedy in this film helps to break up these moments with some levity to give the audience a break.

Even though I was aware of the premise and some of the major plot points before watching Get Out, I was still surprised by how everything connected. The strength of the plot is held together by a number of parallel themes and motifs that give the audience credit for paying attention and seeing how they interweave with the characters’ past and motivations. People have praised neophyte director Jordan Peele for this piece of work, but I think he just saw the formula for this type of movie, distilled it down to its fundamental elements, and made it something all his own.

A smart, thrilling, and poignant film breaking through the “same old business” in Hollywood, I give Get Out 5.0 stars out of 5.