Review of Get Out, directed by Jordan Peele

Something I’ve been reminiscing on for several years as a writer and artist is about how we remember the first time we watched a movie that was special to us, or seemed extraordinary in some ways.

The more I talk to people about this, the more I realize that when someone watches a really good movie or television show they’re so much more likely to remember the tiny details about the day they watched that content for the first time.

I certainly remember movies theaters and spaces like this in my own memory, which leads to why I ended up pursuing this question.

Get Out has been one of those movies I keep returning to throughout the years. It was a breakthrough for Peele as a director, but also actors like Kaluuya. I still hold firm after all of these years that this was robbed of the Best Picture Oscar that year (I am not a fan of The Shape of Water), but I remember I was nineteen the first time I watched this movie.

I was just getting into film and wanted to delve deeper into Black cinema, and this was one of my starting points.

Let’s get into the review before I ramble too much!

A Black photographer comes to visit his girlfriend’s family and becomes tangled up in a white conspiracy.

Our protagonist in Get Out is Chris, who is a Brooklyn-born photographer who’s coming to meet his white girlfriend’s family. He knows the rodeo and asks her if her family knows if he’s Black, and she goes through the whole reassurance process where she claims they’re not racist.

Well, as soon as he gets there, he notices that they’re making comments about Black people that definitely lean more into the racist tropes, and Chris notices that the two Black workers at the estate are acting really weird.

The night they arrive, Rose’s mother Missy tries to convince Chris to do hypnotherapy, as his smoking habits might be a problem for them.

She lures him into a trance, where he admits that he might’ve felt guilty about the death of his mother, and he mentally enters the “Sunken Place” of his mind.

He wakes up the next morning, assumes it was all a dream, and then he realizes he doesn’t have the desire to smoke anymore. None of it was a dream.

The family is holding a party, and the wealthiest white people around start showing up to the house. They, too, make weird comments about Chris and Black people, and an older art dealer expresses admiration for Chris’ artistic eye.

When Chris meets a Black man named Logan married to a much older woman, he tries to photograph him for his friend, a TSA Officer, the flash goes off. Logan breaks out of a trance and screams at Chris to get out before he’s restrained. This situation is brushed off by everyone around them as a medical episode.

Rose refuses to leave after Chris tells her they should go. A bingo happens where the art dealer wins after bidding the highest, making it an auction. As it turns out, Chris is the prize.

The TSA Agent friend tells Chris that Logan isn’t his real name and that Logan is actually a missing guy from New York, but the police dismiss his reports. Chris starts packing, then finds pictures of Rose in the room where she’s dating many different Black men and a woman—two of whom are the workers at the house.

He realizes she lied to him, as she had said he was the first guy she had dated.

When he tries to leave though, her family stops him. Missy uses a trigger she planted during hypnosis, and when he wakes up, he’s strapped to a chair. The grandfather of the family has an entire speech about how they actually implant brains in other people’s bodies, specifically Black ones.

The original mind remains in the Sunken Place. Jim is going to be the new mind in Chris’ body. Missy goes to knock him out, but later it’s revealed Chris plugged his ears with cotton.

He knocks Jeremy unconscious, then kills the rest of the family members. When the Black maid attacks him, he realizes its Rose’s grandmother in there, but he has guilt from his mother’s death.

But when she tries to kill him again, he has to kill her too. Rose and Walter approach him next. Walter is the other Black worker, and Chris takes him down with the phone flash. While he cannot kill Rose despite everything that’s happened, his friend shows up to rescue him as Rose bleeds out.

Overall Thoughts

I love Get Out as a movie. It’s full of twists and turns in the most delightful ways possible, making it such a thrilling movie to watch.

Everyone does such a good job throughout in creating this sinister environment that you don’t know what’s going to happen next in, and that’s what makes a great film to me.

It’s not just about acting, direction, and script. It’s all about how everything, from the technical to the artistic elements, comes together to create a comprehensive piece.

This was the movie that sold me on Jordan Peele, and every time one of his movies hits theaters now I watch them.

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