It’s not until Chris recognizes that the guy who’s been missing from his neighborhood for months is residing in the suburb, married to a white woman twice his age seemingly against his will, that Chris knows something is very wrong. He tries to keep it together even after he’s convinced he’s in fact been hypnotized and nearly assaulted by their groundskeeper, Walter (Marcus Henderson). When Missy offers to treat Chris of his nicotine habit via hypnotism, he is weirded out but passes it off as an oddity. As we do, Chris takes it in stride, and even comforts Rose like her eyes are being opened to her family when it seems ’s racial microagressions for the first time. They're the kind of interactions that are awkward any black person in the audience would expect out of the situation. Chris is led by them past their black help, a maid and a groundskeeper, and burden him with their white guilt that is performative. Her surgeon dad, Dean, and hypnotherapist mommy, Missy, pepper Chris with questions and try and build their anti-racist cred by telling him how many times they voted for Obama.
The film starts with Chris traveling home for the weekend to meet his girlfriend Rose’s parents who live on the set of a horror movie - excuse me: in a secluded, wooded, mainly white suburb. We’re all keenly conscious of how possible it is. Peele brings Get Out to a higher level of horror, at least for any person of color in the audience in using both truths in his film. They’re things we’re still prone to run into in film, books, or television instead of in our everyday lives.
As scary as any of those things are, they’re tropes we can all comprehend for the most part.
There’s hypnotism, multiple hop-scares, a Deliverance-style redneck, and an illicit basement surgery in which a physician works on folks’s brains without their authorization. Get Outside draws on the terrifying components you could expect to see in your typical February horror movie release. I’ll let you decide how offended you are interested in being by that dissertation while I spoil the hell out of the picture. In Escape, writer-director Jordan Peele takes 90 minutes to meditate Kim Kardashian spelled out for America via snake emojis and Taylor Swift: White women should not be believed.