'Get Out': A Terrifically Topical — And Terrifying — Satire 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Justin Lubin/Universal Pictures Justin Lubin/Universal Pictures 
 
 Horror parodies are seldom as funny, and never as scary, as fright-flicks that play their scares, er, straight. Jordan Peele — the shorter half of the 21st century's funniest sketch-comedy duo — understands this, and that's why Get Out, his debut feature as writer and director, is so truly, madly, mercilessly entertaining, even when it makes you want to jump out of your skin. It is small-c catholic in its tastes, liberally sampling elements of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Rosemary's Baby and Invasion of the Body Snatchers before morphing into the most potent racial revenge fantasy since Django Unchained. But a parody it's not: It's as gnarly as Green Room, 2016's nerviest thriller, whose villains wore their bigotry on their tattooed arms. What makes Get Out stand out is that its social critique — usually present in the horror-survival genre as subtext — is very much its text. 
 
 That's a writing trick Peele and his creative partner, Keegan-Michael Key, used over and over again through five seasons of their marvelous Comedy Central series, one that boasted production values that stood head and shoulders above anything else in sketch TV. Key & Peele's movie sendups looked like real movies, and now we have a good idea why: Peele is a world-class filmmaker. (Nearly all Key & Peele episodes were directed by Peter Atencio, who also directed the two comics in last year's Keanu. That was a funny movie, but it had nothing like the invention, the intensity or the shimmering, righteous anger that Get Out possesses.) His movie is as much a triumph of craft as of inspiration. 
 
 Get Out's cautionary tale concerns Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a 26-year-old photographer, whose white girlfriend, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams from HBO's Girls, though her carbon-fiber jawline makes you wonder how she hasn't shown up in an Alien sequel yet), takes him home to meet her affluent parents. She hasn't told them the man she is dating is black, but she assures Chris their liberal credentials are in good standing and that he'll be welcomed unconditionally. Chris is wary, but he loves Rose and trusts her, so he overrules his better judgment — and the warnings of his TSA agent best pal, Rod (LilRel Howery, marvelous in a comic supporting role) — and they drive upstate. When a cop demands Chris's ID after a minor accident even though Rose was the one driving, Rose calls out the cop for profiling even though Chris is eager to comply. In Rose, it seems, Chris has found a true and constant ally. 
 
 The less I tell you about what happens once she introduces Chris to her folks — Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford, perfectly cast as a smug psychiatrist and a smug neurosurgeon, respectively — the better. Let it suffice to say that Allison's louche med-student brother (Caleb Landry Jones) can't refrain from commenting admiringly on Chris's "genetic makeup" and that the Armitages are weirdly insistent Chris meet every one of their neighbors, one of whom cheerfully observes that "black is in fashion again." Green Room's gaptoothed skinheads had nothing on these cardigan-wearing, tea-sipping Clinton voters. Even more unsettling is the fact that the Armitages' black housekeeper (Betty Gabriel) and their black gardener/handyman (Marcus Henderson) evince a Stepford-like servility when they're around company and behave even more strangely when they think they're alone. 
 
 But it takes a long time for the microaggressions Chris experiences at the hands of the Armitages and their confederates to harden into something more directly threatening — long enough for Chris, and for us, to wonder if he's just being paranoid. Rose listens to him airing these concerns with saintly patience, but Peele's handheld camera in these scenes keeps the anxiety high. It's rare to find a first-time director so fully in command of his tone. But if 90 percent of directing is casting (an adage that's been variously ascribed to John Ford, Elia Kazan and many others) then Peele started at 90: His actors are top-to-bottom great, but Kaluuya (whose expressive face you may recall from "15 Million Merits," perhaps the most upsetting of all Black Mirror episodes) is especially magnetic, letting us see the grinding gearworks behind his eyes without speaking a word. 
 
 That other 10 percent we have to give to Peele. He opens the picture with a long steadicam shot of a young black man's attempt to locate an address in a suburban, presumably majority-white neighborhood after dark, while a car creeps along too slowly beside him. We're primed to expect a Trayvon Martin-esque killing, and the way the scene resolves is the first of Peele's many rug-pulls. It's a powerful sequence, but Get Out might've been even stronger without it. This prologue seems inserted to pre-empt complaints that Get Out takes too long to Get Going. It doesn't. Its pace, like everything else about it, is just right. 
 
 And righteous. ||||| Justin Lubin © 2016 Universal Pictures 
 
 You need no more than a passing knowledge of horror movie tropes to immediately recognize the opening scene of writer-director Jordan Peele’s horror satire Get Out. And you need no more than a passing awareness of the past five years’ news cycle—or what it’s like to inhabit a black body in America—to immediately recognize the way in which Peele cleverly repurposes those tropes. A young black man (perennial scene-stealer Lakeith Stanfield) walks down the dimly lit sidewalk of a quiet suburban street, fumbling around on his cellphone for directions to his destination. A white car suddenly appears and begins to creep alongside him, gently playing the 1939 novelty song “Run, Rabbit, Run” by English comedy duo Flanagan and Allen. Instantly, his defenses are triggered. “Nope. Not today,” he mutters anxiously to himself, turning back the other way. “You know how they like to do motherfuckers out here.” But, not unlike the black teen whose name became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, he can’t avoid trouble. A masked individual exits the vehicle, attacks, and drags him toward the car. 
 
 This is the essence of Get Out, which only grows more darkly relevant as the main story gets going, masterfully unfurling all of the real-life anxieties of Existing While Black while simultaneously mining that situation for all its twisted absurdity. Rising English actor Daniel Kaluuya stars as Chris, a photographer who is about to embark on a weekend trip in upstate New York to meet his white girlfriend’s family for the first time. This girlfriend, Rose, is played by Girls’ Allison Williams, whose on-screen persona as one of the foremost basic Beckys of the millennial generation has never before been put to such pitch-perfect use. And so it’s no surprise that Chris is a bit worried that she hasn’t mentioned to her parents that her boyfriend is black, or that she’s utterly oblivious to his concerns, insisting that “they are not racist.” (After all, she explains, her dad would have voted for Barack Obama a third time if he could have.) 
 
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 If you’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, or Night of the Living Dead—all touchstones that Peele has cited as influences on his screenplay—you probably have a good idea of where things go from here. When Chris and Rose arrive, her parents’ estate is a mansion-size symbol of white affluence buried deep in the woods, while their zombielike black groundskeeper and maid seem to be possessed by the spirit of Uncle Tom. Peele puts the audience directly into Chris’ shoes as he navigates this new world that is at once utterly strange and all too familiar to him. He’s accustomed to the kind of casual racism tossed off by every white person he meets that weekend, whether it’s from Rose’s family or the prying guests that stop by for the family’s (initially) mysterious annual gathering. (“Is it true? Is it … better?” an older lady asks Rose immediately after fondling Chris’ biceps.) Yet he’s bewildered by the uncanny subservience of the only other black people he encounters. “It’s like they missed the movement,” Chris confides over the phone to his best friend Rod, a TSA agent, when he is able to slip away from the crowd. (As Rod, The Carmichael Show star Lil Rel Howery expertly serves as both comic relief and a surrogate for black audience members, warning Chris about the dangers of being around too many white people in an unfamiliar environment.) 
 
 Conspiracy Thrillers Movie Club Join Slate’s Sam Adams and leading culture critics as they watch and review some of the best conspiracy thrillers of the past decades, from The Manchurian Candidate to Get Out. 
 
 Peele also draws inspiration from Stanley Kubrick, most obviously when the man in the opening scene compares the suburban streets to “a fucking hedge maze,” but also in the hallucinatory scenes in which Chris is placed under hypnosis by Rose’s psychiatrist mother (Catherine Keener), which feature images of Chris tumbling off into space that are soundtracked by micropolyphonic chanting reminiscent of the Györgi Ligety music Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But for all its nods to its horror forebears, Get Out, above all, wants to ensure that you walk away knowing that the black experience can still teeter on the precipice of being a nightmare, even in 2017. That even surface-level “admiration” for black culture on the part of white people can give way to insidious interactions that are, at best, a persistent annoyance black people must learn to laugh off, and, at worst, the kind of fetishization that only conceals deadlier preconceptions. 
 
 Get Slate in your inbox. ||||| A memorable horror flick if ever there was one, “Get Out” starts with a great title and a promising idea—a black man’s fear as he walks at night down a street in an affluent white suburb. Then it delivers on that promise with explosive brilliance. Jordan Peele’s debut feature scrupulously honors the genre’s conventions. It’s creepy, funny and scary—truly scary. What makes it so special, despite some obvious flaws, is its prime location at the intersection of horror and race. No preachments are preached, no parables are dwelled on. This film never strays from the path of entertainment, yet the horrors of racism lurk in... ||||| Jordan Peele’s Get Out will become the fastest Blumhouse title to cross the $100 million mark, hitting the target in 16 days and beating Split (19 days), Paranormal Activity 3 (23 days) and Paranormal Activity (50 days). 
 
 The Universal release, which cost only an estimated $4.5M before P&A, crosses the mark tonight, and by tomorrow will have accumulated $111M. 
 
 As a horror movie, Get Out is truly an exception. Most genre films drop in the second weekend by at least 60% and are front-loaded. But Get Out continues to impress with only slight dips. Last weekend, the movie eased a jawdropping 15% for $28M (the best hold for a horror film since Dracula 2000), and this weekend Get Out is set to pull in $21M, just 24% down. In these diving Trump times, many rival distributors observe that Get Out hits a nerve with the audience, and that’s why audiences keep coming back (even though Peele, who wrote, doesn’t appear in the hysterical movie). 
 
 Get Out tells the story of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) an African American young man who goes to meet his white girlfriend’s (Allison Williams) family (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener) for the first time. But they’re not normal people, and Chris needs to Get Out of their house. 
 
 Peele initially moved forward with the movie when he pitched it to QC Entertainment’s Sean McKittrick. Edward H. Hamm is also a producer. 
 
 At the Sundance Film Festival where Get Out was the secret screening, Peele shared his inspirations for the film: “We had this black president and we’re living in this post-racial lie. This whole idea that we’ve passed it all. For me, and many black people out there, there’s racism. I experience it on an everyday basis. This movie was meant to reveal that there’s the monster of racism lurking underneath these seemingly innocent conversations and situations. It’s been fascinating watching the last few years develop, because now the movie is coming out in a very different America from where it began. I think it’s more important now, and far more interesting now. I respect Universal for having the f*cking balls leaning into this kind of sh*t.” 
 
 Peele produced the movie through his Monkeypaw Productions. The pic begins its overseas rollout on March 17. Get Out earned an A- CinemaScore –a very rare feat for a horror film– with critics embracing it with a 99% certified fresh Rotten Tomatoes score.
– A young black man ventures to white suburbia to meet his girlfriend's parents but soon realizes he better Get Out in the first feature film from director Jordan Peele of comedic duo Key & Peele. (He also wrote the script.) The satirical horror film with its fair share of funny moments currently has a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics explain why: It takes "a promising idea—a black man's fear as he walks at night down a street in an affluent white suburb" and "delivers on that promise with explosive brilliance," writes Joe Morgenstern at the Wall Street Journal. "It's creepy, funny and scary—truly scary" and "the horrors of racism lurk in every gleefully lurid frame," adds Morgenstern, who was left wondering how Peele showed "such confident technique" in his directing debut. The main character, Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, comes to recognize the "uncanny subservience of the only other black people he encounters" during his weekend away in this "instant comedy-horror classic about the hilarious nightmare that is existing while black," Aisha Harris writes at Slate. She won't give too much away but says the film, with inspiration from The Stepford Wives and Night of the Living Dead, is "darkly relevant." It's just "so truly, madly, mercilessly entertaining, even when it makes you want to jump out of your skin," Chris Klimek writes at NPR. He agrees "it's rare to find a first-time director so fully in command of his tone," but he also commends a "top-to-bottom great" cast. Kaluuya is "especially magnetic, letting us see the grinding gearworks behind his eyes without speaking a word." Peele said he wanted to make a movie he'd never seen before. "Mission accomplished," writes Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. "For a first-time director, working from his own script, Peele comes up aces … juggling horror and laughs to skewer the hypocrisies of race in America," he writes. He adds Allison Williams is "dynamite," but Kaluuya "is a star in the making."