Featured Blu-ray and DVD Review: Get Out
May 23, 2017
Get Out - Buy from Amazon: DVD or Blu-ray Combo Pack
Get Out is inarguably the biggest surprise hit of the year. It earned over $200 million worldwide on just a $5 million budget. It also earned 100% positive reviews. (Armond White doesn’t count, because he’s not a real critic. Roger Ebert himself called Armond White a Troll.) Does the film live up to its success? Is it even medically possible for it to live up to its success?
The film begins with a short prologue, which I’m not going to spoil, even a little, but we soon get to our main cast. ...
Chris Washington and Rose Armitage. They are college students who have been dating for a while. It’s getting serious, because they are going to meet her parents. He’s a little hesitant, because she hasn’t told her parents he’s black. He’s worried they will freak out, but she assures him that they are not racist and it will be cool. She does warn him that her dad will want to talk to him about Obama.
On the way there, Rose tries to convince Chris to stop smoking, while Chris calls his friend, Rod, to thank him for pet-sitting. Shortly after that, they have a fatal encounter with a deer. This has a deep effect on Chris, for reasons we’ll find about later. Meanwhile, she calls the cops, rather than animal control, which would have been the correct choice. When the cop asks for Chris’s driver’s license, even though it was Rose who was driving, Rose gets very defensive of Chris.
When the pair get to Rose’s parents, Dean and Missy, they are just as cool with Chris as Rose said they would be. (Although the groundskeeper, Walter, who is an African-American man, does act a little strange.) When Rose tells them about hitting the deer, Dean goes on a lighthearted rant about his hatred of deer. It’s the first dad joke he tells, mostly to annoy Rose and Missy. Dean then gives Chris a tour. Missy is a psychiatrist and she meets with patients in the home. Dean is a doctor, while his son, Jeremy, is in med school. They are a very successful family. In fact, Dean’s father just missed out becoming an Olympic athlete. He failed to qualify for the 1936 Olympics, being beaten out by Jesse Owens. The 1936 Olympics were the ones hosted by Adolf Hitler. During the tour, they also meet Georgina, their housekeeper. Their Black housekeeper. (She also acts odd.) Dean points out how cliché it is for rich White people to have Black servants, but he hired the two when his parents were getting old and needed help. When his parents died, he didn’t have the heart to fire Walter and Georgina.
Later that day, Dean and Missy try to get to know Chris. We learn that his mother was a single parent and was killed in a hit and run when he was just 11. During this conversation, Chris gets a little jittery and Dean figures out he’s a smoker. Dean was also a smoker, until Missy cured him using a hypnotism technique she developed. Now he can’t even look at a cigarette without getting nauseous. Dean offers her service, but Chris declines and Rose points out this is why she doesn’t bring people over. Shortly afterwards, Jeremy returns home and at dinner tells embarrassing stories about Rose, much to the delight of Chris. Later than night, Rose apologizes for her family’s behavior.
That night, Chris wakes up and goes outside for a smoke, but before he can even pull a cigarette out, he encounters Walter running like people are chasing him. There’s no one out there besides them and Walter doesn’t even act like Chris is there. He then sees Georgina staring out of a window. Going back inside, he bumps into Missy who wants to talk to him some more about her technique to quit smoking. Without telling him what she’s doing she hypnotizes him and sends him to the Sunken Place... then he wakes up from this nightmare.
Or was it a nightmare?
With that cheesy line, I’m going to call the plot summary done. Very little of the plot has been setup, but it is enough to get the general sense of the slow-burning tension being generated. Furthermore, I certainly don’t want to spoil anything beyond what you might have seen in trailers and other promotional material.
Get Out is inarguably the most tense horror movie I’ve seen in years. Every bit of this film works in ratcheting up the tension, while including razor sharp political and social commentary. It’s this latter aspect that turns the film from a great horror movie intro a great film, period. Genre films, like science fiction, fantasy, and horror, have always benefited from the inclusion of political and social themes, assuming they are done right. Done wrong, it can turn a good story into something painful to watch. Star Trek, in all its forms, has many examples of both. Here, Jordan Peele takes elements of White guilt, cultural appropriation, etc. and weaves them into a terrifying narrative that uses elements of some classics in the genre. (Again, not going to mention specifics.) Furthermore, he brings in some of his comedic sensibilities, which helps sharpen the social commentary. The combination of social satire and horror makes this movie an instant classic.
The fact that Jordan Peele’s script is impressive is not that surprising, as he’s been writing comedy for over a decade. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, comedy is hard. It is a lot harder to get comedy right than it is to do drama, but for some reason, comedy isn’t given the same level of prestige. His comedic timing was perfectly suited to horror, as the two genres share similar beats. The timing used in setup-to-punchline is equivalent to the timing used to generate a great scare. On the other hand, I was shocked at how good his directing is. This is his directorial debut, and I don’t mean feature-length directorial debut. He didn’t even direct episodes of Key and Peele. Clearly he’s a natural. He was aided by a very impressive cast. This is one of the advantages an actor has when making their directorial debut; they have more clout than the average first-time director and can more easily get top-level talent. There’s not a single bad performance in this movie.
If I were to look for a fault in the movie, it would be the balance between social commentary and horror, which is tilted a little towards the social commentary. This makes it a more important movie, but will perhaps turn off those just looking for a scary movie.
Extras begin with an audio commentary track with Jordan Peele. There is also an alternative ending, with optional audio commentary. I’m so glad they didn’t use it, because it pushes it into a really depressing direction. It’s a powerful scene, but I wouldn’t want to watch the movie a second time with this ending. Up next are six deleted / extended / alternative scenes with a total running time of 23 minutes, again with optional audio commentary. Most of the running time is various alternative takes for the ending of the film. There is a 9-minute long making of featurette and finally a 5-minute Q&A session with Jordan Peele and the cast. The extras are about forty minutes in total length, which isn’t bad for a first-run release, but not stellar either.
Get Out is arguably one of the best directorial debuts of all time. It is inarguably one of the best horror films of the past few years. The extras on the DVD and Blu-ray Combo Pack are good, but not great. They are, on the other hand, certainly good enough to be a Pick of the Week contender.
Video on Demand
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The Movie
The Extras
The Verdict
Filed under: Video Review, Get Out, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry-Jones, Daniel Kaluuya, Jordan Peele, Roger Ebert, Allison Williams, Betty Gabriel, Marcus Henderson, Lil Rel Howery