Get Out

Saw Get Out, the horror movie that launched many articles about Black Horror. To catch folks up in case (like me) they slept through 2017, the film is about a black guy who is dating this white girl. They live in a city but she wants him to visit her rich and fancy family out in the countryside. He is understandably nervous about how they'll react to him, but the girlfriend is so wonderful and he wants it to work out. The family is friendly, although they have black 'servants' who are themselves deeply creepy and manic. Since this is a horror movie and all, things get worse from there.

I really liked the girlfriend character. She's alternately super-woke and oblivious. At one point she starts a fight with a racist cop who is demanding the licence of the black main character dude (he's just a passenger in the car. No reason to see his licence.) This sort of interaction can be life-threatening to black men however and is scary for the main character, even though he admires her bravery afterwards. Later on in the movie however, she refuses to believe that some black folks don't like interracial relationships. It's all to a larger narrative purpose in the end, but I liked that she was a less-than-perfect ally. Of course she is the source of much horror-movie incompetence (how hard is it to believe your boyfriend oh my god?)

I also liked that this was a psychological horror. The film is blessedly free of serious jump scares and deals with a horror that is simultaneously easier and harder to bear. The film deals with how black people are erased and exploited by white folks. There's an amazing and profound indifference that the baddies have about what they're doing. Even before the grand scheme is revealed, they talk about him like a piece of meat (one of the girlfriend's relatives asks if "it's true, what they say about black men?" Ew.) As one of them explains near the end of the film: they bear the main character no ill will, they just need him and don't particularly care about how he feels about that. Great! Chilling! True!

The film is clever and interesting, first putting you in the shoes of a guy who is very out of place at the lamest party in the world, and then watching as that party slowly and hungrily turns on him. I think the only thing I didn't like was a scene where one of the creepy servants charges at the main character for no reason. It felt a little too silly, horror-movie-land for me. I also didn't like the comic relief character (killjoy that I am) but these are minor things in a very clever, good film.