Critics reviews

The new elements of the exchange gain power from the context of a familiar set up. Just as the immortal line late in the movie, "You know I can’t give you the keys, right babe?" has an inevitability that makes it all the more terrifying. The audaciously frank ideas delivered in classical packaging make "Get Out" the most ingenious construction of all the nominees.

I’d say that no screenwriter in 2017 did more while working from scratch than Peele did. . . . Get Out’s script privileges character and situation over allusion; its greatest moments of recognition are rooted in lived, rather than viewed, experience.

For me, there are only three kinds of films — good, bad and occasionally great. "Get Out" is made with the finely honed precision of a master. It transcends genre, as do "Psycho," "Alien" and "Rosemary’s Baby." Most of us go to a movie to laugh, to be moved or to be scared. We want an emotional response and some kind of satisfying closure. "Get Out" delivers on all cylinders. There’s not a wasted frame or moment.

Jordan Peele fashions America's foundational horror story—racism and the history of slavery—into a nightmare of a movie that astonishes and, like no American genre movie before it, truly pulls no punches. . . . What's extraordinary is the way Peele turns genre inside out so that none of it, including our own knowing response, is a laughing matter.

We all got sick of hearing every other weekend all year long about how this or that film addresses our moment, but come on, this is the one. George A. Romero certainly wasn’t the first to tool horror’s conventions into political allegory, but he was one of the best. Peele’s debut helps assuage the loss.

The totality of "Get Out" is so original that it defies labels. It seems to have been thought about daily for years or more, so exact are its meanings, references, compositions, cuts and music cues. Peele's command of historical and literary symbolism is so complete that he can free-associate even as his script is taking care of business. So many details here have an audacious charge that goes beyond character-building to connect with something larger and more alarming.

One of the marvelous tricks of Jordan Peele's debut feature, Get Out, is to reverse these constituencies, revealing two separate planets of American fear—separate but not equal. One side can claim a long, distinguished cinematic history: Why should I fear the black man in the city? The second, though not entirely unknown (Deliverance, The Wicker Man), is certainly more obscure: Why should I fear the white man in the woods?

Get ready then for a movie that plunges into white insecurities about black sexuality and the lingering toxicity of slavery on the national psyche with such candour you'd probably have to go back decades to Richard Fleischer's Mandingo (1975) and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's images of athletic African-American men to find anything more contentious.

Conceived in the waning days of Barack Obama's presidency and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, four days after Donald Trump assumed power, the comedian Jordan Peele's semi-parodic horror film Get Out has a complexity worthy of its historical moment.

Daniel Kaluuya's face clenches with unease from start to finish. How could he detect a conspiracy within a smokescreen of implicit racism? Peele lines the film with satire and coils it around motifs like teacups, photography, and dead or dying deer. He quotes (and inverts) images from I Walked with a Zombie and The Shining. Get Out gooses the audience with traditional thrills while also inducing a deep and lasting discomfort.

This thing bites and breaks the skin. How on Earth did this movie get made? ...This is a movie about Black victims of theft. The body-snatcher angle makes it blatant, but it's more than just about the theft of Black bodies, a clear slavery metaphor that this great Esquire article explores better than I could. It's also about the theft of achievement, the theft of culture and the theft of myths that were originally conjured up by the same folks now trying to commandeer the hype.

It's bursting, roiling with ideas, but at the center of the maelstrom is a question: What do white people want from us? ...Peele plays a lot of black folks' hangups and internalized oppression like a fiddle. This includes the psychology stigma. The Sunken Place is all that suppressed shit that paralyzes us. It's also a handy metaphor for being "woke" yet powerless to act.