The whopping success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out has demonstrated that general audiences can appreciate horror movies for their subtext. A thinly veiled commentary on American race relations, Get Out uses the horror genre to dramatize fears about the persecution of African-Americans and the suppression of black identity. Audiences seem to get this (given the film’s courageous forthrightness, it would be surprising if they didn’t), as evidenced by the serious discussions of race that the film has provoked across media and social media alike. In its subversion of genre and its effectiveness as provocation, Get Out feels like a truer heir to Bill Gunn’s great Ganja and Hess (1973) than Spike Lee’s overly reverent remake Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014) did. The difference, perhaps, is that Lee regarded horror primarily as a vehicle to pay tribute to Gunn, whereas Peele respects the genre and uses it to address contemporary anxieties.
For their part, the filmmakers communicate infectious sympathy for the victims of the experiment. The opening scenes, which introduce the office setting and most of the major characters, establish the drudgery of the workplace as well as the employees’ efforts to overcome it. Everyone displays flashes of individuality within the corporate culture, making jokes (few of them are actually funny, but then, the corporate environment doesn’t really give one room to cut loose) and behaving benignly. It helps that the cast contains a bevy of fine character actors—among them Melonie Diaz, Michael Rooker, John C. McGinley, Rusty Schwimmer, and David Dastmalchian—who instinctively add personality to their generally underwritten roles. The cast doesn’t overstate any sense of camaraderie, however. It’s clear that the relationships between employees aren’t friendships so much as alliances against the common enemy of boredom.
