'Get Out' Review Roundup: Nothing but Love for Jordan Peele's Racially Charged Horror Movie
Jordan Peele’s new horror movie, Get Out isn’t just getting strong reviews — it’s getting some of the best notices in recent years. With a perfect 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes (as of Friday morning), the actor-turned-director has apparently hit the sweet spot between scares, laughs, and sociopolitical satire with his tale of a mixed-race couple (Girls’ Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya) who visit her family’s upper-crust white neighborhood, where things take a decidedly nasty turn. Even in a crowded multiplex field, the critical consensus is clear: This is one movie worth leaving the house for this weekend.
Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
“In Get Out, an exhilaratingly smart and scary freakout about a black man in a white nightmare, the laughs come easily and then go in for the kill. The writer and director, Jordan Peele (of the comedy sketch show Key & Peele), knows how to make shadowy streets into menacing ones and turn silences into warnings from the abyss. His greatest stroke in Get Out, though, is to have hitched these genre elements to an evil that isn’t obscured by a hockey mask, but instead throws open its arms with a warm smile while enthusiastically (and strangely) expressing its love for President Obama.”
Related: Jordan Peele Shows Us How He Directed Get Out Scenes as Tracy Morgan, Forest Whitaker, and Barack Obama
Peter Debruge, Variety
“Blending race-savvy satire with horror to especially potent effect, this bombshell social critique from first-time director Jordan Peele proves positively fearless — which is not at all the same thing as scareless. In fact, from the steady joy-buzzer thrills to its terrifying notion of a new way that white people have found to perpetuate the peculiar institution of slavery, Get Out delivers plenty to frighten and enrage audiences.
John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
“When the film moves out of the paranoiac realm and into action, the violence is deeply satisfying, the twists delightful. Any teenager with a bucket of popcorn will get his money’s worth. But Peele, a biracial man whose comic sketches have taken race-relations humor to surprising new places, doesn’t stop there.”
Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
“Part of the thrill of Get Out — a thrill that springs from a place of very real, entirely justified anger — is that it feels like a long-overdue response to Hollywood’s collective failure. This is surely the nerviest, most confrontational treatment of race in America to emerge from a major studio in years, and it brilliantly fulfills the duty of both its chosen genres — the horror-thriller and the social satire — to meaningfully reflect a culture’s latent fears and anxieties.”
Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“The writer and director Jordan Peele (of Key & Peele) develops a brilliantly satirical horror comedy that pierces the sensitive points of American race relations with surgical precision and destroys comforting illusions with radical ferocity. … Peele’s perfectly tuned cast and deft camera work unleash his uproarious humor along with his political fury; with his first film, he’s already an American Bu?uel.”
Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly
“Pulling off a premise like this is a lot harder than it seems. And Peele, in just his first film behind the camera, is in total control of the film’s tricky tone. At least, early on. Get Out manages to walk the tight rope between being laugh-out-loud funny and genuinely scary at times. … Peele is undeniably a born filmmaker with big ambitions and an even bigger set of balls. He’s made a horror movie whose biggest jolts have nothing to do with blood or bodies, but rather with big ideas.”
Watch Peele talk about his horror influences:
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