After their purchase, the cashier insults O-Dog by saying he feels sorry for O-Dog's mother. The reveal is that that suburban blandness is its own specific sort of menace, privilege that must be protected at all costs.Caine Lawson (Tyrin Turner) and his best friend Kevin "O-Dog" Odum (Larenz Tate) enter a local store to buy malt liquor, where the Korean cashier and his wife rush them to buy their beer and leave. (A lacrosse stick has never looked so menacing.) But can I say that Allison Williams is pretty excellent as well? The Girls star’s film debut is a deceptive one, in which she appears to be just another bland suburban white girl before shifting into a much more compelling role. Jones is a nervy, jutting actor, who comes at his scenes from surprising angles you won’t be able to quite figure out what he’s getting at, but it’s terrifying to watch him go about it. The standouts, though, are the Armitage siblings.
CAST OF MENACE TO SOCIETY MOVIE
The movie is splendidly cast from top to bottom, starting with Kaluuya and extending to Keener and Whitford (along with an unnerving small role for Stephen Root). You can’t sneak a societal critique into a slasher flick without ultimately giving the audience the slasher flick they paid for. As a Blumhouse horror film, however, this might just be delivering the goods the audience is there for in the first place. Peele is unerring in setting up the strange world of the Armitages, but relaxes into tropes when Chris needs to escape it. But there is an inevitable letdown when this decidedly unconventional movie settles into more familiar territory.
CAST OF MENACE TO SOCIETY HOW TO
Peele’s a skilled director of all that-he’s got an eye for composition, of how to fill a frame with creepy, unsettling little details.
He’s actually a little better about establishing tension than releasing it: Once the gig is up and we discover precisely why the Armitages and all their neighbors have been acting so curious, the movie turns into a more traditional horror movie, with its obligatory shock-cuts and gore. He never gets bogged down in some sociological polemic.
Peele is smart not to overdo his central metaphor: That the surface gentility of “liberal” whites, the “good ones,” disguises something angry and parasitic. Someone is yelling exactly what the audience is thinking. In a film where almost no one is upfront about their intentions, the primal scream of “Get Out!!!!” stirs the movie up. The title of the movie is only said once in the film, but it’s a moment of extreme urgency. If anything, Chris underreacts to what’s happening, which is another point of the movie: There’s constant pressure on Chris, from all sides, for him to let go of his reservations, to accept that the Armitage family’s behavior is normal, to be polite. As far as horror-comedies go, this is more horror than comedy. But it’s clear that something is happening: Chris is the most normal person here, and we’re not given any reason to doubt him. You’re never quite sure what’s going on at that upstate home, whether everyone’s involved in some larger sinister plot or if it can all be chalked up to awkward misunderstandings. This is a movie that is meant to unsettle, and its occasional impersonations of a traditional comedy only work to serve that purpose. The movie is clever both in conception and execution, but there aren’t that many belly-laugh moments: As far as horror-comedies go, this is more horror than comedy. Chris warns her that it’s a mistake that she hasn’t told them he’s black, but she tells him he’s being silly: They’re the least racist people in the world! And when he meets her parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener), they’re friendly and welcoming and pleased to have him, even as Dad keeps putting his foot in his mouth every time he tries to address (or tries to avoid addressing) Chris’s race. The film, written and directed by Key & Peele’s Jordan Peele, introduces Chris (in an instant star-making performance by British actor Daniel Kaluuya) and his girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) as they are preparing to visit her family in the suburbs. Get Out gives Chris every reason to be nervous. They don’t have a racist bone in their bodies. Everywhere our hero Chris turns, there is a reassuring white face telling him everything’s going to be OK, that nothing odd is afoot, that he’s overreacting to the increasingly strange and terrible things that are coalescing directly around him. Of the many magic tricks that Get Out pulls off, the most impressive one is how it turns the smiling face of a friendly white person-who’s just here to help, who happily voted for Barack Obama twice-into a rictus grin as terrifying as a Michael Myers mask.