Summary
Dean and Missy remind Rose that it's the weekend of a party they throw every year, a tradition started by Dean's father. "Why didn't you guys tell me about it?" Rose asks, but Missy insists that it's the same day every year. Suddenly, Georgina goes into some kind of trance, and spills iced tea on Chris. "Why don't you go lay down? Just get some rest," Missy tells Georgina, and she does. Suddenly, Rose's brother Jeremy walks up and greets them.
That night, around the dinner table, Jeremy tells Chris about the fact that Rose used to bite her toenails, suck on them, and save them in a jewelry box. Chris laughs, and Jeremy then tells another embarrassing story about Rose having a crush on a tall lacrosse player named Conner and a time they threw a party at the house when Missy and Dean were in Greece. He says that Conner broke into the bathroom during the party with his mouth bleeding, yelling, "Your sister bit my fucking tongue off!" Rose explains that when Conner slipped her some tongue during her first kiss, she bit it in fear.
Missy excuses herself to get dessert, as Dean asks what sport Chris plays. Chris tells him he plays basketball as Jeremy asks him if he is interested in MMA, and if he's ever gotten in street fights. "I did judo after school, first grade," Chris says, and Jeremy gets very intense, telling Chris that if he trained, he could be a "beast," and alluding to the innate strength of black men.
Missy interrupts with a carrot cake, and Jeremy says they were talking about sports, before launching into a monologue about jiu-jitsu, which he argues is not about strength but strategy. Chris looks anxious as Jeremy gets up and tries to fight him. "I've got a rule: no play-fighting with drunk dudes," Chris says, as the other family members discourage Jeremy. Jeremy leaves the room, saying, "I wasn't going to hurt him."
Later, Rose complains to Chris about her family's racism: the fact that her brother tried to fight him, that her dad keeps calling Chris "my man," and the fact that Missy was rude to Georgina. "I mean, how are they different than that cop?" Chris just looks at her knowingly as she apologizes for her family. "Honestly, it's nothing," he says and they kiss. She warns him that the party the next day is going to be so white, and they go to sleep.
That night, Chris cannot sleep and kills a fly buzzing around the room. He gets up and sneaks downstairs with a cigarette. As he walks down the hall, Georgina appears in the background of the shot, also awake, but he does not see her. Outside, Chris takes out a cigarette, when suddenly he sees the groundskeeper, Walter, running towards him. Walter runs directly towards him, then veers to the right, avoiding him. As he turns around, Chris sees Georgina in the doorway, seemingly in a trance, moving her hair to the side. Suddenly, she walks away and Chris lets himself back in the house.
Inside, as he walks past a room, Chris hears Missy say, "Do you realize how dangerous smoking is?" and he sees her in her study. She invites him to sit with her, which he does, and she tells him about her hypnosis, stirring tea as she does. She then asks Chris where he was when his mother died, and as she stirs the tea more quickly, Chris begins to fall under a hypnotic spell.
He tells her he was home watching television when his mother died and when he tells her it was raining that day, Missy tells him to hear it now. We see a flash of Chris as a child watching television on the day his mother died. He begins to cry as Missy brings up how he thinks his mother's death was his fault. "I can't move," he tells Missy, as she instructs him to "sink into the floor." We see Chris fall through the chair and float through space, getting farther and farther away from Missy as he falls.
Tears stream down Chris' face in Missy's office, as Missy tells him, "Now you're in the Sunken Place." Suddenly, he wakes up with a jolt, finding himself back in bed, while Rose takes a shower. His cell phone beeps and he looks at it to find a picture of his dog that Rod sent him.
Outside, Chris takes pictures of the forest. When he walks back towards the house, he sees Georgina looking at herself and tending to her hair in the mirror through a window, and goes to take a picture. As he does, however, she turns abruptly, and he pretends to be photographing something else. When he looks back at the window, she's gone.
Nearby, Walter chops wood, and Chris goes over to talk to him. When Chris notes that they work him hard, Walter turns around, and with a vacant smile says, "Nothing I don't want to be doing." Walter then tells Chris that he is lucky to be with such a wonderful girl as Rose, laughing weirdly. He then apologizes for scaring Chris when he was running the previous evening and notes that Chris spent a long time in Missy's office last night. He asks if the hypnosis worked.
Analysis
More and more cracks in the facade of the Armitage family begin to appear as Chris's visit continues. In the afternoon, Georgina, the black female servant, falls into a trance and spills some iced tea on Chris. At dinner, Rose's brother Jeremy takes a strangely aggressive tone with Chris. While it would appear that he is simply being a protective brother, his affect and his energy belies a menacing quality that seems to unsettle everyone. Moments of recognizable connection—the family telling embarrassing stories about Rose—are segmented by creepier, more threatening undercurrents that call Chris's safety into question.
Rose's brother is especially creepy, a drawling fair-skinned rich boy who walks the line between seeming like just a privileged preppie, and a full-on white supremacist. Yet again, Jordan Peele takes a scenario that is familiar—the protective brother grilling his sister's new boyfriend—and pushes it further than we would expect. Not only does Jeremy grill Chris about his interests, but he alludes to Chris's race as evidence of the fact that he could be a "fucking beast." He speaks with a bro-ish intensity, the vein popping out of his forehead as he squints his cold, blue eyes at Chris and challenges him to fight.
It seems that Chris' only ally in the weekend is Rose, who complains forcefully about her family's behavior, and delivers a sobering line: "How are they different than that cop?" She realizes that in their casual, subtle racism, her family is just as racist as the cop that profiled Chris on the road. Chris is unsurprised by all of it, looking over at Rose quizzically as she lists realities of his life.
Things get really spooky when Chris sneaks out for a cigarette that night. The casual racism of the white Armitage family is something with which he is familiar, but when he goes outside that night, some truly weird things begin to happen. As soon as he gets outside, Walter, the groundskeeper, begins sprinting towards him, and when he turns around, he sees Georgina pushing her hair to the side in the window. Both of the black servants at the Armitage residence seem as though they have been lobotomized, or are in some kind of trance. While Chris can forgive the standards of racism to which he is accustomed, these abnormalities in the other black people on the premises seem to suggest a more nefarious force at work, and he is deeply unsettled.
That force is brought into clearer focus when Chris gets hypnotized by Missy after coming back into the house, and he gets put in "the Sunken Place." Without Chris' consent, Missy puts him in a hypnotized state, stirring her tea at a certain pace and returning him to the traumatic memory of his mother's death. This hypnosis renders Chris paralyzed, trapped in the hypnosis chair and enduring the isolation and loneliness of his past experiences. Missy, the image of a warm-hearted mother, becomes the harbinger of post-traumatic pain and inertia, as Chris begins to see that whatever is holding up the idyllic facade of the Armitage family is built on something far more evil than he had ever imagined.
