Summary
Nighttime on a suburban, tree-lined street. A black man walks down the street talking on his cellphone, telling the person on the other end that he feels like a sore thumb in the white suburbs. When he hangs up, he mutters to himself, as a white car passes him and turns around, driving slowly alongside him. It pulls next to him and drives slowly, as the man tells himself not to do anything stupid, before turning around to avoid the car. "Not today, not me," he mutters to himself. Suddenly, the passenger from the car, dressed in a helmet and a black uniform, walks over and grabs the man by the neck, rendering him unconscious, putting him in the car, and driving off. "Run Rabbit Run," a jaunty song, plays on the car radio.
The scene shifts to an apartment where Chris Washington is shaving his face and getting ready for the day. Rose Armitage, Chris' girlfriend, arrives at his apartment as he is going through pictures on his camera. They kiss as she enters the apartment. While he packs for their trip to go meet her parents, Rose asks him if he has items for the journey. "Do they know I'm black?" he asks her, and she tells him they don't, flirtatiously joking that it doesn't seem like a big deal. He disagrees, noting that he's the first black man she has ever dated and it's "uncharted territory." She tells him, "My dad would've voted for Obama a third time if he could have. Like, the love is so real." She reassures Chris that her parents might be lame, but they are not racist. "I wouldn't be bringing you home to them...think about that for two seconds," she says.
They get in the car and drive upstate to Rose's parents. On the way, Chris goes to smoke a cigarette, but Rose grabs it and throws it out the car window. Chris calls his best friend, Rod, a TSA agent, who complains that he got in trouble for patting down an old woman and jokes that the next terrorist attack might be orchestrated by an old woman. Chris laughs and thanks Rod for looking after his dog, Sid, for the weekend. Rose asks to talk to Rod, so Chris puts him on speaker and they joke about the fact that Rose ended up with Chris when she should be with Rod.
When Rose begins to tease Chris for the fact that he's jealous of Rod, they suddenly hit an animal that runs into the road. They get out of the car and see a dead deer groaning in the woods next to the road. Chris examines the deer, staring at it with tears in his eyes. A police car arrives. Rose speaks to the policeman, telling him that they are headed up to her parents' house in the Lake Pontaco area for the weekend. The policeman inexplicably asks to see Chris' ID, but Rose speaks up on his behalf, insisting that the policeman is racially profiling Chris and that there is no need for him to hand over his ID, since he has not done anything wrong. The cop moves on.
In the car, Chris tells Rose that what she did for him was "hot." "I'm not gonna let anyone fuck with my man," she says. As they arrive at her parents' house, a black groundskeeper waves to Rose and Chris. The couple walks up to the front door of the brick house, where they are greeted by Rose's parents, Dean and Missy. From the yard, the groundskeeper watches.
Inside, Rose tells her parents that they hit a deer, and Dean begins saying that he thinks the deer are "taking over" and are destroying the ecosystem. "I see a dead deer on the side of the road, I think to myself, 'That's a start,'" he says, and everyone laughs. Dean asks them how long they have been dating and Rose tells them it's been five months even though Chris says it's been four.
Dean takes Chris on a tour of the house, showing him Missy's office where she sees patients—she's a psychiatrist. He then shows Chris family pictures on the wall, pointing out Rose's younger brother, Jeremy. "He's studying medicine now. Wants to be just like his old man," Dean says proudly, pointing out two candlesticks he got in Bali and telling Chris that Jeremy is a world traveler. "It's such a privilege to be able to experience another person's culture," he says to Chris. Dean then shows Chris a picture of his father, a runner who was beat by the black runner, Jesse Owens, in the qualifying rounds for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, in front of Hitler. "He almost got over it," Dean says of his father, laughing, before pointing out the basement—a part of the house they have had to seal off because of a "black mold" problem.
In the kitchen, Dean introduces Chris to a black maid named Georgina, before showing him the backyard, and telling him that the nearest house is across the lake. When they pass the groundskeeper, Dean says to Chris, "White family, black servants. It's a total cliche...We hired Georgina and Walter to help care for my parents. When they died, I couldn't bear to let them go. I mean, but boy, I hate the way it looks," before adding, "By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could. Best president in my lifetime. Hands down."
Later, Dean asks Chris about his parents, and Chris tells him that his father wasn't around and his mother died in a hit and run accident when he was 11. When Dean notices that Chris is tapping his knuckle on the table, he asks if Chris smokes and Chris tells him that he's quitting. Dean suggests that Missy could hypnotize him to get him to quit, telling him that he himself smoked for 15 years and the hypnosis worked. "I'm good, actually," Chris says.
Analysis
The film, like many horror films before it, specializes in making the everyday and the normal appear horrifying. What distinguishes Get Out is that these everyday occurrences have to do specifically with race. From the opening moments of the film, we see a world in which being a black man in a predominately white world is a horror all its own. We watch as a black man walks down a tree-lined street, and the horror occurs when he is apprehended by an unknown assailant in a white car. The tone and mood of the sequence is horrific and heightened, much like any classic horror film in which someone is the victim of a brutal murder or kidnapping, but the scenario is defined by the victim's race and his blackness in a white environment. The sequence is a horrific rendering of racial profiling and police brutality.
After the initial horrific sequence, we are introduced to the central premise of the plot: Chris and Rose, an interracial couple in New York City, are heading upstate, where Chris will meet Rose's parents, who are white, for the first time . He is worried that since she has never dated a black man before, her parents will be awkward but she assures him that her parents are not racist, and insists that it will be fine. The scene is more romantic than horrific, even if the two of them seem to be on entirely different pages about the impending weekend. These differences are not scary, however, and Chris trusts Rose when she reassures him.
While the horrors of the premise are not on full display yet, the film lightly satirizes Rose and her family's whiteness from the start. Rose is a pretty, affable, and unselfconscious girl who—when Chris expresses reservations about being the first black man she's ever taken home—insists that her father would have voted for Obama a third time. The symbolic power that this anecdote seems to have for Rose satirizes her white cluelessness; the fact that her father is enthusiastic about Obama does not preclude his being racist, yet for Rose, it serves as ample evidence that he is on the right side of history and Chris's race will not be a problem for her family.
It does not take long for things to get spooky. On their way to Rose's parents house, Chris and Rose hit a deer unexpectedly with their car. It shocks both of them, but the sight of the half-dead deer on the side of the road seems to disturb Chris considerably. He stares at the animal with pain in his eyes, and leans on the car as Rose speaks to the policeman about the incident. Already, the trip upstate has become eerie. Why would a deer run into the road in the middle of the day like that? What had moments ago seemed like a sleek and aesthetically pleasing car commercial—two good-looking young people driving through the countryside—becomes something unsettling and somehow off.
At the Armitage residence, matters get only more and more unsettling. The family, cushioned in a friendly and affable world of white privilege, is all the more creepy due to the fact that they project such a confidence about their political virtue and liberal understanding. Dean Armitage, Rose's father, insists that he is more than comfortable with Chris' blackness, hugging him upon meeting, pointing out a picture of his father, a white man beaten by a black runner in qualifying rounds for the Olympics, and echoing Rose's insistence that he would have voted for Obama a third time if he could. Yet it is this very self-consciousness, when paired with the prevalence of black servants on the property and Dean's rather colonial attitude (he rails against the uprising of the deer population upstate and acknowledges how privileged he is to travel and "experience another person's culture") that strikes an odd note, setting the film's disquieting tone.
