Get Out was one of my favorite films in the year of its release, being a wonderfully fresh take on the horror genre. As such I had high hopes for this newer, more expensively made film. Unfortunately while this one does have some great moments early on, its central theme is weak stuff and on the whole is a far inferior film.
In 1986, little girl Adelaide Thomas is visiting an amusement park at Santa Cruz beach when she wanders away and finds herself in a funhouse. There she encounters a girl who looks exactly like herself before running away. In the present the adult Adelaide has a family of her own. With her husband and two children they travel to Santa Cruz on vacation and meet up with a white family who are their friends. Adelaide however feels that the day has been plagued by strange coincidences. That night, they notice strangers in front of their holiday home. When the intruders get closer they are shocked to see that they are twisted doppelgängers of each of them. Their leader is a copy of Adelaide and is the only one of them who is able to speak. She explains that they are the Tethered who share the same soul but live underground and are doomed to undergo whatever happens to their counterparts above. Now they have come to untether themselves.
So much of this film is so great. The family’s drive up to their lake house is clearly modelled after the opening scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and yet it makes all the difference that in this instance they are black. The initial attack is one of the very best interpretations of the familiar home intruder scenario. I especially loved how we can see the thin line of civilization fraying as Adelaide’s husband Gabe at first assumes that they are innocuous people who just want something and only very reluctantly realize that they are up to no good. Also amusing is how Gabe sees himself in sort of an aspirational competition with their friends the Tylers but it is obvious that the white family is far richer. I also love how the film breaks the usual limits of the genre by showing that the phenomenon is happening on a much larger scale than at first believed.
Yet beyond the moment to moment filmmaking, the bigger picture here seems lacking. Get Out had an overall frame story that is outlandish but is at least semi-plausible. The origin of the Tethered as given here makes no sense at all, is inconsistent with the coincidences Adelaide observes, and the director appears to think that whatever the truth is doesn’t really matter. The wider theme about privilege and how people are what they are born to is okay but is so generic that it doesn’t have much bite. Even the final twist is exactly what anyone could have predicted. The multiple 1980s references, Hands Across America, Michael Jackson’s Thriller etc. are clever but I’m not sure that they mean much.
Still at least half of the film is excellent right up until the initial home intrusion is resolved. After that it seems to drag on for too long while Peele tries to make it into more than just a standard genre horror film with black protagonists. It turns out that this alone would have been just fine and trying to do more ends with everyone being disappointed. It’s not a bad film overall but it’s far inferior to Get Out.