Jordan Peele
Get Out

After Spike Lee's “Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus,” here comes another brilliant film that, while based on a story linked to the horror genre (the director has openly stated he was inspired by a classic like George A. Romero's "Night Of The Living Dead"), instead strongly addresses a still current theme in the USA like the discrimination of African-Americans. This theme has been central on a social level, in my opinion, and in a special and conscious way especially since the last century (not only in the United States of America) and remains unresolved despite Barack Obama's double presidency. The fact that this film is also a story of “blood,” like the aforementioned Spike Lee film, is like wanting to reconnect the viewer to the violent and brutal nature of a story that began in an age now distant in time and like wanting to seek in the ancestral origins of human history, which began right on the African continent, the reasons for an ancient evil component of our nature. Since then, man has unbound himself from his native land and has disowned his belonging to a single species: he has built increasingly sophisticated and lethal weapons, erected walls, fortresses, drawn boundaries on the map and in his mind. His history has seen scientific development evolve in step with awareness of his capacities and attitudes and even his sensitivity in step with the marginalization of many in favor of a few or very few.

This film is titled “Get Out”. The director is a young African-American of only thirty-eight years old named Jordan Peele (known so far mainly as a screenwriter of the TV series "Key and Peele") and with this film, he earned an unexpected Oscar for Best Original Screenplay: a result objectively as incredible as it is justified and which for the first time in Oscar history went to an African-American. Even if this result and the film itself have been unjustly given little regard by the press and media, something that might almost make you suspect that, in the end, these Oscars do indeed have an artistic and intellectual value. The story is about a young African-American photographer named Chris Washington (the very talented Daniel Kaluuya) who is invited by his girlfriend Rose (a white woman from a wealthy family composed of her father Dean, a neurosurgeon, her mother Missy, a hypnotherapist, and her brother Jeremy, a completely insane and violent medical student) to spend the weekend at her parents' country house. Initially reluctant to this experience, as he doubts their reception, after all, her parents don't know he is black, Chris agrees just to please his girlfriend, despite warnings from his friend Rod. But it will prove to be an unhappy choice, dragging him into a grotesque story filled with unease and terrifying visions, followed by mysterious and seemingly incomprehensible events, concluding in an outburst of violence.

Jordan Peele is clearly not Spike Lee: his background is decidedly different and perhaps his artistic intentions in general too, yet in this courageous and unflinching debut, he brings relevant content to the table and with great intelligence introduces us to a psychological thriller unjustly and summarily defined, in my opinion, as a horror film with "satirical" yet concrete and dense, reality-laden content.