2017 has seen the release of two major films which use the template of a horror movie to make a satirical point grounded in 21st-century America: Get Out about racism, The Belko Experiment about corporatization. Both are essentially about modern slavery: self-dehumanization in service of a power that sees itself as greater. Get Out, directed by comic actor/writer Jordan Peele, is insightful and stinging. The Belko Experiment, written by Guardians of the Galaxy director and onetime Troma filmmaker James Gunn, is bloodier but less biting. Though the two films essentially share a target--well-meaning, privileged white people whose good spirit easily wears dangerously thin--only Peele's film hits it most of the time, while Gunn's leans too heavily on the nihilism in its premise.
In 20 years or so, Get Out will be taught in schools as a snapshot of what racism meant in the early 2000s, represented not by whips and chains but by grins and handshakes. It's in every little iota of tacit bigotry faced by Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) in the early moments of the film: being asked by the police for his I.D. when he wasn't driving, repeatedly being affirmed that Obama is "the best President of my lifetime," being greeted with "My man!" When his (white) girlfriend Rose Armitage (Alison Williams) brings him home to meet her parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), they greet him warmly. Genial. Smiling. Welcoming.
But something is off, and Peele masterfully tilts the movie's balance just enough to signal it. The Armitages' estate resembles a plantation, just a little bit. Their housemaid (Betty Gabriel) and gardener (Marcus Henderson) are both Black. Dean explains their presence to Chris but also doesn't explain it. Rose's brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) is all too eager to talk about sports.
As the film progresses, Peele builds each microaggression into an atmosphere that is more and more threatening, and when the plot reveals itself (there will be no spoiler here), he has presented a scarily convincing picture of what such seemingly innocuous infractions can add up to. It is oppression disguised as admiration, consumption and assimilation disguised as diversity and unity. A party scene in which Chris meets the Armitages' friends is a cavalcade of every condescending statement an unthinking white person has ever made to a Black person. When the reason for their statements becomes clear, the insidiousness of the "well-meaning" behavior is revealed as well, and becomes all the more terrifying.
Kaluuya brilliantly captures the arc of a character who gradually progresses from grudging tolerance to true terror. Williams finds the right note of unproductive protectiveness, exemplified in an early scene where she thinks she is defending Chris from a traffic cop but may be making things worse. Whitford effortlessly plays friendly and threatening at the same time; look at how he appears to confront Chris about racial concerns, seeking to defuse them rather than answer them. Keener, quiet at first, plays her cards steadily until Missy has Chris exactly where she wants him. (For a similarly horrifying Keener slow-burn performance, check out 2007's An American Crime, a true story about a girl who's held captive in a friend's basement. Whitford also appears, as a much more genuine character.)
The film is all but stolen by two supporting performers. Lakeith Stanfield is unforgettable as the first character seen in the movie, and about his reappearance the less said is the better. As a friend of Chris's, LilRel Howery gives a comic performance that is relieving but not distracting (and may singlehandedly redeem the TSA in the public eye).
Though it's dealt with less overtly, racism is an issue in The Belko Experiment as well, implied in the corporate system that it targets. It is not for nothing that the characters who emerge as the villains are white middleaged men, while many of the unfortunate victims are Latino. It does not have to follow that the white man is always the villain (indeed, the emerging hero of the movie is also white and male), but when desperation sets in, the white men are likeliest to assume that the power gravitates to them.
It's why Tony Goldwyn and John C. McGinley make such effective villains. They're exceptional at playing as if they think they're the good guys. Goldwyn is Barry Norris, the manager of about 80 people at the Bogotá branch of the Belko company, which "facilitates employment of Americans abroad," or something similar that's boring enough to forget immediately, reminiscent of unnecessary middleman companies like Enron. Barry is ex-Special Forces, but seems to specialize in management doublespeak.
Early scenes in the film are effective in their take on the corporate atmosphere, playing like an extension of Office Space. Cheerful conversations between employees are benign and contentless. Viciousness lurks just beneath the veneer of banality, especially in McGinley's Wendell Dukes, a serial sexual harasser who masks his lechery with an ingratiating smile. It's the same smile McGinley memorably wore when he played Bob #1, the easily bamboozled consultant in Office Space. Or maybe he was Bob #2. I don't remember.
When the instigating action of the film occurs, director Greg McLean lets it play out believably, as the characters move from incredulity to realization. A calm, robotic voice suddenly comes over a PA system of which the employees were previously unaware, ordering them to kill two people immediately. If they don't, a small explosive implanted in the back of everyone's head (ostensibly a tracking device) will be detonated in four people.
McLean and Gunn do a fine job of believably stripping away the boredom of the average work day until it dawns on the characters that there actually is a threat. Once the threat is confirmed, Goldwyn naturally assumes that the leadership role will naturally fall to him, naturally. The possibility of committing murder is cleverly substituted with "considering our options." Soon the self-appointed oligarchs are determining who lives and who dies, while resident do-gooder Mike (John Gallagher, Jr., slumming it here after his frightening turn in Hush and complex supporting role in 10 Cloverfield Lane) insists that no one has the right to decide who lives and who dies.
It's an intriguing setup, one that's recognizable to anyone familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment. The fact that real-life (though less head-explodey) psychological trickery has yielded well-known disturbing results does not work in Belko's favor; by comparison, it seems cartoonish. Not content to mine their situation for real tension, McLean and Gunn fall too easily into violence and gruesomeness. By the end the film is a nihilistic exercise not unlike the lesser Saw sequels, with the well-worn horror film lesson that humanity is corrupt and there is no saving anybody.
That's a shame, because Gunn knows how to create interesting characters before the movie wastes them. He introduces two strong Latina women (Adria Arjona and Melonie Diaz) only to dismiss them carelessly. I really liked the two maintenance men, played by Michael Rooker and David Dastmalchian, whose friendship seems tenderer than that of usual co-workers. Rooker, gentler than usual, treats his younger colleague as a son or younger brother, which makes one's untimely demise (I won't say which) an effectively tragic moment.
Still, the movie can't help but sacrifice its more subtle pleasures for unpleasantness. I offer a challenge to the makers of the inevitable Belko II:
1) Fewer people. 80 is too many. We know there'll only be one standing at the end, and dispatching 79 people in less than 90 minutes is difficult. Start with 6 people and whittle them down one by one instead of by the score.
2) Only one person's head explodes, at the beginning. The rest of the tension should come from the threat of the bombs going off.
3) The last survivor should be nonwhite or a woman or both.
Both Belko and Get Out are relatively limited in scope, with their share of social commentary embedded in a simple terror scenario. But only Peele's film spins its fable subtly and surehandedly, while McLean's grows more hamfisted as it goes along. McLean, whose Wolf Creek has a good share of fans (I am not one), has an indubitable talent and will make a great horror film one day. Peele already has.
Get Out: **** out of ****
The Belko Experiment: ** 1/2 out of ****
