Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur Elliot Page[1]Credited as Ellen Page as Ariadne Marion Cotillard as Mal Cobb Ken Watanabe as Saito Cillian Murphy as Robert Fischer Tom Hardy as Eames Dileep Rao as Yusuf
Dom sees two children on the shore who seem out of place.
Nolan starts his experimentation in mimesis here, replacing the loud blare from Zimmer’s score with the rushing sound of the waves. The swell of waves crashing against the shore represent a world of potential. Every moment marks the birth of a new wave – a vortex of creation – that eventually gives way to another. It’s from this swirl that our protagonist, Dom, wakes up confused. He sees two children building sand castles on the shore. The children seem out of place given the disheveled appearance of Dom, but their act of creating sandcastles mimics the waves. After all sandcastles are an act of creation that give way to new castles as the waves wash away the old ones. It’s fitting that the man whose eventual mission will be to implant ideas is sandwiches between these two parallel movements of creation.
As the intro sequence plays, Hans Zimmer’s music envelops the soundscape ensuring that your attention is fully focused on the sound. The title fades to black as the music approaches a crescendo, swelling to a massive size before fading away to the sound of crashing waves. Our attention immediately switches focus as the importance we’ve given the score now shifts to the waves on screen. Water swells before crashing into the shoreline creating momentary impressions upon impact -explosions of being- before fading back into the ocean from where it came. Given the movie’s thematic connections with Tarkovksy’s Solaris, a science fiction film about a group of emotionally fractured astronauts stuck on an ocean planet named Solaris which seems to conjure the crew’s memories from within its oceans, it makes sense then that it is from this abode of infinite creation, the ocean, that the camera picks its next target of focus – a partially submerged man named Dom.
His eyes flutter awake revealing that he’s very much alive. It’s at this point that both Dom and the audience become privy to the fact that there are children present. The camera cuts between Dom’s perplexed face and two children who appear with their backs to him. They’re building a sandcastle. Like the waves, the sandcastle is a temporary explosion of creativity, coming into form for an instance before fading away, leaving only its impressions behind.
An older Asian man ( Ken Watanabe) tells Dom that the top he, Dom , carries reminds him of something from the past.
Dom’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) expression changes upon being reminded of the top.
Saito (Ken Watanabe) talks to Dom.
Dom(Leonardo DiCaprio) tries to get Saito to buy some extraction protection lessons.
Nolan uses cuts to demonstrate the malleability of different moments and scenes, showcasing the way ideas give way and lapse into others- whether they be dreams or memories. The normal shot, reverse-shot structure used to cover dialogue scenes is used to transfer us from space and time along with the characters. As the older Asian man talks and ignites a thought in Dom’s head, the reverse shot which would normally be the elder man is instead a much younger man named Saito. He’s oriented to the camera facing a different angle. As the camera cuts again to a much more composed looking Dom, we realize the orientation of the first meeting has also shifted, reflecting a shift in power as well. It’s brilliant filmmaking.
Before Dom can make sense of what’s happening, he’s accosted by armed security who check for weaponry before finding a gun on him. They take him to their boss, an elderly Asian man, for interrogation in a large ornate dining room. This man starts to play with a top he’s apparently taken from Dom before claiming that the object reminded him of something from his past – a distant memory. The camera cuts from the old man back to Dom at which point the movie employs a match cut to another conversation between a much younger Asian man, Saito, and a Dom from another time in the same ornate dining room, this time framed from opposite angles. It is here that Dom and his associate, Arthur, indicate to Saito that they are “extractors”, individuals who specialize in the art of stealing from peoples’ dreams, looking to teach him the tools of the trade to keep his own mental faculties safe.
The room shakes as though and earthquake is happening.
The movie cuts to the face of a watch whose hands go from moving slowly to moving much faster.
People riot on the streets as a car in the background explodes.
Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) sits unconscious in an new apartment location.
The movie cuts to the face of a watch whose hands go from moving fast to moving much slower.
The flames coming from the car’s explosion seem to slow down along with the clock.
Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) walk outside and notice the world shaking in non-natural ways.
The parallel watch sequence demonstrates the logic Inception will continue to use (and will explain later). Impacts from seemingly disparate moments bleed into each other – this is not only a mechanic of the universe but the first indication that the important thing to focus on is the intensity of feeling. This is cemented by the way that the impacts of both scenes’ respective rumblings are tied to the respective dilations of the watch face.
Saito indicates he’ll think about the deal from the two before leaving the room at which it starts to shake violently, as though an earthquake is causing the foundations of the house to rumble. The duo comment that Saito is on to their ruse before the movie cuts to the face of a watch whose hands move slowly before quickly ramping. This ramp up is matched with another cut a riot happening in the streets of a wholly distinct location. The camera moves from the rumble on the street to an apartment overlooking the chaos. Inside the unit, a new character is show tending to what appears to be Dom and Arthur’s unconscious bodies. We cut back to the image of the watch whose hands goes from fast to slow, a reversal of the previous temporal dilation. A car explodes on the street, shaking the screen before the movie cuts back to Arthur and Dom who are walking outside in a world that seems to be shaking just as hard as the explosion that came before.
In a sequence that runs a little over 5 minutes, Nolan manages to establish and present the core mechanics by which his world operates and make clear the themes he’ll be tackling – the way memory and reality bleed into one another, granting meaning to existence. The initial match cut makes it apparent that this is a world where memories and dreams interconnect- one moment, the future, gives way to the interruptions of a past, that may or may not itself be nothing more than artifice. The conversation with Saito primes the viewer to begin probing these ideas, questioning the nature of the first scene and what it’s meant to represent. The parallel watch-sequence is not only a beautiful demonstration of the exposition that Nolan will give us later on, but also hammers home the idea of intensity and duration. The rumbling that starts in the dining room, goes to the riots, stays with the exploding cars, and leads to a world literally shaking as time continues to ramp forward and slow down emphasizes that what matters is intensity , not duration.
This is Inception – a time-diluting, dream-invading, thriller that will have you questioning the “reality” of what’s being presented on the screen at every moment. After this initial sequence, Dom is offered a job with a reward that he can’t resist. The reward? A chance to see his children. The job? Implanting an idea into a person’s head, thereby changing their future decisions – in other words a kind of psychological terrorism. [2]In Kon’s Paprika, Chiba’s exclaims that “Implanting dreams in other people’s heads is terrorism!” It’s funny then that one of the bigger reaction to Inception by many … Continue reading. He goes on to make a team to help in his operation and the “heist” movie really begins.
In a traditional heist movie, a group comes together, usually skillful criminals, to carry out a theft of some kind. The unifying force between movies in the genre is the presence of an object that gets stolen – whether it be money or technology. Inception flips the genre’s trappings on its head by changing the object getting stolen from something physical to something metaphysical – that of free will. After all, the idea of implanting an idea into someone’s head assumes that you are replacing some other idea that was originally there. In other words, the object the thieves are trying to steal are the autonomy of a subject.
Eames (Tom Hardy) explains the nature of the mark’s relationships to his inner circle. Dom (Leonardio DiCaprio) and co. listen on.
From left to right: Saito (Ken Watanabe), Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Yusuf (Dileep Rao), Eames (Tom Hardy), Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio), Ariadne (Elliot Paige)
Traditional heist-planning sequences aren’t missing. They’ve just been modified to deal with the psychological nature of the heist being planned. Instead of talking about firewall security, the group has to probe into the inner psyches of their subjects mind and lives so they can more easily break into said subjects subjectivity and influence it. These sessions take place in both the “real” world of the movie and the “dream” world of the movie.
Likewise, the traditional heist-planning sequences have their counterparts here. Instead of discussing how to get past a certain firewall, the characters analyze their subject(s) from the microscopic details of their daily behavior to the larger way they deal with relationships among their associates. In this way, the structure of the heist film maps onto what feels like a psychoanalytic session, the extractors serving as psychoanalysts treating their mark as a analysand. Each maneuver the crew utilizes to plant their idea doubles as technique an analyst would use in a session. Unwinding in parallel to this external psychological session is Dom’s internal journey to overcome his respective psychological trauma. As he rushes forward to plant an idea into another to control them, he has to deal with his own wayward ideas which refuse to submit to his control – a schema which makes us ask how one can implant a thought in stable fashion to someone if one’s own thoughts constantly float around outside of our control.
This conundrum of subjectivity is reflected in the rules of the story early on as it’s revealed that people breaking into a dream bring along their subconscious projections with them. The subconscious is nothing more than a sea of cognitive material formed from the fabrics of our day to day – images and ideas that slip through our self-constructed barriers to the parts of our mind out of our control. These ideas come from others – people, cultures, legal institutions. Would this entail that social behavior by its nature is always involved in some “inception” of a kind if our ideas are “implanted” by some other agent?
At a technical level, Nolan achieves this conundrum through the magic of cutting. That’s right. Just normal cuts from scene to scene. Traditional movies dealing with dreams and memory as subject matter tend to approach field with surrealist imagery, imperceptible messages, and an obvious desire to be recognized as distinctly “dream-like.” The point is to call attention to the nature of the dream versus reality. Inception approaches dreams in the complete opposite way – treating them as they come to us in real life. Completely naturally. By using audio, especially Zimmer’s simultaneously bombastic and inquisitively resonating score (seriously just listen to the difference between the adrenaline pumping “Mombasa” and the somber epic sounding “Time”), as a throughline, Nolan is able to intercut between scenes occurring in different locations without alerting us to a change in scenery. For example, characters can begin talking in one location. The camera will cut to a completely different location as their conversation continues to play out in the background, the characters now missing from the frame. Then the camera cuts back to the characters in a different location, the same conversation continuing. It seems innocuous until it’s revealed that the final conversation in the sequence is actually occurring in a dream as opposed to the first conversation which occurred in reality.
Dom (Leonardio DiCaprio) looks in awe as Ariadne bends physics in the dreamworld to clone the world into new planes.
Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ariadne (Elliot Paige) walk up the new plane of reality.
Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) explains to Ariadne (Elliot Paige) the way dreams allow people to cheat logic.
Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) shows Ariadne (Elliot Paige) the Penrose steps as an example of paradoxes that dreams allow.
Inception’s dream visuals are astounding and larger than life, constantly cheating reality and reveling in doing so. From the early demonstration of the way gravity can shift to the way paradoxes can come to life, it’s made clear that anything is possible.
That isn’t to say the movie approaches dreams just through subtleties – the majority of the obvious dream action makes major use of spectacular set pieces that will leave you in awe if at nothing else, the sheer slick fluidity by which everything operates. Those looking for a visual feast will take great viewing pleasure in watching the way structures form out of nowhere or the manner in which gravity shifts directions. Instead of embracing the surrealist spirit in the vein of Satoshi Kon with scenarios that beg interpretation (whose own movie about dreams, Paprika, served as some influence to Nolan himself) , Nolan “mechanizes” surrealism to fit the mold of a thriller, letting action play out against a tapestry that rests on the tenuous connection reality and the unconscious.
In fact, one of the great feats of the movie is the way it forces the audience to engage with it in its totality by misdirecting them in the most obvious ways. The breathtaking visual effects in the “dream” worlds and the focus on clear and robust exposition all make it seem like the spectacle of the movie is the focus – the focus on what is real and what is not real. However, what this interpretation tends to miss is that the duplicity between what is real and what is not real is something Nolan is actively showing you on the screen. He’s not hiding it or making the tenuous nature of reality ambiguous. Like Solaris, Inception makes it apparent that everything is not what it seems- the barriers between memory, reality, and dreams are revealed to be tenuous at best. If the movie stresses to us the duplicity between the real and dream world, the question becomes what does such a revelation tell us? What does existence look when we’re constantly traversing one realm to another, calling one “real” and one “dream” ?
With all its moving parts working in tandem, Inception can be seen as a a serious reckoning with the story of Chuang Tzu who dreamt he was a butterfly so vividly that he experienced shock upon waking back up. The dream was so lifelike that it led him to ask, “was I Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly or am I now really a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu?” [3] The Philosophy Foundation – The Butterfly Dream. (n.d.). https://www.philosophy-foundation.org/enquiries/view/the-butterfly-dream.. In other words, given the depth of experience in both domains how can (un)consciousness determine what is reality. Nolan’s answer seems to be reality itself doesn’t matter as much as the experience itself. It doesn’t matter whether or not Chuang Tzu was a butterfly or a person as much as if both experiences left an meaningful impact on that unified consciousness (ex: soul) which perceived them. It’s the emotional journey that matters more than the literal journey – the latter only serves as a jumping off point to begin the former’s discovery.
The end result of these two journeys is a heist movie about perception whose very reality is constantly under question, tying form into content and narrative into theme. It’s a movie that treats its audience intelligently, showing first and explaining just enough later, forcing engagement with the subject matter. The cerebral elements of the movie never overpower the visceral elements or vice versa giving fans of both visual splendor and philosophical inquiry things to chew on. At it’s heart, Inception is nothing more than the story of finding ourselves in our own absences.
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TLDR
Inception deftly combines the genre mainstays of a heist film with the cerebral intensity involved with the best of science fiction. It is a movie that trusts the audience fully, constantly demonstrating the rules of the world it presents to wow and dazzle. At no point does either element, cerebral or visceral, overwhelm the other as Nolan manages to keep the thriller sequences and metaphysical discoveries tied to each other. Cinema, in both form and content, is used to reveal the duplicitous nature of ideas – their source, their interpretation, and their impact on (un)unconsciousness. The result is a truly human story that asks what it means to have freedom and what it means to use that freedom to live a life worth living.
Rating
10/10
Grade
S
Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
A child is born. The villagers are nicely blocked. The father treks. The father journeys forward, framed in the background as lonely among the elements. The father approaches the enchantress. The enchantress (Melody Carrillo) extracts the illness. The enchantress (Melody Carrillo) sits framed by a triangle. The enchantress dissolves to the child with second sight. The child is returned to the forest. Spectral children surround the Beautiful child. The beautiful child (Giulia Doherty) looks at the audience. The title card appears in the triangle surrounded by the reach of the tress. The fairy tale of the “Beautiful Child” serves as the fictional heart of this fairy tale adaptation and and takes broad strokes from the fairy tale serving as the film’s source, Hansel and Gretel: a witch, a forest, a child being abandoned. Yet, this telling differs in that the source of malevolence is the child who stares at the audience once the story is done and the moral has been imparted. We know we should be wary of gifts, givers, and receivers before the title drops, framed in the triangle, warning us of the supernatural events to follow.
We open on a black frame as a narrator invites us to listen to her tale, a story which “holds a lesson” that “might keep” its childish listeners “safe.” This is the story of “the Beautiful Child with the little pink cap.”
We cut to a scene of labor. A child is born to a couple through great pain and we’re treated to beautiful shots of the environment (utilizing both depth and blocking to accentuate the milieu in highly evocative fashion) of her upbringing.
This child is ill and her father (Jonathan Delaney Tynan) seeks alliance with an enchantress (Melody Carrillo), a denizen of “darkness”, who can heal any ailment. Her father bravely trusts the powers of this iconic figure, one whose silhouetted presence in a distinctive triangle emphasizes her narrative importance and the extent of her domain. The framing of her reveal needs no other dialogue to highlight her power.
A treatment is given and an ooze is extracted from the child, the illness rendered corporeal; in its place, a gift is given: the child (Giulia Doherty) is granted “second sight.” The film marks this transition from the witch to the child with a wonderful, dream-like dissolve which emphasizes the mystical connection between the two figures.
The town, eager to hear their futures, is ultimately made uncomfortable by the girl who predicts their “bitter” ends, an emotional response which is only exacerbated by the manner in which the gifted child ensures her prophecies come through via her use of supernatural gifts ; she even goes so far as to execute her father, the man who braved everything in his journey to heal his daughter, by hypnotizing him into taking his own life.
The child is returned to the deep woods, an attempt to isolate and seal the darkness resulting from her presence. But the girl, far from powerless, acquires new “friends”, the undead resurrected, who surround her in lieu of her former town and family.
With the tale concluded, the narrator warns her audience to be wary of gifts, those who offer them, and the willing benefactors willing to take them.
Fittingly, the “Beautiful Child” stares menacingly towards the audience, a 4th-wall breaking shot which serves as a wonderful footnote to the nature of the monologue so far, affirming to the audience that the deconstruction of the fairy tale will start promptly as the evils lurking behind the fantastical framework of the narrative form will be allowed to break through.
We cut to black and travel upwards through the reaching limbs of crooked trees, an evocation of the forest which served as the point of abandonment and magical mystery, before the iconic triangle, the symbol of the powerful enchantress, pops up back in frame and captures the film’s name within its domain, a title, Gretel & Hansel, which inverses the order of its Grimm fairy tale counterpart, Hansel and Gretel.
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) walks through the woods as the camera tracks her. Gretel looks at her upside-down reflection in the water while contemplating. Hansel (Sam Leakey) and Gretel (Sophia Lillis) grunt at one another, a piggish affirmation of their relationship. The switch to another narrator, Gretel, marks a formal shift in the film. The tale being told goes from an epic, fable to a personal recollection of one’s life, a switch from objectivity to subjectivity. The frame goes from wide to boxy to reflect this. Gretel laments on the manner by which tales psychically become embedded within listeners and the manly deus ex machinas that inhabit the genre, usurping the potential of feminine agency.
Then, we’re entreated to new narration, one that operates in a psychic conversation with the opening, deconstructing the gendered apparatus of fairy tales and the way they subordinate identity through strict normative paradigms and establishing the thematic posturing of the film itself: a genealogy examining the fairy tale as heuristic along with its gendered machinations and the manners in which they frame the morals commonplace to the format.
This switch of type of narration — narrating a fable (third-person) versus narrating the subjective thoughts of one’s own life (first-person) — is visually indicated in the change in the frame’s ratio which goes from a wide, elongated, epic shot to a more personate, intimate shot; we’re going from a tale told externally to one told internally.
Our new narrator, a young girl, Gretel (Sophia Lillis), refers back to the story of “the Beautiful Child with the little pink cap” and remarks on the manners in which such tales can “get” into one’s head like the way this fable has burrowed itself into hers. She examines and questions the nature of the tale, the history of how its come to be burrowed within her psyche, and the manners by which real stories are elevated into the grandiose mythical encounters. Finally, she laments on the way “princes” come in and resolve a good portion of such stories, rendering the question of the female characters’ agencies a trite manner.
But there are no princes in her surroundings. Her tale will be a different one, focused on a journey of femininity finding itself in a world that seeks to consume this freedom through its socialization processes. The film’s titular choice begins to poke through as we understand the vantage point that will color it.
Her quest for agency begins with a journey where her brother, Hansel (Sam Leakey), a young boy, questions her incessantly as she walks with him through a forest in search of a job.
The siblings come to stand in front of an expansive building, press their faces against one another, and grunt like pigs, affirming their solidarity and making us aware of their struggles. Their choice to celebrate their relationship through an animalistic parlance reminds us of the underlying manner by which fables utilize non-human creatures to impart messages and simultaneously reinforces a motif of consumption (the children, acting as animals which are traditionally rendered food, are seeking labor in order to acquire nourishment)— a reminder that lurks ominously in the backdrop given the source material.
Gretel sits in an interview room, silhouetted against wondrous stained-glass windows. The master (Donncha Crowley) of the house interviews Gretel. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) speaks her mind. The shot widens as Gretel (Sophia Lillis) is reminded of her place. Gretel sits in the interview room filled with colorful stained-glass displays, a mosaic of colors which serves as an ironic counter-point to Gretel’s limited pathways. Her interview is derailed by sexist comments which she refuses to succumb to. This failure, her decision to find a new identity, is made clear by the cut to a wider shot of her which reveals the colorful windows once more alongside her, a sign of the possibilities that she yearns and seeks to tap into.
Her interview quickly devolves into a didactic interplay as her interviewer (Donncha Crowley) quickly corrects Gretel when she openly speaks her mind and criticizes the bureaucratic structures which oppress her brother and her. He tells her to address him as “milord” and questions her “maidenhood”, quickly affirming the oppressive milieu and reminding Gretel of her uniquely vulnerable, feminine place within the social apparatus.
The shot tracks Gretel (Sophia Lillis) as she walks back home. Gretel and Hansel are framed by a dark entryway as they return back home. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) sits while being chastised. Gretel’s mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) berates Gretel. A flame sits in the middle of Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and her mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy). Gretel’s mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) moves towards her daughter (Sophia Lillis), covering the flame between them. Gretel’s mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) perverts the piggish affirmation with Gretel (Sophia Lillis). Gretel’s mother (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) axes the table as a final warning. Gretel’s inability to get a job forces her back home in the rain. But she is unable to stay here and her mother, through heinous and twisted remarks, lets her daughter know as much. A perverted piggish affirmation from the matriarch which covers the only light in the room, signals the dissolution of this family unit, a proclamation which is confirmed by an axe which she lodges into the table as a final warning to leave. Left with no other options, the siblings must depart that place which they called home and seek new shelter.
We know that things have gone poorly when Gretel rushes out of the location, brother in tow, as the rain pounds on them accentuating her failure in procuring employment. She questions whether or not it would have been proper to slap the man for his controlling, disgusting demeanor and the camera, fully focused on her face and tracking her movements, imparts her deliberation with a subjective heft that emphasizes her agency. But before we get an answer, the film cuts to her house, framing both Hansel and Gretel within the closed-off and darkened boundaries demarcating it.
The manor, lit in a depressing, overwhelming blue makes the siblings’ mother’s (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) chastisement of Gretel sting all the harder. Gretel is questioned as to her insolence but attempts to push back against the unfair debasement. Yet, the matriarch continues and tells Gretel that the latter must leave. There’s not enough room in this house for “ghosts”, a haunting proclamation which ties the house and its inhabitants towards death, and Gretel is told to take her brother and try to make it to a convent.
Gretel argues logistics but her mother quickly ends the conversation, telling her daughter that if they’re unable to do as much, they should dig their own graves and make sure to make one for their mother as well. She reaches over to her daughter, places their faces against one another, and grunts like a pig; yet, the utterance is perverse, an explicit acceptance of annihilation, a far cry from the earlier evocation which hinted at perseverance in the face of tribulations.
Immediately, this disjoint is emphasized. A loud thud shocks as an axe falls onto the table and the matriarch threatens to kill her children if they do not leave; the family unit is broken apart and must be re-forged once more.
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and Hansel (Sam Leakey) are covered by the forest. The siblings head to a manor in the darkness. An upside down overhead shot of Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and Hansel (Sam Leakey). A man (Jonathan Gunning) appears behind Gretel (Sophia Lillis). The emaciated man (Jonathan Gunning) has Hansel in his grasp. The huntsman is revealed, framed by the doorway of the abode. The children are framed in the hazy fog and looming trees of the forest. They are small and feeble, vulnerable to the powers that reside within this environment. They head to a manor in the darkness and think they’ve found security. An upside-down overhead shot of them showcases this temporary unity which is broken as a man rises behind Gretel and reveals that this abode is no longer safe. He almost takes out Hansel, but a Huntsman, framed and given importance by the doorway of this manor, saves the duo and takes them in temporarily.
As a result, the siblings find themselves swallowed in the “terrible mouth” of the forest, a metaphorical rendering which paints the world as a consumptive machine with its denizens being nothing more than foodstuffs waiting for their turn to eaten, subject to the whims of the trees stretching across the backdrop, limbs reaching down for the next tasty morsel, and the hazy fog pervading the area, obscuring their fates and diminishing their presence; they are truly at the whims of nature.
Hansel, innocently unaware of the gravity of the situation, questions Gretel on her obstinance to accepting the seemingly easy solutions to their problems. If she had just accepted the earlier offer of employment and subjected herself to the decorum required of the same, the family might still be together; food (particularly cake) might be on the horizon. But Gretel, unperturbed by the childish problem-solving, explains the reality of the world: “Nothing is given without something else being taken away.”
While her use of the adage is in reference to the sexual politicking she had to and will have to navigate, there’s a uncomfortable undercurrent catalyzed due to the nature of the opening’s tale of the girl whose illness was traded for power; sickness is transfigured not as purely negative, an impediment stopping natural functions, but instead as metonymical humanity, one that has been traded for supernatural powers; humanity, and it’s reliance on over-arching norms, poison from a certain point-of-view, agreed to upon by the powers that be, is rendered fungible and can be sacrificed for that which exists beyond in the realm of the supernatural.
This overarching connection, subtly implied through the film’s posturing, lingers in the air like the malevolent fog surrounding the kids and makes Gretel’s plan to find shelter at another woman’s house suspect, especially when she reveals that she sees this abode not through her normal vision but through some special sight.
The two tepidly approach a solitary building with a fire out front and enter the dim, cavernous building with flickering lights. They decide to rest in a bed and we see a top-down view of them oriented upside-down — domesticity has been established but at an unseen cost is waiting to let itself be made known.
The situation completely flips on itself, when a hidden figure (Jonathan Gunning) slowly rises behind Gretel as the siblings attempt to comfort one another, stripping away any sense of security and warmth the duo had managed to clench onto.
The kids run out of the building but the menacing man takes hold of Hansel in the chaos. Gretel attempts to take him out, injuring his eye and rendering him even more of a monstrosity, but he only appears to get more powerful, threatening to bring the duo’s journey to a premature halt.
Suddenly, an arrow flies through the man’s head and removes him from the equation. A huntsman (Charles Babalola), framed neatly in the doorway of the building announcing his presence, comes forward and takes the children in before questioning them about their unfortunate circumstances. They converse in room lit by a musky, yellow haze which saturates the area, making grime on the children’s’ faces more prominent and pessimistically highlighting the realities of what they must do in order to survive.
Hansel (Sam Leaky), Gretel (Sophia Lillis), and the Huntsman (Charles Babalola) sit around the dimly lit table, enshrined by yellow hues. Gretel bathes. The huntsman (Charles Babalola) gives advice. Dissolve from Gretel (Sophia Lillis) to the forests which she must once again navigate. The siblings return to their trek through the woods. The encounter with the Huntsman, an event whose magical underpinnings Gretel questions, leads the siblings to a new path back into the forest. They will have to make their way back to society and slot back into the socially ordained order of things.
The huntsman offers to help the two by leading them towards labor, work defined by explicit gender roles that remind Gretel of the way her femininity has been coded and the way she can be taken (in even the darkest senses of the term) by the realm of men. However, with no other options, the two acquiesce to the huntsman’s suggestions and depart the location; all the while, Gretel questions the coincidence of the encounter and its fantastical nature, neatly tying her journey back to the earlier discussion about fairy tales.
The siblings once again journey through the forest and director Oz Perkins uses a series of nice dissolves which accentuates the environment’s fogginess and the dreaminess of the endeavor.
While taking a break, Hansel once again breaks into a tirade of childish inquisitions and Gretel is forced into an uncomfortable position, forced to deal with her younger brother’s lack of knowledge regarding sexual processes (and the disturbing manners in which gender roles are implicated in them) and the responsibilities that she faces in spite of her own young age. He believes in the fairy tales about procreation involving children being delivered by birds while she knows the involves processes underlying such myth, but her only response is sardonic disavowal instead of deeper explanation; what else is she to do?
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) looks out into the forest. The silhouettes of enchanters fills the forests’ negative space. A shot looking up at the reach of the forests.The siblings walk in the dark, silhouetted against the forest. An enchantress’s silhouette appears in the fog of the night. The siblings’ journey is marked by silhouettes, their own and those of the enchantress who follows them. This spectral figure, framed by trees and fog, stares at them and then disappears into the night as a black-bird emerges, the storybook sign of the witch.
He asks her to tell him the “pink cap” story again but she refuses, not willing to scare him and cause him to fall victim to delusions: the repetition of the story will only exacerbate their unwieldy conditions and cause the younger of them to see things which “aren’t there.” But as the older sibling looks into the woods and sees the silhouettes of enchanters in the forest, covered in the haze, we’re left wondering as to the nature of her visions and feel the pernicious effects of the story in her psyche that she alluded to earlier. Is her warning to Hans based off her own circumstances or is she truly gifted with a second sight like the character from the fable embedded within her?
Nighttime falls and the journey becomes increasingly treacherous. A solitary silhouette stands in the forest blocking the children’s path and the camera slowly zooms onto it. What does it want?
A whisper: “Gretel”.
Then, a dark bird, an evocation of the supernatural, flies up ending the moment. The figure is missing and reality becomes suspect. We’re left wondering the figure’s motivations and its reasoning for reaching out to Gretel while being unsure of its status as dream or reality.
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) narrates until she is interrupted by a noise. A tracking shot follows Gretel (Sophia Lillis) as she searches for this disturbance. Hansel is pretending to cut a tree. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) attempts an amends with Hansel (Sam Leakey). Gretel (Sophia Lillis) and Hansel (Sam Leakey) do a pig affirmation in a closer shot, affirming their reunification. Gretel’s narration is cut off by a noise which she promptly goes to investigate. We track on her as she moves to the site of this disturbance which is revealed, in a wide-shot, to be Hansel trying his luck at chopping trees. She initially responds with anger and upsets the bond between the two. But then the camera cuts to a more intimate framing of the two, and their piggish affirmation unites them once more.
Back in the daytime, Gretel narrates again about her powers and how her mother told her to put such thoughts out of her head, but this internal discussion is interrupted by an unseen noise which Gretel begins to trek towards. The interruption in thought reveals the “real-time” aspect of the film proper, informing us that this tale, unlike the fairy tale, is far from set in stone and is being carved out. The camera adopts a handheld quality as it tracks her, imbuing the shot with a subjectivity that affirms this moment of urgent agency.
We’re initially tense with her. Is this her nightly visitor coming back again?
No.
It’s just Hansel, who bored in the moment, is “practicing” his craft by whacking a stick against a tree, an affirmation of his future role as a manly woodcutter. A wide shot that frames the duo within a larger scope of the trees and reveals the truth of the situation: objectivity reigns once more.
Initially, Gretel is cross with her brother for worrying her but the discord is cut through as the two affirm their piggish bond, coming closer within a more enclosed frame, and continue forwards.
Gretel runs towards mushrooms framed in the foreground. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) laughs. Hansel (Sam Leakey) laughs. Hansel (Sam Leakey) is perturbed. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) is enamored while Hansel runs past her. Witches appear in the foggy trees. A carriage goes by in the forest. The beautiful child (Giulia Doherty) and her mother ride in a blue-lit carriage. The trip sequence marks the start of the film’s disorienting form, once which discombobulates space and time through its edits to reveal the effects and powers of the supernatural forces which, stemming from nature, govern all. The siblings’ trips from their mushroom consumption starts off well with both of them in giggles but quickly becomes unnerving. An edit which shows Hansel broaching Gretel’s space is the first disorienting step which is followed up when the latter sees new witches in the surroundings. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a carriage appears in the woods, its proximate location to the children unexplained. We cut to the inside of this impossibly blue-lit carriage and see the figure of Gretel’s tale, the pink-capped child, along with another woman riding along. The sequence, evocative yet confusing in its progression, calls to question the reality of the situation and where the siblings’ trip has ended and where the magic has started.
Incredibly hungry, they come towards mushrooms growing on the forest floors, growths which appear prominently framed in the foreground. Gretel dresses the moment up with make-believe, pretending to talk to the fungus (although given her claims of magic, we’re also slightly convinced that her dialogue may in fact be real) and gets the “okay” to eat them. Hansel eagerly accepts her affirmation and the two eat the mushrooms.
We cut to the delirium: both children are framed in their own spaces and the two laugh before the soundscape becomes more intense. Hansel becomes perturbed and begins to walk out of his position. An immediate cut disorients us, as the continuity of Hansel’s trajectory within Gretel’s shot is whiplash-inducing in how it changes our spatial perception of the environment the two are in.
Figures, once again hidden in the fog, appear in response to this spatial schism, and call to question the reality of the setting. Are they a drug induced vision or something more nefarious?
Then, another childish whisper: “Follow me. Come and find me. Follow me, sister.”
A carriage pops out of view, once again usurping our orientation of the environment through the intentionally obfuscating editing; where did this vehicle come from and where is it in reference to the children?
The questions only pile up as the visuals continue to become more abstracted as; suddenly, we cut to “the Beautiful child” and a woman in a carriage lit in impossibly deep blues, a luminescence similar to the children’s’ house at night. Then, the dream temporarily abates, leaving only questions in its wake.
The siblings are framed by the gates. A doll is hidden among the grasses. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) is one side of the gate while Hansel (Sam Leakey) is on the other. The red-glass of the house stares at the siblings. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) tries to hold Hansel (Sam Leakey) back. The house watches the siblings. Gretel looks through a triangular peephole. She sees a bountiful feast in front of her eyes. Gretel (Sophia Lillis) keeps watch in front of the window. Holda (Alice Krige) appears behind Hansel (Sam Leakey), framed off by the door. The children happen upon a new house which is littered with ominous signs that would serve as deterrent for anyone in the area. A gate which demarcates the two, dolls on the floor, and an ominous red-window (which the camera pushes on imbuing with its own supernatural agency) all scream ill tidings, but the smell of food from the house serves too powerful a force and compels the siblings to ignore their better judgement. Gretel looks through a triangular peephole, a sign of the enchantress’s domain, and keeps watch for Hansel who sneaks in to retrieve some food. But the house’s owner, an older woman, Holda, appears in a doorway behind Hans, an eerie callback to the manner by which the emaciated man appeared behind Gretel moments earlier, and whisks him away. Gretel’s attempt at saving her brother make no progress and she is forced to take refuge with this mysterious stranger who warns the young girl off of any foolish plans.
A gate frames the siblings as they walk towards the source of the voice and they find a partially hidden doll-like figures on the floor, a sign of civilization and a marker of lost innocence, that points them towards a house where the smells of cake are overwhelming and tempt the hungry children desperate for any source of meaningful consumption.
But the revelation of the triangular structure of the house informs us of what we now know: this is the abode of absolute power.
Yet, the sibling’s drive to consume overwhelms all other senses and notions of common sense. Gretel cautiously peers into the house, one lit in ominous yellows, but her eye, framed within a triangular peephole, a confirmation of the overarching architecture, sees only a bountiful feast on a table. There is only one goal Gretel and Hansel care for now: satiating their hunger which takes full control of their faculties.
Hansel sneaks in with Gretel’s help and starts to steal foodstuffs. But then, a figure appears from the background (seemingly out of nowhere like the horrific emaciated man from earlier), isolated in a doorframe, and whisks Hansel away with the flip of her cloak. Unfortunately, there are no princes (or huntsmen) to save the duo from their current perils and the older sister is tasked with figuring out her own solution to the major impediment facing her.
She decides to throw a rock at the building in an attempt to save her brother but is unable to make any meaningful dent as the projectile weakly bounces off the abode. While she begins to start a fire in another rescue attempt, the woman (Alice Krige) and Hansel come out and the former warns the young woman to not “start something that she can’t stop”, clearly alluding to a more sinister double meaning lurking beneath the words.
Gretel (Sophia Lillis) finally decides to eat the food gifted to her. Holda stores Hansel’s hair. Hansel (Sam Leakey) and Gretel (Sophia Lillis) sleep, comforted by the fact that they are seemingly safe. Gretel eats the food, left with no other options, while Holda puts aside a piece of Hansel’s hair, an ominous sign of the costs of these gifts. But the children, asleep in their own beds now, are comforted by their temporary safety. This has at least started better than their failed encounter at the house of the emaciated man. But we are well aware, their newfound freedom will turn upside down once more.
Finally, the visions and reality collide: Gretel is tasked with dealing with this strange and mysterious woman, a seemingly kind soul named Holda, who offers the first positive words in regards to Gretel’s femininity and the roles available to her. With no other path to turn down, Gretel joins her brother and begins to consume the bounty in front of her all while the elderly woman takes a strand of Hansel’s hair and stores it away.
The opening’s warning, made all the more poignant due to the slow burn nature of the narrative creepily crawling towards this preluded epiphany, is brought to sinister light as all the visible pieces — gifts (the food and boarding), those who offer them (Holda herself), and the willing benefactors willing to take them (Gretel & Hansel) — make us eerily aware that a cost will have to be paid when the battle between the parties plays out.
Perkins perfectly encapsulates the nature of this triangular antagonism through the metaphor of chess; as the children get acquainted with Holda she has them play the great strategic game and uses the pieces and rules to further extend the gender discourse: “the king is afraid, and he should be. Because the queen can do whatever she wants.” In this battle to determine her own fate against the powers that be and seek to domesticate her, Gretel is tasked to play in this game, her opponent being the woman who seeks to educate her, the other “queen” on the other side of the board.
The characters (and their affects) become pieces in an overarching game and the cinematographic decisions reflect as much, demonstrating the effects of their movements on the wider state of the “board”.
The primary players are typically framed in manners that never highlight their entire body (usually in medium shots) with the characters in the center of the frame (usually in the lowest vertical register of the frame at that) to emphasize the characters’ subjectivity and their current situation. In addition, these types of shot usually isolate the character by themselves, emphasizing their status as individual pieces. This makes shots where characters intercede in another’s space immediately evocative, suggesting that a “power play” is occurring even if the nature of the maneuver is not immediately apparent.
Tracking shots, both stable and handheld, follow the characters as they make specific decisions —movements on the board in order to strike the enemy down. The speed of these shots is perfectly calibrated, going as slowly or quickly as the moments need, carefully establishing just who really is in control of a situation.
Wide shots, which usually are the only such shots to reveal characters’ entire bodies, represent the results of the clashes by respective parties which is why they emphasize the totality of the players qua pieces and their surroundings.
The film oscillates between these visual registers, taking advantage of elliptical editing and the Kuleshov effect to visually depict how each respective party asserts their power within this (primarily) psychological space. We see them isolated thinking of their next move, privy to their pressing interests and their psychological states due to the symbolically rich and evocative mise-en-scène (in particular, the lighting achieved through the stained glass). We see the momentum of their agency as we see them proceed towards action. Then, the battlespace is revealed and we can re-assess who’s “winning” before the next “move” is played.
This flow in the film’s rhythm is what keeps it captivating, accentuating the poetic flourishes of the script’s dialogue and buoying the weaker such parts (usually involving either dialogue that’s too on the nose for it’s own good or, less often, line deliveries which bely the tone of the scenarios in which they’re spoken) with visual schemas that safeguard the tense, oneiric mood (even during basic shot-reverse-shot sequences). Even when the story goes slower, quieting its more traditional narrative in favor of affective mood-setting, the heart of the battle is always present within the frame, captivating any viewer willing to parse the piece’s form.
Even without the schematic underpinnings imbuing the frames with their respective meanings, Perkins and his cinematographer, Galo Olivares, achieve a fairy tale aesthetic that’s oozing in personality. Watching the film is akin to viewing a moving storybook, filled with breathtaking and nightmarish images that certainly dip their toes in surrealism to great effect.
The score operates in a harmonious (mostly) subdued sense, augmenting the mood but never overdetermining the moments with an unearned elicitation of feeling due to the music alone. The effect is one that surprises as we’re caught unaware when the sonorous stylings do rear their head during the profound moments when characters’ make legitimate headway in their strategies.
It’s no surprise then that the film has still struggled with finding its audience as its focus is less on the story and more on the nature of its telling; the fairy tale is merely a springboard to discuss the ideas inherent within the narrative form and the film’s exploration of these vis-à-vis the particular mode of film, the nature of the image and the ways they can have an impact on the psyche of the viewer through the way the assert implicit meaning and connection, allows the viewer to disappear within the world of the film, fully captured within texture of the frame. The measured pacing and lack of conventional narrative thrust intentionally forces the viewer to play the film’s game on its terms, a decision which may alienate those looking for a more propulsive, kinetic horror experience; however, by that same token, the confident formal and aesthetic decisions should also earn the film fans itching for a mood piece which reckons with genre in a lush, painterly manner as it excavates the darkness present within the popular childhood fable.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Gretel and Hansel is a beautiful looking, slow-burn telling of the Grimm Brother’s fairy tail with a feminist slant that plays perfectly within director Oz Perkins moody, evocative wheelhouse. While the script fails him at times, the depth he’s able to imbue through his direction, which prioritizes mood over narrative propulsion, elevates the piece and makes it a truly haunting experience for viewers willing to lose themselves in the film’s spell.
Rating
10/10
Grade
S
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
The title card evokes The Shining. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) sleeps with hands clasped. The winter abyss. The opening sets the stage with an evocation of Kubrick’s The Shining, a tale of alienation and madness set within a wintery backdrop, a shot of a young woman on the edge of sleep and prayer, and a shot of a wintery backdrop which looms ominously.
An evocative, yet disturbing song plays: “Deedle, deedle, Blackcoat’s Daughter, what was in the Holy Water? Went to bed on an unclean head, the Angels they forgot her.”
While these ominous lyrics fill the aural setting, a quick title card using the same iconic blue font of The Shining informs us that this story will be a haunting one; when approached within the context of the devious ditty, this allusive shorthand portends something wicked waiting to come.
We cut to a young girl, Katherine (Kiernan Shipka), who sleeps with her hands clasped as if in prayer — the “Blackcoat’s daughter” praying while the “Angels” forget her. What thoughts lie in her head?
The film intercuts between her still sleeping and a tracking shot moving towards a snowy landscape shot — a white abyss, another callback to the snowy mountains which serve as The Shining’s primary location.
Why does this vision, her apparent prayer, percolate in her “unclean” head?
Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) sleeps. A black figure in the foreground obscures her.A Close on Katherine’s (Kiernan Shipka) face. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) looks up at this black figure which obscures half the frame. Perkins uses precise cuts to showcase the relationship between Katherine and the mysterious black specter which intervenes in her sleep state. It crosses her in the frame and we’re suddenly closer to her, as if encroaching within her dream. Then she “wakes” and stares at this figure which divides the frame’s space; the two entities are on opposite sides but the black figure is unknown to us sans Katherine’s declaration that it’s her “Daddy.”
We cut to an alternative take of her still sleeping, her hands now laying by her side — has her call been answered?
A black shape, a counterpoint to the white environment, obscures the foreground and walks past her, disguising a cut which pushes in closer to her face: is this the dream come to life?
She wakes and looks up at the figure which obscures half the frame, isolating her to the opposite side and rendering her alienated: she’s held completely within this entity’s purview.
Then, she innocently addresses this being: “Daddy. You came early.”
There’s a palpable tension as the unknown is rendered familiar, begging the question as to whether our assumptions were wrong or if Katherine has become ensnared in something deeper.
Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) walks forward. Winter continues to push in. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) reaches one hand out. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) walks with “Daddy”. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) grabs a teddy bear. Katherine sees a black car. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) stares at the car with “Daddy “by her side. Katherine’s (Kiernan Shipka) hand trembles. the wrecked car. Katherine’s journey into the winter setting calls into question the reality of the situation. How did she get here and why is the “Daddy” figure still positioned out of the frame? We’re shown that this is a dream of sorts and the sequence intercuts between the oneiric and the real, using Katherine’s hands in the real world as analogs by which to frame the dream: it’s a cry for companionship, a prayer, a phenomena which defies the body. Whatever it is, the taste it leaves is one of despair.
Suddenly, Katherine walks in the same snowy landscape from her vision, a chimera standing on the interstices of dream and prayer. Another cut to the same tracking shot still pushing forward on the wintery backdrop, confirms that she’s in this unidentifiable location. An eerie foghorn type noise cuts through and ratchets the feeling of unease permeating the moment.
But we cut back to her, still asleep in her bed, her hands now split apart with one of them outstretched — a half-prayer or a call for companionship?
She’s back in the snow walking by this black figure, her “Daddy”.
Then we’re back in her bedroom; the camera is focused on her other hand grabbing a teddy bear, an act of childlike innocence which evokes dread in the grander schema of the intercutting.
She asks the figure: “Daddy, where’s the car?”
We cut back to the snowy wasteland, over her shoulder, and see a crumpled vehicle, shot out-of-focus such as to render it a black blurb in the background; the foghorn comes back. She looks at this wreck in shock while the black figure, her supposed “Daddy”, stands right by her side with its visage still cut out of the frame; what is this creature’s nature and what does it desire?
The outstretched hand starts to tremble as the droning noises get stronger and more invasive. Terror begins to seep in and Katherine calls for her “Mommy” presumably trapped in this wreckage. But then how did “Daddy” make it out and come to her, calling her from her bedroom to the scene of this crash? The loud sound of static is the only response she receives: a non-answer that somehow conveys everything.
The car is finally in focus and we can peer into the wreckage. There are splatters of blood on the front of the car. There are no apparent survivors. There is no explanation to be found.
A resolute cut to black. Are we somehow trapped in the figure from Katherine’s oneiric experience or in another void altogether?
Katherine sits in silhouette. She looks at the calendar. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) moves closer to the calendar. She’s getting closer to her parent’s visit. The reaction to the vision is one marked by ambiguity because we can’t tell if Katherine is looking out at the wintery fields, a call back to the dream, or if she’s staring at the audience, a wall-break that accentuates the horror of the moment. We learn it was the latter and with that confirmation, we see her move towards a calendar and the sinking feeling portended by the vision becomes stronger: her parents aren’t going to be making this trip.
Before we can ascertain the answer, we see Katherine, now cast fully in a black silhouette, sitting up and gazing; the direction she faces is hidden by the shadows; is she looking towards us, the audience, or looking out from the window at the now retroactively signified wintery hellscape, the place of her parent’s demise?
Her harrowing visions, a perverse answer to her prayers, unheard by any but this shadowy figure, a being which given the opening song we can figure is anything but an angel, seemingly overwhelm her.
She slowly turns her head to the side, revealing that she was in fact staring directly at the audience without us being aware, and looks up a calendar; the days of the month are crossed out in red “X” ‘s with a heart symbol tacked onto a day not yet gotten to.
A closeup of her harrowed face as she goes towards it.
A close-up of the heart symbol and the words inside: “Mom & Dad Here.”
We’re not sure of her vision but we, like Katherine, feel despair knowing that her prayer for the family’s happily ever after will not happen: her parents will die before making it to this encounter; that much is certain.
Katherine from behind. Mr. Gordon (Peter James Haworth) sits next to a cross. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) sits next to no one. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) looks over at “nothing”.Mr. Gordon (Peter James Haworth) and Katherine are separated by the cross. The conversation between Katherine and Mr. Gordon is one that firmly confirms the former’s alienation and its spiritual nature. She enters the conversation from a vantage point that emphasizes the subjective nature of her issues but presents a mystery. Her conversation proceeds in a fashion that emphasizes the alienation she feels as she’s constantly shown being completely alone while the image of God seemingly lingers on the other side of her. Yet, her attention it is drawn not to this symbol but to an empty space next to it. By the time we cut to both characters in the same space, we’re concerned with what exactly Katherine is so concerned with.
We cut to a new view of Katherine that starts from the back of her head which is placed in the lower part of the frame, an intentional geographic choice which ties us into the idea of descent, the subconscious, the id, hellish recesses far from the gaze of angels. This shot, a formal choice that film will repeatedly utilize, reinforces the film’s preoccupation with the psychological, unknowable zones of its characters, the oneiric chasms where images can convey meaning only through their interstices, forcing us to put the pieces together in a desperate attempt to understand why the characters do what they do, why they think what they think.
The moment passes as Katherine is called into the Dean’s office. We learn from the Crucifix on the wall that this is a religious educational facility. The ominous opening referencing the silence of the divine sinks even deeper.
Meanwhile, the film’s shot-reverse-shot rendition of the conversation between Katherine and her dean, Mr. Gordon (Peter James Haworth) reinforces the abundant alienation she experiences. She’s framed next to an empty seat while the Dean is framed next to the Crucifix. She’s utterly alone and her small talk reveals the extent of that loneliness as she desperately attempts to make a connection, one that is rebuffed as the Dean explains that he will be absent for her musical performance due to the upcoming school break.
A cut to a wide of the room emphasizes the distance she feels and her desperation to bridge it; she changes her focal point of attention from the person in the room to the spot occupied on the other side of the religious symbol, a gaze qua prayer that she knows falls on deaf ears. There are no Angels or humans waiting to give her company. But she smiles in this moment. What has she seen? Was it “Daddy”?
Gordon attempts to gather an explanation for the oddity but Katherine deflects the inquisition. There will be no answers. Fittingly, the film cuts to black once again, the color thus far imbued with perverse ambiguity.
Rose (Lucy Boynton) enters the room. Rose (Lucy Boynton) walks by slowly. Rose (Lucy Boynton) gets seated. Rose (Lucy Boynton) smiles for the picture. The choice to introduce Rose in slow-motion is one that elevates her position within the scope of the film, imbuing her character with an importance that’s cemented by the nature of her image, one that evokes an Edenic peace. This image is elevated to an Apollonian ideal and will constantly be referenced throughout the run-time as its modal value is evaluated and questioned.
We cut to an empty doorway which the camera slowly repositions to better capture and watch another young woman, Rose (Lucy Boynton), who walks through the frames of this entryway in slow-motion. The eerie ambience transforms into a musical interlude that evokes a sense of jazzy melancholy.
Meanwhile, the camera tracks on Rose who continues to walk slowly down a hallway to a blue, cloudy backdrop — an evocation of heaven. She sits down and gets ready for a school picture. This paradisal backdrop fills the frame and we see Rose, center frame, lower quadrant, break out into a smile for the picture: this is the ideal image.
But the shutter clicks and the screen fades to black once again, formally imbuing this color and the editing refrain itself with the powers of the camera ascertaining and fixing a subject into position.
Rose (Lucy Boynton) in silhouette. Rose (Lucy Boynton) in silhouette looks into mirror. Rose (Lucy Boynton) character card. Rose’s friend (Emma Holzer) listens to Rose (Lucy Boynton).It’s fitting that this image serves to prefigure the introduction of the character proper, one whose immediate aspirations and desires are clouded in an unknowability. We see her in near-silhouette from behind her head, an evocation of earlier shot choices used with Katherine, that reinforce that we’re entering the subjectivity of this young woman and we’ll be forced to piece together the mysteries lurking with her. The most pressing of these is her pregnancy scare, one which she plans on handling herself and takes full responsibility for. This self-reliance and foundational ego serve as a stark contrast to Katherine and the juxtaposition of their respective standings will color the form of the film.
We see Rose again in a bathroom, this time in the iconic shot used earlier on Katherine; her face is partially turned away from the camera and she’s positioned in the lower half of the frame. There’s something running through her mind as she stares into a mirror. While she ponders, one of the film’s three character titles, the first of which is aptly titled “Rose”, appears in the same blue font used in the title card.
It’s a curious choice indeed to open the film on a character and spend time with them, then cut to another character and quickly use a title card to introduce them more formally to the audience; we’re left wondering why Rose’s story can only be understood once we’ve seen Katherine’s circumstances.
But before the question can linger for too long, the film cuts and shows Rose at the nurse’s office acquiring medicine and treatment for an apparent headache. The nurses are obviously suspicious of the circumstances but let nothing slip.
We cut again to Rose smoking a cigarette, clearly a contraband action given the school’s religious depiction, while she talks to her friend (Emma Holzer) in coded terms that imply that she’s scared of an impending pregnancy. Suddenly, her trepidation in the bathroom earlier makes sense.
This vantage point of Rose directly runs in contrast to the pure, saintly image of her shot for the yearbook; we learn that she enjoyed sex with her boyfriend, takes responsibility for her possible pregnancy, still hopes for her period to come, and is unwilling to talk to her parents about this newfound issue.
We cut to her in an assembly and learn this is an all-girl’s school, one that prides itself on the stock of its students, women who are meant to represent with honor the women that have come before them and the women who will come after them at the hallowed halls of the Bramford school. Here, Rose’s actions become registered in a different, symbolic light: her shameful pregnancy, the proof of her sexual actions, an act marked as deviancy by the rules of conduct, becomes elevated to a sin which will bleed into the student populace at general. She half-asses an affirmation to the school’s call to maintain such a code reinforcing this normative schism outwardly while she deals with traversing it internally.
Cars arrive at Bramford. Katherine walks in the opposite direction of the rest of the students, partitioned against them by the trees. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) cries a tear. Katherine stares out into the empty winter wasteland. Katherine’s journey reinforces her newfound sense of isolation. She is separate from the rest of the students. She is separate from her parents. All that remains is the cold, wintery environment which gives her absolutely nothing. She sheds a tear at the realization that her vision is more likely to be premonition than a nightmare that can be ignored.
With the current session of school now at an end, we see parents’ cars pulling in to pick up their kids and are forcefully reminded of the terrible visions from the film’s start.
Right on cue, we cut from a wide shot which shows the majority of the students walking one way, presumably to their parents, while we see Kathrine hauling herself the other way, desperate to ascertain whether or not her nightmare was true or not. Intense strings accentuate this movement away from the crowd, a desperate attempt to find connection where we know it doesn’t lie.
As foretold, Katherine stares out into the snowy wasteland, a tear streaming down her eyes, and is framed completely alone against this environment.
Rose (Lucy Boynton) looks at Katherine’s performance. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) plays the piano. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka), separated in the frame by the piano, looks out in the audience. Katherine’s parents are missing. Katherine’s piano performance marks the first encounter between Rose and herself. Rose looks up at Katherine but the older girl’s gaze is not met. Instead, Katherine looks out, while framed fully alone by her musical instrument, at the sea of faces in the crowd and pays attention only to the absent seats her parents would’ve filled if they had managed to make it. This interaction spells out the film: missing moments of interaction between persons both within and absent from a space spur alienation; Katherine does not see Rose and does not see her parents; she is condemned to be alone.
Finally, we see our two primary characters enter one another’s circles when Rose enters the auditorium and sees Katherine play her aforementioned musical number. There’s a wonderful shot of Katherine partitioned in the frame again, the piano in the foreground and out-of-focus acting as a delimiter between her and the rest of the space. She looks out the audience and sees two empty seats, places where we know her parents should have been. The scene cuts when she sings about “hope”; her desire that her premonitions of the future are false finally fade away and she’s forced to accept the cold reality of what she’s seen.
Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) and Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) looks over. Rose (Lucy Boynton) looks over. The first formal encounter between Katherine and Rose affirms the distance between the two young women. They both stare off in completely different directions while dealing with their missing parents. While Katherine’s parents are hinted to be dead, Rose’s parents are implied to be missing due to their daughter’s interference; the difference for the respective parental figures’ missing statuses thus marks the larger dichotomy separating the girls and their respective journeys towards resolving the alienation they feel.
These two girls, one whose parents we are certain are dead and one who wishes to actively avoid her parents for other reasons, are seated next to one another as the administration attempts to figure out what to do with them.
Katherine is questioned about whether or not she’s received a call on her cell-phone from her folks, but she reveals that she doesn’t have such a device, a means by which to communicate with her loved ones, and the group focuses their attention on Rose who lies through her teeth and explains that she told her parents the wrong day to come.
The dean attempts to assuage the girls’ concerns, real and fictional respectively, and jokingly mentions that their parents have to come get them because the girls can’t “live” at the school, a statement which utterly gets under Katherine’s skin because of her forbidden knowledge: where will she end up if she has no home to go to and can’t stay at this educational abode?
There’s an attempt made to get Rose to look after Katherine in the interim period before the duo’s parents are expected to arrive, and the girl’s exchange glances at one another while they’re framed in their singles; it’s a moment of hope on Katherine’s part, a potential connection amongst the darkness, and a moment of irritation for Rose, a potential impediment to the plans she has to resolve her own issues. The latter deflects responsibility, calling back to her illness as an excuse and the principal attempts to wash his hands of the situation and tasks the nurses with getting things back in order before forcing responsibility onto Katherine to do the bare minimum and call to her parents once more.
Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) tries to call her parents again. A nurse (Elena Krausz) sits on the opposite side of the room while Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) finishes her call. Katherine’s attempts to call out to her parents is one doomed to fail, further cementing their portended status. The cut to the wide shot demonstrates just how alone she truly is, as even another person in the room feels miles away as the phone call disappoints and is unable to summon the presence which Katherine so desperately yearns for.
Per this request, Katherine makes phone-calls, communicative gambits she is certain will fail, to her parents and pleads with them, though we know she’s really begging the forces that be, to provide an answer back to her. Her eyes dart around the frame as she waits with baited breath for any possible response.
As she puts the phone down, we cut to a wide shot that highlights the abject distance she feels between herself and others; the nurse in the room feels miles away even as she sits right besides Katherine.
Katherine places the spoon at an angle. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) obsessively looks at the arrangement. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) changes the arrangement. Katherine’s intense concentration with the dining table arrangement evokes the same discontent channeled by Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. Here his obsession with the Alka-Seltzer is channeled in her obsession with the arrangement that evokes a slight asymmetry. Like Bickle, Katherine’s behavior is disturbing in its severity and deviancy from the norm and her simple act of changing the arrangement speaks to something far greater and more insidious.
The effects of this isolation become more explicit when the girls and nurses go down to eat dinner. There’s clearly something wrong in the air and there’s an intense, unpleasant droning noise that continues to intrude as Katherine fixes her plating arrangements. Initially, she places her spoon at a slightly diagonal angle, a seemingly small mistake in the grand scheme of things but one that she obsessively pores over, staring at the deviant ordering with enough intensity to bore a hole through the whole arrangement; it’s a moment of psychological estrangement that feels right out of Travis Bickle’s playbook in Taxi Driver, warranting a comparison to the infamous and off-putting Alka-seltzer scene. It’s only at the apex of the aural discrepancy that she slightly re-adjusts the spoon back into place, a seemingly minute action which takes on a life far larger than it would desire, but the sounds only continue to reverberate, overpowering the “grace” that is said by the parties present at the table.
Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) talks to Rose (Lucy Boynton) who is out-of-focus in the foreground. Rose and her boyfriend drive away as the snow pelts down. Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) stares down at the couple from a window. Katherine stares at the idyllic image of Rose (Lucy Boynton) Lower angle shot of Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) staring. The phone in the hallway. Katherine’s schism with Rose sets the tone for what’s to come in their relationship. The young girl asks the older one to stay back and take care of her, a cry for help, a desperate last attempt to stay afloat with the visions of her parents’ death dragging her down. But instead, the could-be role-model absconds her duty and instead contributes only frightening, devilish tales for Katherine to hold onto. Katherine (framed apart from everything else) stares as the “pretty” girl drives away, obsesses over the image of this girl ( which is also framed apart from everything else) in a manner that hearkens back to the discomforting look she gave the kitchen utensils earlier, and we finally cut to the ominous payphone in the hallway of the school — the symbol of communication which will now dominate now that all other discursive avenues have been cast aside.
Afterwards, in the dorm rooms, Rose curtly informs the underclassman foisted upon her by the authorities that she will not be “babysitting.” Katherine protests and repeatedly brings up Mr. Gordon’s edict, an attempt at channeling authority, which is quickly brushed aside by Rose, someone who we know couldn’t be bothered to follow the school’s regulations let alone a command given during supposed vacation time.
Katherine attempts to at least figure out what Rose is going to do but is given nothing as the latter informs her that she is going “nowhere.” In lieu of any meaningful information, Katherine instead spreads sordid hearsay in regards to the nurses, sisters who she claims are devil worshippers.
From her view, this diatribe is meant as a prank, a way to keep Katherine on her toes and away from her business, but we know that the latter, one who Rose herself described as a “freaking recording” when she repeated Gordon’s request, will play this haunting tale in her isolated mental landscape over and over again; given the fractured state of mind we know Katherine to be in, we know this malefic narrative’s pervasive influence won’t end well.
Rose, however, is blissfully ignorant of the consequences of her actions, an ironic position to be in given that she’s gone to meet with her boyfriend to deal with the unintended results of their lovemaking, and leaves Katherine with no comfort, refusing to answer the freshman’s questions about the source of this rumor, and leaves her with a warning to stay away from her room and possessions.
The elder girl leaves, goes through the snowy surroundings, and enters her boyfriend’s car where the two lovers embrace one another with a jovial warmth, a communicative interplay that Katherine desperately longs for and stares at unnervingly from above as she’s framed alone, isolated in a large window, physically restrained from this moment of connection.
It’s at this moment that the terrifying ambiance seeps back in and we see her slowly open Rose’s door as the camera pushes in on her, enter the room she was forbidden from going into, and then pick up and touch Rose’s belongings; she gazes down at Rose’s hairbrush and then stares at Rose’s school photos, the artificial Edenic images, with the same intensity that she directed at the spoon earlier at during dinner.
A tear rolls down her face as she cries out for this lost moment to connect with an upperclassman who could assuage her worries but a new moment for communion presents itself as we cut to a silhouetted telephone ringing in an empty hallway. If Rose qua “the Angel” refuses to respond, then whomever is calling on the line will have to do. Right as the terror of the situation settles, we cut again to black — a confirmation of the morbid realization.
Joan (Emma Roberts) stares into a bathroom mirror. Doctors look down. Joan (Emma Roberts) makes a call which goes dead. An map of Bramfoard dissolves into Joan. Joan’s introduction is fraught with mystery. Her gaze into the mirror introduces flashbacks which only raise questions. Her desperate phone-call is a dead-end that goes nowhere. But we know she’s going to Bramford, the location where both Katherine and Rose reside. How will these characters’ journeys interact with one another?
Finally, at near the 19-minute mark, our final character, a third young woman (Emma Roberts), appears and walks into a facility, cautiously looking around as if worried that she’s being followed.
She goes to a bathroom and stares at a mirror while discordant noises begin to play and we see a quick peak into her mind, a distorted flashback comprised of short bursts that hint at a medical facility of sorts. She rips off a wristband and confirms that she’s an escaped patient yet the circumstances surrounding her are kept private.
With quarters in her hand, she quietly attempts to use a payphone; the camera obscures her visage as she holds the phone to her face, desperate to hear her desired contact on the other side; but she receives an error message instead and dejectedly puts the phone down. This disturbing moment serves as a counter-point to the communicative misfires that we saw Katherine experience and the cut from the call happening with her to this call failing to go through connect these seemingly disparate settings and characters into a larger tapestry exploring attempts at connection.
These moments are then more explicitly connected when this escapee wanders the facility, finds a map, and stares at Bramford’s location. The cartographic image, a representation of how to traverse (literal) distance, dissolves to the film’s iconic shot of the young woman, who’s positioned in the lower quadrant of the frame with her head facing away from the audience; whomever she’s looking for is at the school we’ve been made privy to and her thoughts are singularly focused on this point in space even as we wonder what she seeks.
Katherine (Kiernan Shipka) looks up at this black figure which obscures half the frame. Joan (Emma Roberts) looks down as a black figure, Bill, obscures half of the frame. The connections between the seemingly unrelated characters becomes stronger as Perkins uses the nature of the frame to connect Katherine and Joan: both girls are isolated in one half of the frame as a figure in black, father figures of different sorts, covers the other part of the frame. The difference in the images come from the side the black figure approaches and the perspectives of the young women in respect to the figure: Katherine looks up in an embrace while Joan looks away in rejection. The nature of this connection is one of many that the film will expertly navigate and unwind.
While she waits outside, an elderly gentleman, Bill (James Remar), questions her on whether she’s waiting for someone and offers her a ride East. He partitions the frame as his black-coat, shot out-of-focus, takes up more than half of the space and ominously calls back to the opening moment where Katherine’s anointed “Daddy” fulfills an analogous aesthetic function. The two images look like reflections of one another when presented side-by-side and projects these persons in an alike light or, to be more precise, in a similar shadow. We’re left to wonder then if Bill is the same as the shadowy specter which guides Katherine through her visions or if his position on the opposite side of the frame codifies him as a corporeal comrade meant to help the young woman navigate reality.
It’s at this point that the young woman gives up her name: Joan — a contextually charged moniker that alludes to the great saint herself, Joan of Arc, a woman who was immolated for her faith, a spiritual gesture which we’ve been informed by the opening is doomed to fall on silent ears: the failed phone call is transformed into a moment of divine contemplation. Is this car ride a holy answer to her call to get to Bramford? Has her “prayer” been answered in a way she didn’t expect? Or is she walking down a path that will lead to her ultimate demise?
Bill’s car drives away. A cut to black. Rose’s car drives back in. The black frame is used to traverse distances between characters, connecting two car rides going to different places in a manner that suggests that their journey is one in the same.
She accepts the help offered and gets in the car. We see the back of the vehicle drive away and we fade to black once again before fading back to another vehicle belonging to Rose’s partner, which is driving back to Bramford Academy; the edit ties Joan’s journey to Rose’s as well, using the ominous black which the film has cut to as a transition multiple times as a ligature between two different journeys, two different spaces which both lead to the same location.
Thus, the stage is set for the convergence of these three women’s respective desires coming into contact with one another as they try and resolve their respective problems, some of which we’re privy to and others which we’re left more ambiguous about; but all of their issues stem from and are intimately related to: communication and the manner in which it both bridges and causes alienation.
The song which acts as prologue to the film proper and the supernatural opening frame these questions in a religious context, one that evokes the meditations of Ingmar Bergman’s spiritual works ruminating on the silence of God and the meaning of faith in such a world, while using the trappings of the horror genre, both supernatural visuals and psychological interplays, to dramatically raise the stakes of and render the results of these ruminations viscerally explicit.
The constant refrains to a black frame, a plane of unknowability which takes on a plethora of associated functions as the film continues, alongside the film’s shifting spatial chronologies, split amongst the three aforementioned women, give director Oz Perkins the chance to contemplate the same action or lack thereof from multiple perspectives, effectively keeping the narrative engaging even as it circles on itself like an ouroboros, devouring seemingly everything it proffers in search of an inner meaning which is only made explicitly clear as the final narrative domino drops.
The aesthetic decisions, both the choice to focus on the character’s visages — lower quadrant shots and close-ups of their faces — and their unknowability — deep shadows and constant silhouettes obscuring possible information — along with the Antonioni-like framing of the character’s against persons and backdrops that render them isolated in the frame, exposing their inner-most thoughts visually through the mise-en-scène, have a psychological effect that compliments the narrative as it shifts through space and time, accentuating moments of uncertainty and unease which make the unnerving progressions chilling to experience and render the set-pieces, few and far-between, an absolute terror to witness.
In spite of its aesthetic and narrative withholdings, Perkins never “cheats” the viewer, carefully presenting all the details along the way in such a manner that one finishes the film and realizes that the twists were truthfully presaged and the disasters were dutifully portended. Caught under the film’s spell, the viewer is left entranced and befuddled until the moment of divine revelation is rendered, leaving them as chilled as the wintery backdrop that serves as the film’s milieu.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
The Blackcoat’s Daughter is one of the truly great debut films, utilizing the horror genre to explore deep-seated questions about faith and meaning without sacrificing the bite and terror one would associate with it. The film deftly intercuts between different perspectives, delivering a cartography of the psyche that will leave attentive viewers truly haunted.
Rating
10/10
Grade
S
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Daniel Kaluuya as Chris Allison Williams as Rose Armitage Bradley Whitford as Dean Armitage Catherine Keener as Missy Armitage Caleb Landry Jones as Jeremy Armitage Lil Rel Howery as Rod
Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Wendy (Shelley Duvall) walk in the hedge-made labyrinth. Andre (Lakeith Stanfield) walks in the suburban labyrinth . The movie opens on a suburban landscape in one-point perspective with greenery adorning both sides of a walkway in the center, hearkening back to the iconic hedge maze from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Given both Wendy and Danny’s eventual fates, we immediately know that Andre is in danger of some external danger. This will soon be confirmed as he’s kidnapped.
We open in a suburban neighborhood sidewalk. The camera tracks forward slowly as a young black man, Andre, (Lakeith Stanfield) walks onto it talking on his cellphone about how the location is disorienting or as he puts it: “a creepy confusing ass suburb.” The mise-en-scène hearkens back to similar shots from Kubrick’s The Shining, namely that of the characters walking through a hedge maze. Like those characters, this labyrinth is not a safe location for inhabitants unfamiliar with it.
Andre realizes that a car is following him and tries to escape it but is caught unaware by an assailant donning a knight’s head of armor. As the latter chokes out the former, we can hear the lyrics to Gay and Butler’s song “Run Rabbit Run”; the happy sounding song warning rabbits to run is jarring in feeling but lyrically contextual, warning us of things to come. His body is unceremoniously dumped into the back of his pursuer’s car as the opening credits play in blue font color. This reference to The Shining, which also uses the same light blue color in its opening sequence text, is made even more explicit in the next cut to a tracking shot of a forest.
Peele doubles down on The Shining references by directly referencing the opening of movie through the use of a similar light blue opening credit font along with a shot of an ominous forest. It’s the aural differences (and similarities) that set the scenes apart as Kubrick’s
While Kubrick’s masterpiece starts on aerial shot of a mountain range and surrounding forest as foreboding droning noises with indigenous chants punctuate the soundscape, setting up the subtext regarding the genocide of the native populations. Peele keeps the view of the encroaching forest but trades the cries of the indigenous, whispery African voices puncture the soundscape and give a warning to be careful of impending danger. [1] Weaver, C., & Peele. (2017, February 3). Jordan Peele on a Real Horror Story: Being Black in America. GQ. https://www.gq.com/story/jordan-peele-get-out-interview. It’s no coincidence that the jovial track warning rabbits is swapped out for an moody and foreboding Swahili song, “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga ” which similarly warns its recipient of impending danger.
Finally, the movie cuts to a striking black and white photograph, neatly framed against the wall; no longer in the forests, we’ve transported to the inside of a photographer’s apartment. The song changes again to Childish Gambino’s funky ethereal track “Redbone” which warns its audience to stay alert for creepers looking out to get them, the audience, while unaware. We get to see the interior of the apartment before finally getting to see our protagonist, a black photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), getting ready for an outing with Rose (Allison Williams) , his white girlfriend.
We learn that he’s getting ready to meet Rose’s parents, Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener), for a weekend visit at the latter’s residence. He asks her if they know that he’s black. She says “no,” but assuages his concerns by ensuring him that her parents are super liberal going so far as to mention how her father would vote for “Obama a third time if he could.” It’s the perfect comedy set-up; well-to-do white liberals in their efforts to seem inclusive end up reinforcing racist tropes in comedic fashion. However, everything up till now has primed us to be more suspicious and be on alert. We know being in an unfamiliar neighborhood is dangerous news for black men and we’ve been warned now 3 times to stay vigilant.
The immediate effect of this opening sequence is a persistent vertigo effect that makes every interaction impossible to pin down as our interpretations of what’s happening is constantly being ripped out from under; innocuous moments turn uncomfortable turn horrifying as we along with Chris are forced into questioning every interaction. His reception starts innocent enough, but as his stay continues little moments build up into bizarre microaggressions which transform into horrific realizations culminating in what I can only describe as the horrific ideology of “post-racial”[2]By post-racial I am referring to the idea of a post-racial America where the United States is free from racism and discrimination related to the same. The idea came heavily back into fashion with the … Continue reading equality come to life.
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) shows both fear and unease perfectly as he cocks his head and intensifies his gaze in regards to Georgina’s odd behaviours. Georgina (Betty Gabriel) goes “batshit” as she cries and smiles in a disconcerting fashion. Peele relishes in the ambiguities of his characters by shooting the actors portraying them in beautiful close-ups. By using their faces as canvases during intense moments, Peele gets to drive home ambiguities, heighten tensions, and get you fully invested in where everything is going. It helps that the movie is filled with masterclass performances from the lead in Kaluuya all the way to supporting cast like Gabriel.
This is obviously helped by the fantastic performances of the cast which Peele shows off by filming in close up, letting their faces envelop the entire frame. Moments that are already unnerving become blood chilling as we’re forced to confront faces that seem to give away everything and nothing simultaneously (in particular scenes with Betty Gabriel who plays Georgina) ; every muscular twitch, every pinching at the lip, every shift in the gaze becomes heightened forcing the audience to figure out what is trying to be revealed. While I can’t get into nuances of every actor for fear of spoilers, I can say that the multiple roles that a host of the characters play make it impossible to gauge certain moments for what they are until the end of the movie only for them then to then gain another layer of meaning on subsequent watches.
Chris (Daniel Kaluuya)talks about his evening with Missy with Rod . Rod (Lil Rel Howery) responds to Chris’s concerns and offers his comedic diagnosis.Peele intentionally structures the movie’s key revelations around conversations between Chris and his best friend Rod. These scenes give the movie and audience some breathing room while making the larger themes of the movie easier to digest. It helps the movie be coy in moving forward with more nuanced thematic ideas later on.
Obviously the topic of racism (and it’s relevant nuances) is hard to tackle in a way that keeps its target audience [3]One only has to look at the currently “critical race theory” debate breaking out right now – … Continue reading, people who have drank the “post-racial” Kool-Aid, in their seats while also seriously reckoning with the issue. Peele solves this at a structural level with the introduction of Chris’s best friend, Rod (Lil Rel Howery), who calls in at various points of the movie and offers comedic takes on the situation. It’s not that what he’s saying is incorrect or off base; Rod is actually correct in his own ways about most of what he says if you want to connect the dots. It’s that Howery’s delivery of certain “assessments” helps ease discussion of more serious topics in a more accessible and less severe manner. On top of giving the audience time to catch their breath and compose their thoughts, the technique allows certain thematic ideas to be cemented in a more innocuous way allowing their more developed forms to more easily take root; simple anti-black racism turns into a discussion on the harms of post-racial ideology which turns into a meditation on the importance of black art as a survival strategy.
This is why the horror movie of an interracial couple meeting white parents features the black boyfriend of the couple being a renowned photographer known for his unique “eye”. Peele has explicitly come out and said “Black creators have not been given a platform, and the African-American experience can only be dealt with by an African-American.” Therefore, it is imperative that Chris’s is a black artist He can “see” the best shots. However, this sight is not limited to just art but also to the way the levers of power operate around him. From his first comment to his girlfriend, we know he’s aware of racial dynamics; springing a black boyfriend to a white family that’s only known white boyfriends might go poorly. This is an example of what W.E.B. Dubois called “double consciousness”, where a minority party identifies themselves according to a trait which they know is being surveilled – black flesh- and have thus internalized judgements associated with the same. [4]Scott, J., Franklin, A. T., & Higgins, K. (2006). Chapter 3: Double Consciousness and Second Sight . In Critical affinities: Nietzsche and African American thought. essay, State University of New … Continue reading Chris knows what could happen because he can predict what a white set of parents might think of him because he’s been conditioned by similar treatment from an early age. This vantage point is traumatic but can be transformed into a spiritual “second sight” through an understanding that the debilitating judgements one is casting on oneself are a result of a problematic world; in the case of Chris, this sight has literally manifested in artistic vision. [5]Ibid.
Because the horror is related to the ideological nature of racism and Chris has the ability to detect the “lines” of that ideology, he naturally makes intelligent decisions that we can get behind. We get behind him because it feels like he knows what he’s doing. That’s why when things get flipped on their heads, we realize that we’ve been caught as well – unaware of the true depths of the horror we’ve been led into. The manifestation of this horror in relation to Chris (and his photography) then brings the themes of the movie to full circle, forcing us to reckon with the value of black art, not just as a vision but as a way of survival in society that seeks to erase black subjectivity.
For a genre whose most famous connection to black characters is in its notoriety in killing them first, it’s a breath of fresh air to have a movie in which the black character is intelligent, artistic, and the protagonist. Far from running away from the genre (I’d argue the deference to The Shining shows an immense respect for the genre), Peele runs towards it with open arms in an attempt to use horror to examine racial dynamics in a way previously unexplored. Never once is tension or suspense traded for the sake of a theme and never once is a theme left unexplored in favor of pushing out a new scare. Instead, every element works in tandem to deliver a though provoking thrill ride that will force you to question the nature of status quo ace relations.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Get Out is a horror classic in the making, demonstrating that the genre has more than enough in its wheelhouse to tell captivating stories about issues as nuanced as the terrors of post-racial ideology. It’s a movie that stays committed to both scaring and teaching, never foregoing entertainment for nuance or vice versa. With a healthy number of The Shining references, the evocative soundtrack spanning musical genres, dark comedy built into the structure of the narrative, and a protagonist who you can’t help supporting, it’s hard to find a reason not to recommend the movie to someone.
Rating
10/10
Grade
S
Go to Page 2for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Weaver, C., & Peele. (2017, February 3). Jordan Peele on a Real Horror Story: Being Black in America. GQ. https://www.gq.com/story/jordan-peele-get-out-interview.
By post-racial I am referring to the idea of a post-racial America where the United States is free from racism and discrimination related to the same. The idea came heavily back into fashion with the election of former President Obama with multiple pundits claiming that Obama symbolized a new era.
One only has to look at the currently “critical race theory” debate breaking out right now – https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/06/gop-whos-afraid-of-critical-race-theory/619311/
Scott, J., Franklin, A. T., & Higgins, K. (2006). Chapter 3: Double Consciousness and Second Sight . In Critical affinities: Nietzsche and African American thought. essay, State University of New York Press.
