Chris At The Pictures

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut isn’t titled I’m not racist, I have black friends: The Movie, but it may as well be. The film sees photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) visiting the affluent family of his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), unsure as to how they’ll react to the news that he is, in fact, black. Against the urging of his best friend, Rod (LilRel Howery, who delivers a landslide of the film’s comedic joys), Chris puts on a brave face and makes the trip. Upon arrival, the cringeworthy greeting from Rose’s parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) establishes an atmosphere of awkwardness that could so easily be dismissed as over-friendliness, but amounts to something far more sinister.

From the instant we’re introduced to the Armitage household, with its two black servants and immaculate displays of courtesy, Peele slashes the veneer to allow scalding satire to bleed through. There are comments on cultural appropriation (Roses’s father, Dean, proudly shows off his myriad of multicultural objects that now amount to little more than mantelpiece trinkets), the usually glossed -over smugness of liberal racism (Dean’s over-emphatic oath that he would have voted for Obama for a third term, given the chance) and the fetishising of black bodies. Rose’s extended family gawk at, poke and fawn over Chris’ physical form. “Is it better?” one of the women asks, slipping Rose a knowing look, while a genial uncle declares “Fair skin is out – black is back in fashion!”

No, these aren’t your usual cackling, toothless hicks who readily admit to their backward views with glee; wine takes the place of moonshine, slack-jawed grimaces swapped for painted smiles. In fact, they’d probably rush to tell you how much they “simply loved” Get Out. Even at the most jaw-dropping, unutterable moment of discriminatory revelation, Stephen Root’s blind art dealer decries any inherent racism, before immediately explaining his motivation in a way that can only label him so.

I’m hesitant to co-opt a review about a film primarily concerned with racism and cultural satire to gush about its genre trappings, but considering the rut that studio horror has dropped into recently, we’d best appreciate what Peele has gifted us here. When was the last time a multiplex horror drew on something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers for more than cheap nods to horror nerds? There are contemporary comparisons to make, too: an early scene projects the suffocating depths of Under the Skin through the most famous visual cue from Trainspotting. Oh, and it’s got actual cinematography, not just a greyscale frame left empty in preparation for jump scares!

Cattle-prod frights do appear, but incorporated into a general aura of skin-prickling unease that only intensifies as Chris discovers what lies beneath. And, God, is it a thrill. The steadily-rising dread delivers on every promise the critical hype machine could possibly spit at you, from a supremely unnerving cold open to a conclusion that’ll leave nail marks in your palms for weeks. There are so many moments worth gushing over, but my aversion to spoilers and usual failure to adequately explain a plot means I won’t do that here. All you really need to know is that it’s smart, sharp, scary and everyone in it is sublime (with particular emphasis on Kaluuya, Williams and Keener). How many more great films can 2017 throw at us before we’re exhausted? One more, it seems.

Having lay awake half the night trying to figure out just why Sicario didn’t work for me in the same way it worked for apparently everyone else, I’ve still no luck in nailing it down, but I’ll try to explain myself before the sniper scopes of many an outraged critic take aim.

The latest from Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Enemy, and the upcoming sequel to Blade Runner), the film follows idealistic FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) into the desert of distrust and despair. In the aftermath of a violent and horrific drug raid which sees her team decimated, Macer is enlisted by sandal-wearing CIA operative Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) to aid in the escalating war against Mexican border cartels, working alongside the inscrutable Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro).

If you’re going to sell your film as a ‘suspense thriller’, it might help to make good on that promise. I understand that we’re meant to be kept in the dark just as Macer is as she’s dragged deeper into the cesspit, but the threadbare nature of the dialogue and the tortuous reveal of information kept my investment at arm’s length. 

I hate myself for saying this, but the action sequences – excluding with feeling, the fantastic opening and ending – struck me as the high-budget equivalent of Paranormal Activity: there’s a lot of walking and talking with little dramatic verve until something goes ‘bang’ very loudly. Explosions, shady trades and one striking showdown in the bowels of an illegal border-crossing are far from lacklustre ingredients, but there’s a very fine line between a slow build and the construction workers turning up late.

I may be a tasteless moron in the eyes of several readers by now, but even I can appreciate the value of a good cast: Blunt is fiercely engaging and believably lost as the audience eye-view, and Del Toro is continuously fascinating in his role of the silent and enigmatic spook, whose spoiler-heavy arc prevents me from saying any more than that. I also grew a soft spot for Daniel Kaluuya as Macer’s number two, perhaps because he seems just as lost and irritated by the cloak-and-dagger politics as I was.

A perpetual mood of uncertainty is given great heft by Jóhann Jóhansson’s pulsating, windswept score while Roger Deakins’ cinematography takes the cake, delivering a stunning array of powerful imagery that speaks a dial louder than anything else in the film: the colour beige has never looked so good, every frame thick with artful symbolism.

As much as I went into this ready to sing my praise to the heavens, I can only be honest about a film that did so little for me. I have a major inkling Sicario will be something akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey or Blade Runner, both of which I now hold in huge regard: something for everyone else to rave about around my confounded ears until I give it another go a few years down the line, realise the error of my ways, and stop using my least favourite word: overrated.