Expertly blending those two genres with on-point satire, Get Out worked as an exposé allowing us to visualise a certain type of African-American experience (Peele may not have been joking too much when he called it a ‘documentary’) that has long been an elephant in the room: the fears ranging from nightmarish micro-aggressions to much much worse that lie behind being Black in and around affluent white US middle classes.īy making a subversive retelling of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, with sprinkles of Stepford Wives, Rosemary’s Baby and, that man again, Michael Haneke and his uncanny home invasion scenarios, Jordan Peele has crafted a film as remarkable for its twists, its turns, and the fun to be had unpeeling (pun unintended) its many eye and vision-related motifs, as it is for its skewering of the liberal white middle-classes’ implicit racism. Politically timely, gripping, often unexpectedly funny, the talked-about movie event of the year was the debut of a comedian-turned-director, Jordan Peele, who also clearly has a film-lover’s passion for horrors and thrillers. If this doesn’t get under your skin, you have one thick hide. Janne Rättyä’s blood-curdling accordion chillers on the soundtrack, and Nicole Kidman’s bizarre turn as the surgeon’s creepily calculating wife, only add to the something’s-not-quite-right feeling. The wide-angle lens shots for home interior scenes, the formally precise tracking shots down corridors, the seemingly unmotivated zoom-ins and -outs Lanthimos uses these tricks for no specific reason other than turning up the unease dial. While the premise lies somewhere between Greek tragedy, Haneke, and Pasolini’s Teorema, Lanthimos pushes audio-visual mastery worthy of Kubrick. This clinical and cynical retelling of the Iphigenia myth pits an affluent, reputed surgeon (Colin Farrell showcasing his deadpan skills again after The Lobster) against a very peculiar teenage boy (Barry Keoghan in probably the most disturbing performance of the year) who is going to invade not just his life, but his family too, forcing a moral dilemma of utter perversity on their shoulders.įew 2017 films were as unnerving as the latest from contemporary virtuoso of weirdness Yorgos Lanthimos. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos) There are also films I saw a bit too late to include, such as You Were Never Really Here, that I may well save for a 2018 list… Some more things that 2017 did very well: languorous summers, odd couples, comebacks by great female directors, and scenes involving deer, although ironically not The Killing of a Sacred Deer.ġ6. My countdown of the best films I saw in 2017 gets to the business end of things ( Part 1 here), with 16 fantastic films in order of preference, picked among the many I got to see in 2017 - it was a tough job cutting it down.
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