This wildly profitable socially themed horror-comedy was one of the biggest success stories of
2017.
Still, it's easy to get a little lost in all the action, and hard-hitting subtext, on the
screen during the final act.
To help you make sense of it all, here's Get Out's ending explained.
"Hi.
I'm Roman Armitage and if you're watching this, you're probably wondering what's going
on."
The ultimate reveal at the end of Get Out is so organically earned that the weight of
it can be hard to understand on first viewing.
When Chris goes to meet his white girlfriend Rose's parents for the first time, he's apprehensive.
"You said I was the first black guy you ever dated."
"Yeah, so what?"
"Yeah, so this is uncharted territory for me.
You know, I don't wanna get chased off your front lawn with a shotgun."
At first his fears seem ridiculous since Missy and Dean seem perfectly nice, if awkward.
However, Dean drops some early foreshadowing when he reminisces about when his father lost
a race to Jesse Owens.
"Tough break for your dad though."
"Yeah.
He almost got over it."
As the audience and Chris soon learn, the Armitages and their friends are planning to
steal Chris' body as part of a plan to live forever in the bodies of kidnapped black people.
Dean's musing about his father's loss to a black man hints early on that the Armitages
aren't exactly as jovial as they seem.
Later in the film, Chris is hypnotized against his will by Missy and introduced to "The Sunken
Place."
"Now you're in the sunken place."
What exactly is the Sunken Place?
It's a visual display of what happens when Chris is paralyzed through hypnosis, but according
to director Jordan Peele, it also represents the reality of living as a marginalized person.
Peele tweeted:
"We are all in the Sunken Place...
We're marginalized.
No matter how hard we scream, the system silences us."
Unfortunately, Chris soon learns that racism is a family business and that his girlfriend
Rose is a willing participant in her family's crimes.
For years, she's been luring black people back to her family's home to be hypnotized
for dark purposes.
As Chris wakes up paralyzed in a chair, he finds out just how terrifying the Armitage
family really is.
A video reveals that the family is part of a cult called the Order of Coagula, originally
led by Rose's grandfather.
The video goes on to say that the Order of Coagula developed a method of life extension
through brain transplants.
Young black people were sought out for these operations for their perceived superior physical
traits.
The black people are lobotomized, preserving only a shadow of the host's consciousness,
forever doomed to reside as a paralyzed passenger in its own body.
Their brains are replaced with the consciousness of rich, old white people interested in immortality.
It's already been established that Chris' response to hypnosis is to panic scratch at
a chair's upholstery.
This winds up being his saving grace.
Chris is able to pull some cotton from the chair he's been confined to and stuff it in
his ears so that he isn't affected by the hypnotic sound.
After gaining the upper hand on the Armitages in a satisfyingly violent sequence, Chris
gets in a car and tries to escape.
In the process, he comes to a final confrontation with his former girlfriend Rose.
By the end of it, Rose lies wounded on the ground telling Chris that she still loves
him.
"I'm so sorry.
It's me.
I, I love you, I love you."
Chris sees through the lie, and begins to strangle her, but after their time together,
he just can't bring himself to go through with it.
As he lets up on Rose, we see a police car's red and blue lights flashing.
Earlier in the film, Rose and Chris are pulled over.
Despite the fact that Rose is driving, the police officer asks to see Chris' ID, and
he hands it over, sadly accustomed to being profiled by the law.
So when the police lights flash in the movie's final moments, we fear that Chris will be
shot or railroaded into prison by a racist police officer.
Luckily, it isn't a police car, but rather a TSA vehicle driven by Chris' pal Rod.
Chris walks away from Rose, leaving her to possibly die from her wounds, and gets in
Rod's car, finally free from the Armitage's twisted scheme.
It's a mostly happy ending, but Peele nearly ripped out audiences' hearts with an alternate
deleted ending.
In the alternate ending, it's not Rod who turns up to save the day, but the actual police.
Chris is blamed for the deaths at the Armitage house and arrested, and the scene cuts to
Rod visiting Chris in prison.
The movie ends with Chris accepting his fate in prison, secure in the knowledge that at
least he stopped what was happening.
"I'm good.
I stopped it.
You know?"
But as Chris hangs up the phone, we can see the dozens of black men that are in prison
with him, and we know that Chris didn't really stop anything; he just stopped one particularly
fantastical symptom of racism.
Ultimately, Peele went with the theatrical ending because he felt like the deleted one
was just too heavy for an audience that needed a break.
He told Variety that:
"It was very clear that the ending needed to transform into something that gives us
a hero, that gives us an escape, gives us a positive feeling when we leave this movie."
In Get Out, the Order of Coagula are not the kind of societal outcast racists that are
usually depicted in movies.
These are socially accepted, otherwise-upstanding-citizen racists, who keep their true evil hidden by
falsehoods and platitudes.
"Don't, please don't lump me in with that, you know, I could give a s--- what color you
are, you know."
By revealing their professed admiration for the black race as fetishistic and opportunistic,
Peele revealed an unspoken, larger truth that resonated with audiences worldwide.
Using the microaggressions that people of color deal with in their everyday lives as
the signals for more sinister motives, Peele created a story that succeeds both as an engrossing
thriller and as a pointed social commentary.
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