Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Get In’ on Netflix, a French Thriller That’s Part ‘Get Out,’ Part ‘Funny Games’

You can’t help but wonder if Netflix purposely titled Get In in order to garner near-immediate comparison to Jordan Peele’s groundbreaking thriller Get Out. (The streamer likely had to rename the new film — it’s known as Furie in its native France, which begs confusion with the 2019 Vietnamese action film of the same name.) Olivier Abbou’s tense thriller flirts with similar themes as Peele’s movie, but does Get In ultimately deserve to associate with a new-masterpiece?

GET IN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Subtitle: “The following events are based on a true story.” Paul (Adama Niane) and Chloe (Stephane Caillard) Diallo and their young son have just spent two months traveling the countryside in their vintage motorhome. It’s a dark and stormy night when they get back, and the entry to their gated home doesn’t work. Their housesitters, Sabrina (Marie Bourin), also their nanny, and her husband Eric (Hubert Delattre), aren’t picking up the phone. Rumble rumble crack, goes the storm.

Turns out Sabrina and Eric signed a contract agreeing to pay the utilities, and are now exploiting a loophole that allows them to stay in the house. What are Paul and Chloe supposed to do? Physically force them to leave? Is this where I note that Eric is a large man, and Paul is slight of build? (Yes, because this becomes relevant later.) They call the cops, who treat Paul like a black man who just climbed over the gate to a big house — they rough him up and cuff him and don’t bother to listen to a damn thing he says.

Infuriated yet? Well, it gets worse. The cops basically shrug them off. They pull the RV into a nearby campground and call a lawyer, the first in a series of bureaucratic hoops Paul jumps through like a toy poodle with a doberman buried deep in its amygdala. Long story short, they’re getting stonewalled, and the weeks go by in the motorhome as Paul teaches an all-too-appropriate high-school history course on John Locke — you know, life, liberty and property and all that. Paul and Chloe’s marital troubles compound the stress, especially when he skips their marriage-counseling appointments. And then one of Paul’s students calls him an “Oreo,” you know, black on the outside, white on the inside.

This is when Mickey (Paul Hamy), the campground manager, slyly muscles into Paul’s life. Mickey looks and kinda acts like a redneck, but we shouldn’t judge — no, judge him by his smile, which resembles nothing we’d ever define as reassuring, especially considering Chloe coolly acknowledges that they went to school together. But when she’s not looking Mickey encourages Paul to loosen up a little. They pal around, pound a few brewskis, go to a warehouse party thrown by Mickey’s buddies where everyone gets wasted and shoots guns at loose pigs wandering the property. This is some hardcore Big Man stuff, stuff that Paul never indulged because he’s a mindful, intellectual family man, but also stuff that he might want to consider indulging, once this entire situation goes bucking-bronco nuts and threatens to toss him in the dirt and stomp him.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Get In tangles the black-man-in-a-white-world topicality of Get Out with the disturbing and exasperating home-invasion terrorplots of The Strangers and Funny Games with the racist-rednecks-run-amok horror of Green Room, and throws in the creepy animal masks of You’re Next for good measure.

Performance Worth Watching: Niane is quite good as a “weak” man at a personal crossroads. He’d be terrific in a thoughtful drama addressing a similar topic.

Memorable Dialogue: “You’re a victim ’cause you decided to be,” Mickey

Sex and Skin: A creepy sexual-assault scene; fairly unsexy liberal toplessness; a gross, unsexy sex scene in a toilet stall; a disturbingly unsexy credits sequence.

Our Take: First things first: that “true story” disclaimer is a load of hooey tossed on there to lend the movie plausibility. It’s entirely believable that a flawed legal system might allow squatters to temporarily take over an upper-middle-class home, because that’s exactly the type of backwards-ass anti-logical thing that surely happens every day. But that story ends in court, not with BLOOD AND FIRE like Get In does.

Yet I’m not above admitting susceptibility to the exasperatingly manipulative manner in which Get In worms under your epidermis. It so gradually transitions from credible to incredible, you don’t know until it’s too late that you’ve swallowed the premise. Co-writing with Aurelien Molas, Abbou exploits the recent emergence of Proud Boy culture from its mama’s basement, rendering Mickey and his ultraviolent alpha-male gorilla-chest-beating bros one shade shy of spittle-flinging white supremacists. Our nearly involuntary involvement in the story begins in the opening moments, and there’s no turning back when the movie gets utterly batshit in the third act, complete with elements of torture porn and a drugged-out psychedelic freakout sequence.

I hated watching this miserable, sadistic movie. It preys on our vulnerabilities and fears, and comes to a deeply troubling conclusion about violence, masculinity and the overall State of Things. It’s unflinchingly cynical. But I also must begrudgingly admit that it’s an example of effective, skilled horror filmmaking, with one foot in Michael Haneke psychosis, and the other in Fede Alvarez’s (Don’t Breathe) brand of Hitchcock-derived suspense. It diverts from psychological drama to genre indulgence, but unlike the former, it lacks nuance, and unlike the latter, it’s no fun whatsoever.

Our Call: SKIP IT, unless you own Funny Games in multiple formats.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Get In on Netflix