The Visit + Get Out

• Tuesday, August 26 at 2:15pm (The Visit) + 4:15pm (Get Out)
• Thursday, September 4 at 6:30pm (The Visit) + 8:30pm (Get Out)

The Visit
M. Night Shyamalan, 2015, U.S., 94m
M. Night Shyamalan’s self-financed, low-budget return to independent genre filmmaking doubled as both a reinvention and a formal pivot. Constructed as a documentary shot by two teen siblings visiting their estranged grandparents, The Visit refracts suspense and comedy through a child’s-eye perspective, deviously blurring the boundary between home video and Grimm fairy tale. Shyamalan maintains tightrope control over the film’s deliberately unsteady tone, veering between slapstick shock and genuine terror, while probing the emotional residue of abandonment and the deep-rooted discomfort children feel around aging relatives who suddenly seem like strangers… and maybe they are?

Followed by:

Get Out
Jordan Peele, 2017, U.S., 35mm, 104m
When Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black photographer from New York, accompanies his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to her family’s upstate estate, the casual racism and falsely smiling social privilege that imbues her parents’ white suburbia turns from mildly suffocating to downright sinister as the weekend wears on, leading Chris to uncover an unimaginable dark secret about the community. In its elucidation of “The Sunken Place,” Get Out becomes a horror allegory that, like The Visit, twists the American domestic space into something uncanny, and finds terror in being trapped with those who insist they mean well. Winner of the Academy Award for best original screenplay. 35mm print courtesy of Jordan Peele’s personal collection.