by Jason Adams
She says "No" fourteen times. It starts off with an "Ohh" that swings into an "Oh, no." Then it gets a little cutesy with a sarcastically sweet "Nooo" that reads as violently as a Southerner saying "Well bless your heart." From there it's a tumble, a cascade of no-no-no's swallowing up each one before it -- a walling-off of panic followed by a hard, thick swallow. A sharp inhale. The computer reboots. "Aren't you something," she asks, blinking off tears she can't seem to even feel running down her face.
And now Georgina (Betty Gabriel) leans forward, conspiratorially, coming even closer to the camera...
You can actually hear the floorboards creak beneath her, all her weight (two bodies worth) pressing down. This is an absolute invasion of our personal space at this point. "The Armitages are so good to us," she grins too broadly, head tilted to a too strange angle.
Gabriel's work with the camera here is keen stuff -- this is a dance of a close-up, etching deeper degrees of wrongness in microscopic shifts of facial planes. A cheek turned tall, round, feels monumental and slightly obscene. All Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) had said to Georgina was that sometimes being around too many white folks makes him nervous, but it was like he swung one of those oversized sledgehammers onto a boardwalk bell game -- Georgina sparks, shatters; to borrow Patrick Bateman's turn of phrase her mask of sanity slips.
This would play like gangbusters beside Paula Prentiss' kitchen malfunction in The Stepford Wives -- it's impossible to tell where the black woman being held hostage ends and her captor, the elderly white woman underneath, begins. "The Armitages are so good to us," she says, that final pluralization echoing from here to Jordan Peele's follow-up film -- Us, all the people black people have to be; hollowed out husks turned white people's playthings. It's all there, vibrating across Betty Gabriel's earthquake surface, spilling out her eyes, blinked off and forgotten like a last slapped breath. Here we watch an entire murder happen in fourteen simple words.
Recently in "Great Moments in Horror Actressing"...
- Rosario Dawson, Death Proof
- Glenda Farrell, Mystery of the Wax Museum
- Anjelica Huston, The Witches
- Rita Macedo, Curse of the Crying Woman
- Geena Davis, The Fly
- Shelley Duvall, The Shining
- Jessica Lange, Cape Fear
- Sadie Frost, Bram Stoker's Dracula
- The women of American Psycho
- Lupita Nyong'o, Us