We’re all keenly conscious of how possible it is.
The film starts with Chris traveling home for the weekend to meet his girlfriend Rose’s parents who live on the set of a horror movie - excuse me: in a secluded, wooded, mainly white suburb. Her surgeon dad, Dean, and hypnotherapist mommy, Missy, pepper Chris with questions and try and build their anti-racist cred by telling him how many times they voted for Obama. Chris is led by them past their black help, a maid and a groundskeeper, and burden him with their white guilt that is performative. They're the kind of interactions that are awkward any black person in the audience would expect out of the situation. As we do, Chris takes it in stride, and even comforts Rose like her eyes are being opened to her family when it seems ’s racial microagressions for the first time.
When Missy offers to treat Chris of his nicotine habit via hypnotism, he is weirded out but passes it off as an oddity. He tries to keep it together even after he’s convinced he’s in fact been hypnotized and nearly assaulted by their groundskeeper, Walter (Marcus Henderson). It’s not until Chris recognizes that the guy who’s been missing from his neighborhood for months is residing in the suburb, married to a white woman twice his age seemingly against his will, that Chris knows something is very wrong.