Get Out

Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford.

Directed by Jordan Peele.

 Get Out is a masterful social horror in the tradition of the Stepford Wives and Rosemary's Baby. It draws on the greatness of those past classics to produce a wholly original and much needed social commentary for our times.
The title comes from on Eddie Murphy comedy bit, about how a black character would immediately leave a haunted house as soon as they noticed something was off.
The implication is that a black person has to be hyper-aware of the danger of this world just to survive. Whereas the horror genre is built around movie, blindly trusting characters. So putting a black character centerstage in a horror movie, which's dealing with these questions, Get Out is subtly revolutionizing the genre. The film gets a lot of its power from inversions, which are strong source of both social insight and comedy.

So, from the start, the story inverts the old cliche of white characters locking their car doors or getting nervous when they find themselves in a bad neighborhood. Instead, Get Out starts with a black man walking through a picturesque suburb and we feel the tense... it's reminding white people, that they can be the scary ones.

What's so subversive about the film is that the target of the satire is white liberals. These are people who would be shocked at being called racist, who probably think of themselves as pretty awoke who are very ones watching this movie and loving it.

But the movie's revealing that these some people might have deeper internalized prejudices that are pretty terrifying. When it comes down to it, many people are willing to go to great lengths to preserve their privilege, no matter what their surface-level politics are.

All of this makes Get Out a landmark film in so many ways.