Although cloaked in the familiar tropes of the horror and thriller film, Get Out transcends its genre trappings to offer a searing and penetrating indictment of complacent white liberalism.

Black photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is invited by his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) to her family’s suburban home. While outwardly friendly and respectful, Rose’s family and friends are revealed to have a nefarious agenda for Chris and, more pointedly, his Black body.

The disquieting terror of Get Out stems from director Jordan Peele’s decision to limit the subjective perspective in the film to the Black protagonist. We see this bucolic and prosperous, but distinctly white, suburban enclave exclusively through Chris’ eyes, augmented by the camera he carries, which he wields as both weapon and shield. Peele brilliantly exploits this limited perspective, methodically but relentlessly stripping away the banal and seemingly innocuous veneer of this utterly common white space to reveal the racialized horror that lies at its centre.

While there is certainly pleasure to be had in Get Out ’s stylish reworking of the horror genre, it is the film’s philosophically rich and politically potent ideas about Black experience that will haunt the viewer.