Jordan Peele

A guest knows something is wrong, but saying so would mean offending his hosts. In Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele makes that ordinary pressure frightening: Chris is already uneasy, and everyone still expects him to behave. Daniel Kaluuya gives the awkward encounters weight without letting us forget the effort of staying polite. We felt trapped by those welcomes, because each apparently friendly exchange made Chris's unease harder to voice. Peele understands that a horror film can make us anxious well before anyone has an obvious reason to run.

The sketch comedy of Key & Peele (2012–2015), which he co-created with Keegan-Michael Key, helps explain his confidence with an uncomfortable conversation. His timing lets us register the joke and then sit with what is unpleasant about it. In his writing and direction of Get Out, the apparently friendly interest in Chris keeps the humour close to the threat. A few supporting performances are too broad, making people less credible than the behaviour Peele has noticed. Kaluuya gives the film the steadiness it needs.

His subsequent films widen the scope: Us (2019) uses doubles to explore class, while Nope (2022) brings Western and science-fiction elements to its treatment of spectacle, Hollywood and violence. On Nope, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema's IMAX work helps build suspense on a larger scale. The move makes sense for a director interested in how an audience can be amused, frightened and prompted to think within the same scene. Both films are less tidy: Us can lose focus, while Nope sometimes leaves its themes underdeveloped.

We rate Peele highly because he takes the small humiliations of an awkward encounter seriously enough to make them frightening. In Get Out, Chris trying to stay courteous gives us a clear way into the film's concern with race, without anyone needing to stop and explain why it matters. Start there, and let Kaluuya's unease tell you how much to trust the welcome.