Get Out is not just a horror film. It is the most precise sociological document about a specific kind of American racism that cinema has produced: not the overt kind, the kind that comes wrapped in progressivism, in smiles, in the language of admiration.

Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) travels with his white girlfriend Rose to meet her parents for the first time. The Armitage family is liberal, educated, warm. Their estate is beautiful. The Black workers they employ move strangely, speak strangely, seem absent from themselves in ways that only Chris notices, and only Chris is troubled by.

Jordan Peele constructs the film’s dread with extraordinary patience. Nothing is obviously wrong. Everything is slightly off. The tea-stirring scene, Rose’s father’s explanation of how he would have voted for Obama a third time if he could, the guests at the garden party cataloguing Chris’s physique: each of these is recognizable, uncomfortable, and quietly terrifying.

Kaluuya is superb: watchful, controlled, the performance of a man who knows when a Black man in a room full of white people cannot afford to show what he is thinking. LilRel Howery as his friend Rod provides the film’s humor and its clearest moral vision; he sees exactly what is happening from the first moment.

The horror, when it comes fully, is visceral and earned. The Sunken Place, the metaphor Peele introduces for the experience of dissociation and powerlessness, entered the cultural vocabulary immediately upon the film’s release and has not left it.

Get Out won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Peele was the fifth Black writer to win that prize in Oscar history. That context does not diminish the film. It is part of it.