Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) visits his white girlfriend’s (Allison Williams) family and experiences the worst cigarette detox this side of Shane in Survivor 12.

Jordan Peele’s 2017 debut proves he’s the best thing to happen to Blumhouse since the cancellation of the Magic 8 Ball movie. Get Out is a cold splash of reality to the face of mainstream horror, and a breath of fresh air for the studio behind such diverse offerings as The Gift, The Visit, The Veil, The Bay and The Purge.

And while far from the first genre flick to address racial issues (Night of the Living Dead, The People Under the Stairs, Candyman), it is one of the few to make race the focal point of the story. This does rob the film of subtext, but Peele makes enough smart choices to keep you glued to your seat. His racists are seemingly progressive Obama voters rather than the usual rednecks or old folks, thereby implicating the liberal audience instead of throwing a different minority under the bus.

He also manages to make a movie about slavery without any of the racial slurs Tarantino is so fond of, and is all the more relevant as a result, the natural, funny dialogue strewn with dog-whistles and microaggressions. More than that, it centres on Chris’s psychological experience, capturing with horror the feeling of having his identity chased away and hidden inside him to become acceptable to white society.

Where Get Out stutters is in signposting and spelling out the would-be twist too early, playing its hand a little too soon and diminishing the shocks to come. But Peele still keeps plenty of surprises up his sleeve, and the plot is well thought out where its imitators (Men, The Menu) lack the most basic narrative logic.

Kaluuya is brilliant opposite the perfectly cast Armitage family (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener and Caleb Landry Jones), whose apparent normality is the most terrifying thing about them. Peele’s execution is pure sci-fi, a race-based Stepford Wives told with poise and menace. Rarely does a film have such an immediate impact without the conversation moving on while Blumhouse makes four sequels.