Get Out is clearly one of the best - and most unusual - films of the year

Jordan Peele's fantastically inventive and surprising Get Out (2017) is definitely a must-see and I hope it's remembered during awards season - it will be hurt by it's early-2017 release date - and it's impossible to talk about without giving a lot of info away, so many spoilers to come so see the movie before reading any further. First, Peele takes on all the black male cliches and stereotypes directly in a way that no white writer-director could possibly have done. The movie starts out (after a puzzling opening sequence of a black guy getting abducted in a suburban neighborhood - the significance of this scene becomes clear by the end of the film) as a family "guess who's coming to dinner" drama: attractive, skinny, white girl takes her black boyfriend to her parents' suburban home for the weekend; she had never told them her boyfriend was black - seems improbable at first but later makes sense as the movie becomes clear - but she insists it will go well, her parents are not racist, Dad voted for Obama, etc. All true, sure enough - but several disturbing things happen: they crash into a deer on the road (lots of symbolism there - a hit and run, a broken mirror - these, too, will make sense later), at the home, the black servants seem weird and almost transfixed, the kid brother is strange and inappropriate, talking about the boyfriend's "genetic makeup." Parents hold a big annual get-together, and people are polite in a bizarre way toward the boyfriend; eventually the one other black guest throws a kind of fit and yells to the boyfriend: Get out! We gradually come to learn that the parents use hypnosis on black men (and women) and then keep them as sex slaves. I know it sounds completely absurd - but we have slipped unknowingly from one genre to another, domestic drama to horror - and w/ a touch of comedy as well. In probably the best scene in the film the boyfriend's bost buddy becomes suspicious and goes to the police and tells them he thinks this suburban family is holding black men as sex slaves. It seems so absurd and the police laugh it off, as we do, too - but we're also him, just as I'm telling you this plotline right now. It makes no sense, yet it does make sense within the terms of this film, original and provocative at every moment. Is there a deeper meaning, an allegory? If so, the film doesn't say so explicitly, but I think all of us in our anxiety about race can see elements of ourselves in this film, in these bizarre or beleaguered characters. Clearly one of the best films of the year.