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Jordan Peele has made three feature films, and each one uses genre conventions — horror, thriller, science fiction — as tools for examining specific aspects of American racial and cultural politics. He is the most important American genre filmmaker of his generation, and the rapidity with which his films have entered the cultural conversation suggests that he is making films that people desperately needed to see.
Chris Washington visits his white girlfriend's family for a weekend in the country. The family is too accommodating, too interested in him, too eager to demonstrate their liberal bona fides. The housekeeper and the groundskeeper behave strangely. Peele constructed the film as a nightmare that works on multiple levels simultaneously — as a horror film, as a satire of liberal white racism, and as a genuine thriller. The sunken place. The teacup. The cotton. One of the great American films of the 21st century.
Streaming: Available for rental on Amazon
OJ and Em Haywood run a horse ranch in a California valley. Something in the sky is eating their horses. A former child actor runs a Western theme park nearby and has his own complicated relationship with the thing in the sky. Peele made a film about spectacle and exploitation — about our culture's compulsion to film everything, to monetize everything, to turn even terror into content. Daniel Kaluuya. Keke Palmer. Steven Yeun in the backstory. The most formally ambitious film Peele has made.
Streaming: Available for rental on Amazon
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The Wilson family goes on vacation to their beach house and encounters their exact doubles — the Tethered — who want to take their place. Lupita Nyong'o playing two roles, one of the most demanding dual performances in recent film history. Peele constructs a film that is simultaneously a home invasion thriller, a monster movie, and an allegory about class, privilege, and the parts of American society we prefer not to look at. The ending recontextualizes everything.
Streaming: Available for rental on Amazon
Get Out (2017) is his most acclaimed and most essential. Nope (2022) is his most formally ambitious. Us (2019) is his most thematically dense.
Peele's films consistently examine race, class, and American cultural politics through the lens of horror and thriller genre conventions.
Peele has multiple projects in development. He is also an active producer of horror and genre content through his Monkeypaw Productions company.