Jordan Peele's debut film is a brilliantly inventive horror that skewers the insecurities and injustices of modern America.

Ever since the days of Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre it’s been a critical truism that the horror genre offers its own running commentary on the distressed state of modern America. With levels of onscreen carnage escalating over the years, however, it’s heartening to see a filmmaker opt not to deliver even more of the same, but instead return to the fantasy-inflected unease that made TV’s The Twilight Zone a pop-cultural barometer for the anxieties of an earlier American generation. Writer-director Jordan Peele’s remarkable debut feature is very much a product of our own Black Lives Matter era – provocatively so indeed – but one that purposefully uses Serling-esque surrealism as a fantastical container for a whole array of hot-button issues.

Screening as part of our PARANOIA AT THE RIVERSIDE season of films