“APPLAUSE … APPLAUSE … APPLAUSE”

An excitingly beautiful movie; Peele has made what I believe to be a truly great and mature film here. My initial reservations re: tone and pacing were shattered this time around, and in fact I’m slowly becoming convinced of this as an authentic horror (or horror adjacent) epic in the true tradition of The Shining and Jaws. In any case it’s the culminating apotheosis of a decade spent wandering the desert of “elevated horror,” such that the ideas bursting out of nearly every moment and image here spring organically from a driving narrative whose preexisting complexity has already rendered it compelling and scary as hell. Such a rewarding and provocative experience, a vigorous compulsion to look not without seeing, lest ye be looked at without being seen.