Blending race-savvy satire with horror to especially potent effect, this bombshell social critique from first-time director Jordan Peele proves positively fearless — which is not at all the same thing as scareless.

Get Out is fully surprising in both concept and craft, with the scares never coming just when you expect them and the secrets more audacious than you might be guessing.

When the film moves out of the paranoiac realm and into action, the violence is deeply satisfying, the twists delightful.

Sketch-comedy whiz Jordan Peele of TV’s ”Key and Peele” and “Keanu” has cooked up the smartest horror movie in ages, an edge-of-your-seat thriller that is entertaining and creepily enlightening at the same time.

Writer-director Jordan Peele has smartly created a horror comedy that doesn’t feel like a series of sketches from his show: the whole thing is a single, coherent episode and individual scenes are masterfully and subtly crafted with tonal shifts that work well.

Peele is a talented director of action as well as horror, and Get Out is always far from boring even in its more familiar scenes.

It does what all great horror movies do: turn real-world anxieties into the stuff of nightmares.

Get Out feels fresh and sharp in a way that studio horror movies almost never do. It is both unsettling and hysterical, often in the same moment, and it is totally unafraid to call people on their racist bullshit.

If Get Out isn’t half as scary as the ideas that inspired it, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is almost certain to be the boldest — and most important — studio genre release of the year. What it lacks in fear, it nearly makes up for in fearlessness.

A horror film with the power to put a rascally grin on the face of that great genre subverter John Carpenter (They Live), Get Out has more fun playing with half-buried racial tensions than with scaring us to death.