Social thriller
The genre gained attention by audiences and critics around the late 2010s with the releases of Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us,[1][2] each film highlighting occurrences of racial alienation (the former which veil a plot to abduct young African-Americans).
[7] TLA Video reviewer David Bleiler described the 1950 Sidney Poitier film No Way Out as "an exceptionally made, tense drama which succeeds both as medical soap opera and social thriller.
[11] Both Tracy and Poitier also appeared in 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a film that would later be identified as a key "non-thriller" example of the social thriller genre.
In describing the work of Russo-Belarusian director Aleksandr Faintsimmer, Rollberg writes, "Fainsimmer devoted himself to the traditionally underrepresented genre of the social thriller with blockbusters such as No Right to Fail (1974) and The Cafeteria on Piatnikskaia Street (1978)."
Rollberg also names Leonid Filatov's 1982 film The Rooks and Vadim Derbenev's 1985 hit The Snake Catcher as landmarks of the genre in the Soviet Union.
The authors of Sociology: An Introductory Textbook and Reader wrote of the 2002 British film Dirty Pretty Things as being "not a documentary but a social thriller which blends aspects of the global urban legends about child kidnapping for organs and prostitutes drugging unsuspecting barflies who wake up in a hotel bathtub minus a kidney.
It might be called a social thriller—a creepy, tightly knit suspense film that, on the fly, reveals more about the lives of immigrants in London than the most scrupulously earnest documentary.
[30] Bachchan said of Pink that, "the context and the premise of the film shall always be of prime interest," but that "much is not spelt out because of the nature of the story and, of course, the nature of its genre—a social thriller!”[31] Before Pink the term social thriller was applied occasionally by Bollywood's directors and marketers and then repeated by the press to describe selected movies, such as 2014's film Fugly starring olympic boxing medalist Vijender Singh.
"[34] After Fugly, other social thriller tags followed suit, such as 2014's Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain about the Union Carbide Disaster,[35] and 2016's Laal Rang about the organized crime trafficking in human blood.
[44] Post-Pink social thrillers in Indian cinema have included Adanga Maru,[45] Jhalki...Ek Aur Bachpan,[46] Mulq,[47][48] Pinu,[49] Parari,[50] Blue Whale,[51] and Marainthirunthu,[52] all released in 2018.
Broadly categorized as a horror film,[53] director Jordan Peele stated that his directorial debut, Get Out, was part of a lineage of social thrillers, meaning that whatever scary things manifest onscreen, society is actually the true evil.
[59][60] When asked about its inclusion in the series, Peele told the Village Voice, "It's not an actual thriller, it's just a great exploration of the social phenomenon of how we deal with race, putting it in a package that everyone can understand.
[71][72] That same year Rolling Stone posited Tyrel, a drama about one black man's weekend getaway with a bunch of drunk white men, as a social thriller.
Club added Cam, a psychological horror film told from the perspective of an online sex worker, to the genre's roster, saying, "One year after Get Out, another social thriller deserves Oscar love for its script.
[75] Likewise the website Insider clamored "to see Lee Chang-dong's tense social thriller Burning in this race" for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2019 Academy Awards.
"[77] With Get Out helping to codify the genre, critics have continued to apply the term retrospectively, with more than one review adding the 1975 science fiction thriller The Stepford Wives to the canon.
"[79] In an opinion piece for SYFY Wire Emma Fraser wrote that "social thriller" refers to a specific kind of horror but that "by dressing this genre up, it actually does it a disservice."
"[82] Also writing in 2002, The New York Daily News said that Iain Pears Riverhead's book The Dream of Scipio "uses a larger-than-ever canvas to construct this genre-bending historical and social thriller."
Time Out New York reviewer Adam Feldman wrote that the Broadway show Junk "melds a breadth of genres—crime story, tragedy, issue play, cautionary tale—into a fast-moving, broad-ranging social thriller.
[88] In September 2018 The New York Times highlighted a number of fiction podcasts as contributions to the social thriller genre, chiefly the politically charged dystopian fantasy Adventures in New America by filmmakers Stephen Winter and Tristan Cowen.
[89] Audio fiction publisher Night Vale Presents touted the term on its own website, citing comparisons to Boots Riley's film Sorry to Bother You and the work of Jordan Peele.
