Janelle Monáe Stars in “Noir Town,” Directed by Jordan Peele

The scene: A private investigator is standing in a clock tower taking photographs of a parade. She is a woman, played by Janelle Monáe, and she is searching for clues to a murder. As the detective stares through the lens, she begins to realize that one of the bystanders on the ground looks exactly like her. Then she sees another identical face. And another. Suddenly, the sea of potential suspects are visions of herself. Are these women good? Are they evil? And why are these twinlike alter egos haunting her? “I wanted to create a Hitchcock moment that doesn’t really exist in a Hitchcock film,” explained Jordan Peele, the 39-year-old writer and director of Get Out, which has been widely acclaimed as one of the best movies of 2017. Peele, who was standing on the fourth floor of the abandoned Palace movie theater in downtown Los Angeles, had constructed a scenario that paid homage to the mystery and intrigue of Hitchcock masterpieces like Vertigo and Psycho. Just as Get Out is Peele’s subverted and original take on unsettling classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, “Noir Town” replaces Hitchcock’s uniformly white protagonists with a woman of color.