Jordan Peele's Us Is a Fascinating Horror Movie About Living in America Right Now

So goes the wicked premise of Us. Jordan Peeles second feature film as a director is being touted as a follow-up to his Oscar-winning Get Out , which is both correct and cruelly unfair. That debut served as a taut, slick horror movie and a pungent social satire about white monsters cloaked as kind Obama supporters-a radical and original vision that somehow needed no explanation. The closest Us gets to that racial sendup is the fact that when the family in crisis, who happen to be black, call the local police for help, theyre told it will arrive in 15 minutes. Of course, it never does.

There are many, many ideas in Us-more than its two hours seem able to contain-but they are more diffuse, less immediate than even the abstract, two-letter title lets on.

Warning: Mild spoilers ahead for Us.

Those ideas require quite a bit more explanation (and, unfortunately, exposition in the third act) than their predecessor. But while the movie doesnt glide like Get Out, the biggest relief for Peele fans comes when you realize that he isnt even close to being done making fascinating movies that hold up mirrors to who we are, and almost certainly wish we werent.

That realization hits a few minutes into Us. In flashback (a device that extends throughout the film, in ways that waver from illuminating to overdone) parents clearly on the outs hang out on the Santa Cruz boardwalk in 1986 with their daughter wearing an oversized Michael Jackson Thriller t-shirt that her distracted dad has just won her in a theme park game. This young version of the main protagonist-played in the current day in a phenomenally wide-ranging and complex performance by Lupita Nyongo-wanders into a hall of funhouse mirrors where she finds something stranger and much more disturbing than an optical illusion: a human carbon copy of herself.

The event haunts her into adulthood as she returns to the area with her two kids and husband (Winston Duke in a delightfully comedic turn). While shes shaken by the slightest roving of her young son, dad is trying to one-up his obnoxious and obnoxiously wealthy white friends (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker) with his new motorboat.

When the demon-clones arrive, moms fears are proven correct. But with an already knotty setup, Peele throws a veritable meat locker of signifiers at viewers: a period-specific Hands Across America TV ad, Jeremiah 11:11, rabbits of various shades in cages, PTSD, The Beach Boys, Black Flag, Fuck Tha Police, 5 on It, visual nods to Wes Craven and Stanley Kubrick. (And that just represents the surface. Peele himself pointed out three sneaky references to Corey Feldman.)

Us is soaked in the pop culture of the era in which Peele grew up, but it all points to something more heady and subliminal. When asked What are you? the invader-mom answers, Were Americans. That turns out to be a key line in a movie that becomes a bold metaphorical answer to the current fractious U.S. political climate, in which more than ever we seem to stick to our own familiar communities and shut down questions about our responsibilities to the other side, whatever that side may be. It wouldve been way too on the nose, but the film couldve easily been called Us vs. Them.

The windy path it takes to get there is sometimes confused, but what a trip it is. Peele mercifully hasnt lost any of his sense of humor (see: the lengthy sequence in the rich white familys home), but he has possibly overloaded himself with topical material. The best moments here are the ones that ground it all, like the glimmer of a smile in a mom protecting her brood as she says, They cant hurt you, and the they suddenly seems very ill-defined and the sentence not at all comforting. Us isnt always as scary as it could be, but its sinister effects are hard to shake off, especially when you realize that theyre directly pointed at you.