Jordan Peele's "Us" is marred somewhat by a bizarre twist, but it’s still a first-rate scare picture.

(Readers who’ve seen the movie will recognize that I am dancing around spoilers in this review.)

In Us, the new shocker from writer-director Jordan Peele, the spaces of the film linger in our memories. If Peele has any tangible connection to the director John Carpenter (of the 1978 Halloween, Escape From New York, etc.), it’s his effective use of familiar locations, which he transforms into hellscapes. Images of the leafy suburban houses of West Hollywood, as featured in the original Halloween, have rattled around in my psyche ever since I first saw that movie, and I can wander the streets of my own neighborhood and spot similar houses which conjure inside me a cozy sense of foreboding. The dwellings in Us are two mid-century lake houses that look like they might have been a vacation spot for the Brady Bunch what with their open stairwells and wood-paneled walls. And the other primary location is an oceanside amusement park in Santa Cruz (which, as the film is steeped in 1980s references, is surely a nod to the 1987 vampire film The Lost Boys). When the film opens, we’re met with a series of television commercials playing on an old boxed TV set (the year is 1986), which culminate in a feel-good, saccharine advertisement for “Hands Across America” (which took place on May 25, 1986). Moments later, we meet Addie, a young girl visiting the amusement park with her parents. Addie is draped in an oversized t-shirt emblazoned with the words, “Michael Jackson’s Thriller” on it. The shirt is a prize, won by her father moments ago at one of those shooting games. Addie wanders away from her parents, practically swimming in that Thriller shirt, and enters a dark funhouse called “Vision Quest”. (Its logo is, “Find Yourself”.) There she becomes lost in a maze of mirrors and seemingly infinite reflections of herself, one of which, it turns out, isn’t a reflection at all.

We’ve been so inundated with nostalgic genre pieces about the 80s (including the 2017 adaptation of It and the Netflix series Stranger Things) that a further excavation of 80s pop culture may suggest that Jordan Peele is following trends instead of doing his own thing. After all, it was doing his own thing that earned the director an Academy Award for his debut, 2017’s deliciously creepy and perceptive Get Out. Peele is perhaps the most vital and surprising director working in the horror genre right now. And, thankfully, he uses nostalgia more cannily and organically than the rest: He’s not simply pandering to us, or repackaging old content. He plants his nostalgic bits of detail, planning for them to pay off later, and then moves us to the present day, with a grown-up Addie Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) and her husband Gabriel (Winston Duke), en route to the family lake house with teenage daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright) and son Jason (Evan Alex), who wears a monster mask and, like the boy in The Shining, seems like he knows something. (There’s always at least one kid in a horror movie who seems like he knows something.)

We know that Addie fears returning to the lake house because it means returning also to the beach at Santa Cruz, and we know whatever Addie experienced in the funhouse has yet to be fully revealed to us. It left Addie temporarily mute as a child, and as an adult, Addie has kept quiet, never revealing the story to Gabriel, who is just trying to enjoy his vacation. Gabriel is more focused on playing with his new (old) boat and mingling with Josh and Katie (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss), fellow vacationers who have a pair of inane teenage daughters. As the boozing, bored Katie, Elisabeth Moss lends some flair to a small role: Josh pours Katie a third glass of rosé (he’s quick to point out the number in the presence of Addie), and says, “here’s your medicine,” and Katie responds with a jokingly hostile indifference that perfectly sums up their relationship. Indeed, Katie’s general response, in body language and in tone of voice, is the equivalent of the world’s longest eye roll. Addie suffers through this performative marital spat as the lone spectator; when Katie invites her into some wifey small talk, Addie feels unequal to the task.

What unfolds is a Twilight Zone-esque story that, unlike any Twilight Zone-inspired horror film I’ve ever seen, actually feels suited to the format of a movie. That’s because Jordan Peele lives and breathes movies. His passion for filmmaking shows in his love of building a suspenseful sequence, as well as in his refusal to bombard us with jarring jump scares, one of the most worn out tricks in the horror movie playbook. The film gets going quickly enough, and once Addie’s family is confronted by their doppelgangers (not a spoiler if you’ve seen any of the film’s official trailers), ominously staring at them from the foot of their driveway, Gabriel, assuming his role as “The Dad” in an apparent crisis, attempts to scare them off. Gabriel’s vaguely comic threats are unpersuasive, his brandishing of a baseball bat equally unconvincing to these wide-eyed, freakish Parent Trap-apparitions, all of them adorned in orange jumpsuits like escaped inmates, and each wielding a pair of big, sharp scissors (surely one of the scariest weapons in a horror movie.)

The pace of the film never relents after the initial attack, when we realize that these are not the only doubles who’ve been unleashed, seemingly by Addie (for reasons unclear to us). But the film is somewhat marred by a complicated plot twist, and its refusal to give away too much too soon means that our horror is tinged with confusion: we’re aghast by the freakish goings on, but constantly aware of our confusion. Peele doesn’t deny us an explanation, and the movie avoids the problem of Hereditary director Ari Aster, who went in too many different directions, but Us is nevertheless vaguely unsatisfying if you think about it too much. The doubles themselves are loaded with symbolism, but the more you contemplate their actual origin, the less it makes sense. That’s why I recommend not parsing out the details. (Perhaps Peele should have left them out to begin with.) As a movie-going experience, Us is unhinged and pleasurably terrifying (and funny) in the way a horror movie should be. If the big themes underneath are mushy and unsatisfying, at least Peele gets a good deal right in terms of tone and construction.

Ultimately, the performances of the actors playing the Wilson family make the movie work, because they make it human. Peele needs this, especially when his dizzying plot twist fails him. Even at Addie’s most monstrous moments, Lupita Nyong’o keeps her from becoming an actual monster; she remains maternal and strong and single-minded as she’s forced to commit horrifying acts of violence in order to protect her family. In a scene at one of the lake houses, Jason witnesses his mother bashing in a double’s skull (the gore is, mercifully, left to our imagination), but Addie somehow returns to normal, wanting her son to see her as his mother and not the Terminator.

Shahadi Wright, as Zora, and Evan Alex, as Jason, have together redeemed every child who has ever been a source of annoyance in a scary movie. (I’m thinking, in particular, of the irritating kids in Jurassic Park.) Zora and Jason fight back, take chances, use their brains, in ways that few adults do in most horror movies. They’re also remarkably game, and adept at developing fully realized characters, sometimes with just a facial expression or a gesture. Wright gets the sarcastic, “what the hell” look of a teenage girl down perfectly, and Alex, whose character is rather complex (he has a special bond with his mother, as though he’s more likely than Zora to connect with all things metaphysical), is required to be quiet and pensive, yet he makes us care about him, laugh with him, and root for him, as he outwits his own double in multiple scenes. And, as Gabriel, Winston Duke, the film’s comedy MVP, serves as a vector for Jordan Peele’s love of dumb humor. He cracks dad jokes and skulls in equal measure.

Jordan Peele's smart, scary "Get Out" taps into a terrifying world of white devils.

Get Out, a savvy, unpredictable comic-horror film written and directed by actor and comedian Jordan Peele of Key and Peele fame, opens on a stately suburban neighborhood at night, where a young black man is walking to a house, feeling disoriented in an ostensibly white neighborhood. Cinematically speaking, of course, this neighborhood feels familiar, as though Peele had found and recaptured the same shooting locations of John Carpenter’s Halloween, a film which subverts the cozy banality of suburbia and turns it into a venue for nightmares: the big houses and the maze-like streets lined with tall, massive trees. Carpenter introduced the Boogeyman into this otherwise safe place as a dangerous outside force disturbing the peace; in Get Out, the Boogeyman isn’t a stranger, but a resident, and the silence isn’t the presence of peace, maybe just the absence of life.

Jordan Peele possesses a keen understanding for how the horror genre works, and his nods to John Carpenter continue in this scene as an ominous (white) car sidles up next to the unsuspecting young man, and we know, instantly, that the driver of this car is a threat. “Not tonight,” the young man keeps saying, feeling nervous and instinctively expecting trouble, and redirecting himself, away from the car. But it’s already too late. The director’s use of visual trickery, not to mention his talent for building suspense, give us a pleasurably tingly feeling. Thrillers work best when we feel we’re in the hands of a capable filmmaker, and with Get Out, Jordan Peele proves himself more than capable.

In an era when the horror genre seems mostly exhausted (sidetracked by countless demon possession thrillers and mostly forgettable remakes and reinventions), Jordan Peele has fashioned something unique: a racially tense thriller where the black guy is the victim-hero, a reinvention of the Jamie Lee Curtis character in Halloween. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya, giving a fine, perfectly measured performance), a Brooklyn photographer, has been dating Rose (Allison Williams), a rather typical, boring-ass white girl, for five months.

Nothing captures whiteness quite like the image of Rose, sitting in her bedroom, eating dry Fruit Loops in a bowl and drinking a tall glass of milk through a straw as “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” blasts from her earbuds and she looks up pictures of shirtless, musclebound black men on Bing (!). We may be wondering what Chris sees in Rose, until an incident with a police officer, who clearly exhibits hostility toward Chris, reassures us: Rose stands up for her man, and the policeman backs down. And now they’re off to the country to meet Rose’s family. But it’s clear from almost the moment Chris steps foot inside their secluded, perfectly manicured brick house that Mom and Dad (played by Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford with a chilling degree of restrained hostility) are shifty, that Rose has misjudged them when she assures Chris that “they are not racist.” After all, they voted for Obama: the new white proof against prejudice.

The parents are well-educated professionals: Mom is a shrink who specializes in hypnosis, and Dad is a neurosurgeon. But these learned white liberals, it turns out, are just as scary as any blue-collar white conservatives. Mr. and Mrs. Armitage have invited a bunch of old (and I do mean old) friends over for the evening, and these guests exhibit a creepy fascination with Chris: one old man asks him about his golf swing and waxes on about his love of Tiger Woods; one woman grips Chris’s bicep, gushing over his muscles. Another lady, standing beside her frail, oxygen-tank-carrying husband, asks an embarrassed Rose: “Is it true? Is it better?” (Meaning, the stereotype about black men in the bedroom.) Chris is a specimen, the embodiment of white fantasies of blackness, whether it’s the thrill of being ravaged by a “black beast” or the lust after his perceived physical and athletic superiority.

The Armitages have a pair of black servants: Walter and Georgina (played by Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel), and they are the Black Stepford wives, creepily cheerful and uptight, and about as formal in their speech as the Queen of England. Both Georgina and Walter walk around as if in a fog: she keeps house, he tends to the grounds, and they serve their “masters” with the utmost devotion, unless something upsets them, like when a tear rolls down Georgina’s cheek, and we know, although we cannot quite put our finger on it, that something has control of her, that the real Georgina has been captured and locked away, screaming and crying out, but unable to communicate the terrifying truth.

The same is true of Logan (LaKeith Stanfield), the only other black guest at the party, who’s the apparent husband of a white woman more than twice his age. Logan dresses and talks and walks like a prep school kid turned law student, studying for the bar in between bouts of pleasuring his lustful white cougar-woman. But when Chris snaps Logan’s picture, the flash of his phone triggers a violent, frantic outburst: Logan rushes at Chris with his arms outreached in agony, pleading with him to leave. Again it feels like the real “Logan” has been a prisoner all this time, momentarily freed, it seems, by the flash of a camera.

Peele uses all kinds of smart visuals and sounds to make us jump, and to paint suggestions in our minds: the flash of the camera, the sound of Catherine Keener clinking her teacup with a spoon (which puts Chris into a trance), the close-up shot of Georgina, a harried battle raging inside her mind between her true self and the brainwashed/hypnotized self: tears stream down her face as she locks into a smile, repeating “No. No. No.” But Peele doesn’t give in by explaining everything away. He’s planted enough clues, and plotted Get Out so masterfully, that exposition is basically unnecessary, and that’s the mark of a good director.

The premise behind Peele’s film is a canny metaphor for how white people have taken everything from black people. During their drive to the house in the country, a deer jumps in front of their car. After they have investigated the damage to Rose’s vehicle, Chris stares forlornly at the dying creature as it utters haunting cries. Right then, we know that this deer is Chris. Later, when he’s being held prisoner inside a wood-paneled game room with a retro television set, Chris stares at the glassy-eyed head of a buck mounted on the wall. That’s what Chris is to these people: a creature to be conquered, an assortment of valuable abilities and strengths to be harnessed, a commodity to be fetishized.

With Lil Rel Howery, who provides comic relief (and good advice, like the title phrase) as Rod, Chris's best friend, and a TSA employee; also featuring Caleb Landry Jones and Stephen Root. Written by the director.