Jordan Peele’s Us: Thrills, chills and confronting the real monsters

His first movie was a worldwide phenomenon and the follow-up delivers even more thrills, chills and terrifying monsters.

If Get Out wasn’t scary enough for you, then Jordan Peele really wants to freak you out with Us.

Us is much more of a conventional horror movie, designed to make you jump in your seat, hold your breath for too long and stare down at your lap to hide from the terrors on screen.

In other words, it’s more sensory experience than thinkpiece.

If Get Out fills us with an existential dread, Us fills us with just your regular kind of dread. The kind of dread that comes from having a lumbering red jumpsuit-decked version of yourself chase you down with some mighty sharp scissors.

Who needs a Ghostface Killer mask when the face the monster wears is the scariest one of all? Yours.

Don’t open that door. Picture: Claudette Barius/Universal Pictures via AP

Simply structured in three acts, Us’s cold open begins in the mid-80s. A young Adelaide (Madison Curry) is separated from her feuding parents on the Santa Cruz boardwalk.

Wearing a Michael Jackson “Thriller” T-shirt, Adelaide wanders into a deserted funhouse and becomes trapped in the mirror room when the power goes out.

What she sees in the maze of mirrors haunts her to the point that when as an adult (Lupita Nyong’o), Adelaide is still deeply uncomfortable when she and her family — husband Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and son Jason (Evan Alex) — return to the beach during their summer holidays.

Sitting on the beach with their friends Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker) and their twins (Cali Sheldon and Noelle Sheldon), Adelaide warns they must leave the beach before dark.

That night, back at their holiday house, a family that looks exactly like them, their malevolent doppelgangers, attacks the Wilsons.

RELATED: Jordan Peele talks about Us, his fears and why he loves horror

The real monsters are ourselves. Picture: Claudette Barius/Universal Pictures via AP

The middle act of Us is the most effective, a classic home invasion slasher horror, except when the enemy is a twisted version of yourself, it cuts, literally, that much closer.

Here, Peele’s prodigious skill as a director is on full display. These sequences are taut, tense and breathtakingly good.

Even when you’re scared, you can’t help but notice Peele’s striking visuals — they really are beautiful to look at — whether it’s the Wilsons walking in a row at the beach, stalked by their shadows on the sand, or a particularly vexing sequence in the final act that we wouldn’t dare give away.

Peele is also a master of tone, balancing the horror with comedy, just like he did in Get Out. That is not an easy thing to master, and no one is doing it better than the former one-half of sketch duo Key & Peele.

Honestly, if you’ve never seen Winston Duke on a boat before, you’re missing out. Or, Elisabeth Moss with a lip gloss tube.

The four leads are crazy good in their dual roles, especially Nyong’o who manages to create distinct but connected personalities between Adelaide and her doppelganger Red who skitters around like a cockroach.

The words “Oscar nomination” and “Nyong’o” is being thrown about and it’s not without merit.

Lupita Nyong’o is just so good in this.

Us is littered with “coincidences” and doubles as a constant reminder there’s much more at play than the chase.

Peele has said Us is supposed to question “the fear of the other” and whether the real monsters are ourselves. It’s like the funhouse mirrors at the beginning of the film, a potent visual symbol of our own self-image reflected but usually wilfully ignored — distorted and grotesque.

Also layered into the movie are thoughts on social inequality, the haves and have-nots and the politics of envy.

The Wilsons are a comfortable, middle class African-American family, but they’re not as well-off as their friends Kitty and Josh. At one point, Gabe looks on at Josh’s new car with a tinge of green.

But their doppelgangers, called “the tethered”, are stratified well below the Wilsons, so it’s like we’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of consumerism and want. Everyone wants something someone else has and that’s part of the reckoning in Us.

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Universal Pictures.

The social commentary in Us is not as clear as Get Out, which had one strong central idea it ran with all the way through.

In Us, there are several ideas at play, and it doesn’t always form a coherent whole — and the ending may turn everything on its head anyway.

Us is a movie you need to sit with for a while because your feelings and thoughts on it will morph with time and every subsequent conversation.

But it is indeed a worthy follow-up to Get Out, proof that Peele isn’t a one-tricker, that he’s capable of evolving his creativity and, most importantly, that he can give you one hell of an entertaining and thrilling ride.

Rating: ★★★★

Us is in cinemas today.

Share your movies and TV obsessions: @wenleima