The film begins in 1986 when a young girl (Madison Curry) wanders off from her bickering parents at a loud and garish fairground in Santa Cruz, California. She enters a hall of mirrors and soon becomes lost and disoriented in a scene that nods to Orson Welles’s The Lady of Shanghai (1947) and the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon (1973). She is suddenly confronted by an exact replica, or spectre, of herself that is certainly not a reflection. The story then takes us to the present day. The girl, Adelaide, is now a grown woman (Lupita Nyong’o). She is driving with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and son Jason (Evan Alex) to her empty childhood home for a holiday. The family is, therefore, close to where her ordeal took place – an experience that, though she never spoke of it, led to a diagnosis of PTSD, as we discover through flashbacks.

After an uncomfortable day at the beach – adjacent to the site of Adelaide’s trauma as a young girl – the foursome are relaxing at their house when another family, eerily dressed in matching red jumpsuits, appear in the moonlight in the driveway. They are, apparently, alternative versions of Adelaide, Gabe, Zora, and Jason themselves. This chilling first appearance of the new family leads to more than an hour of sustained violence (the weapons of choice including scissors, baseball bats, and golf clubs). Each family member is confronted by their respective ‘double’, and we soon learn the physical and mental capacities and limitations of these ‘others’. We also discover that it is not just Adelaide’s family being terrorised by these beings, and ultimately who they are and what they want. They are ‘the tethered’, and their spectacularly strange, subterranean origins provide a starting point for the film’s immense allegorical possibilities. The plot, which is complex and unpredictable, climaxes with a surreal, brilliantly choreographed, Kubrick-esque fight scene that lingers with the viewer long after the closing credits – as does a twist that triggers a reconsideration of where our sympathies lie.

The fearsome neighbours in Us (photograph via Universal Pictures)

As mentioned, Us poses questions without answers. It offers abundant metaphor and symbolism without any conclusive indicator of their meaning. The film is something of a riddle then, and interpretation may depend on the viewer’s own values and prejudices. Peele gave some idea of his thinking when, at a Q&A session at SXSW festival, he suggested that Us is about a fear of difference and the demonised:

We’re in a time where we fear the other, whether it’s the mysterious invader that we think is going to come and kill us and take our jobs, or the faction we don’t live near, who voted a different way than us. We’re all about pointing the finger. And I wanted to suggest that maybe the monster we really need to look at has our face. Maybe the evil, it’s us.

Us seems to be making a statement about a darkness that ripples beneath the surface of the middle classes (Adelaide and her family are clearly well-off). It suggests that, despite our best intentions, it is ‘us’ who are inherently complicit, even in small ways, in society’s ills, be it poverty, discrimination, colonialism, environmental ruin, and so on. In making the film’s ‘villains’ a set of doppelgängers of Adelaide’s family, Peele blurs the lines of ‘us and them’ by suggesting that it is just a tweak of perspective that makes us, the comfortable, progressive, and aspirational denizens of developed societies, a domineering, malevolent force. The eventual revelation of the identity of these vaguely supernatural others portends a future scenario of an underclass one day mobilising and attempting to overthrow their oppressors.

Madison Curry as young Adelaide Wilson in Us (photograph via Universal Pictures)

In its depiction of a home invasion and violence involving blunt objects and plenty of blood (not to mention large homes that back on to water), Peele evokes Michael Haneke’s two versions of his grim satire Funny Games (1997, 2007). However, Us does not quite have the dry self-awareness of those films, nor does Peele break the fourth wall as Haneke did so memorably. What Us does have, though, is an expertly written and performed comic element. As the action intensifies and Adelaide’s family battle the intruders on an increasingly graphic scale, the interaction between them remains hilariously glib. Amid the chaos Zora finds the composure to make a wisecrack about her father’s decidedly unpopular decision to buy a boat. There are also plenty of one-liners based on pop culture, including a pitch-perfect quip about Home Alone (1990).

Music is also a key tone-setter in the film, albeit in macabre ways. Those of us of a certain generation will remember when ‘I Got 5 On It’ by Luniz was a hit single. This artefact of commercial West Coast hip-hop takes on new and sinister qualities as it is reimagined with strings in the aforementioned climactic scene. Elsewhere, ‘Good Vibrations’ by The Beach Boys and ‘Fuck tha Police’ by N.W.A provide one of the most brutal scenes with an incongruous soundtrack of grotesquely upbeat energy.

Lupita Nyong'o as older Adelaide Wilson in Us (photograph via Universal Pictures)

Peele has elicited tremendous performances from each of his actors, including the ever-versatile Elizabeth Moss as a prissy family friend. Particular praise must also go to Nyong’o as both Adelaide and her double, ‘Red’, as well as Alex as Jason (and ‘Pluto’), who is influential in several of the film’s critical moments – including its frenetic denouement.

With a plot twist that demands a second viewing of the whole thing, Us ends on a note of ambiguity, uncertainty, and intrigue. The film is rich with visual motifs and provocative cultural references, and is a brave and ambitious work of cinema from a writer–director whose every creative turn pulses with originality.

Us (Universal Pictures) 121 minutes, directed by Jordan Peele. In cinemas 28 March 2019.