What's scarier than being invaded by Us? If you like your horror movies twisty-and-turny, Jordan Peele's follow-up to Get Out is definitely for you, says Simon Morris.
There's an old rule in the low-budget movie business which is "When in doubt, make a horror film".
They don't cost much, and there's every possibility you'll make your money back out of people coming in out of the rain.
It's not always the case, of course, but it worked a treat for a brilliant little genre film called Get Out (2017) – the first film for writer-director Jordan Peele.
Get Out had plenty of gags in it, but the underlying horror was a novel take on racial politics in the US.
So, understandably, there's been a lot of interest in his follow-up - Us.
The shortcomings of many horror films are that they're often riddled with clichés. It's a vampire film or a monster movie. It's a homicidal maniac in a dark house or an ancient curse.
But Us dips into that source of unpredictable Tales of Mystery and Imagination - Rod Serling's old TV series The Twilight Zone - for its inspiration.
Us opens with a preamble set in the 1980s - an era of optimism, of President Reagan's Hands Across America - and also, lest we forget, a period of some classic horror films, often involving families.
A little girl gets lost at a fairground on the beach resort of Santa Cruz. When she comes back she's deeply traumatized.
Cut to the present day, and the little girl - all grown up now and played by Black Panther's Lupita Nyong'o - has a family of her own.
The family is Afro-American, but otherwise couldn't be a more traditional, old-fashioned Steven Spielberg family.
Dad's a lovable idiot, Mum rules the roost, there's a teenage daughter and a younger son, Jason. And they're going on holiday to, wait for it... Santa Cruz.
Jordan Peele has made the point that this isn't a family defined by its blackness, any more than the family in Jaws was defined by their colour.
But Us is certainly a film defined by the fact that Peele has seen plenty of movies in his time. He even has Jason wear a Jaws T-shirt in an ominously familiar scene by the beach.
Us includes visual quotes from everything from The Birds and Vertigo to Big and The Shining throughout Us, but they don't prepare us for the plot, which is straight from the unpredictable Twilight Zone playbook.
One night a family turns up outside their house that looks unnervingly like an exact copy of them - Mum, Dad, Princess, Junior. And they've got more on their mind than a neighbourly visit.
Once they arrive, Us ramps up the suspense, the action - and, it has to be said, the bewilderment.
In a story with as little traditional familiarity as "The Invasion of the Weird Doppelgangers" all bets are clearly off.
Where do they come from? What do they want? What are their powers? And what does it take to kill them?
Like many of today's most successful horror films - A Quiet Place, Suspiria, Hereditary and the rest - the lead is a woman.
Though in this case, that's complicated by the fact that Lupita Nyong'o plays both the lead member of the threatened family and the leader of the invaders.
As he did in Get Out, Jordan Peele offers more than we're expecting, though he dials back the comedy here.
Also unlike Get Out, Us seems more enthusiastic about showing off the film-maker's chops - not just by displaying his influences but keeping us off-balance to the last moment and beyond.
If you like your horror films twisty and turny as well as scary, Us is definitely one for you.
It's interesting that the next project Jordan Peele has taken is as the Rod Serling-type narrator in a remake of the old Twilight Zone series.
Who better, obviously.
