Jordan Peele loves a rabbit. There is a song that appears in the first scene of Get Out, Peele’s Oscar-winning debut as a movie writer and director, that goes “Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run! Run! Run!” as Lakeith Stanfield’s character Dre strolls to his doom through a white suburb. It’s an old British song from World War II, and to the modern ear, it rings as nostalgic for a time of jolly tea parties and unchecked white supremacy. Peele proved himself to be a master of genre contrast in Get Out by mixing horror with black satire, and the juxtaposition between “Run, Rabbit, Run” and Childish Gambino’s “Redbone,” whose “stay woke” refrain is another key theme in the movie’s soundtrack, added another layer to the movie’s atmospheric tension.

A rabbit also opens Us, Peele’s follow-up effort. The opening credits play out across a long, lingering close-up of a white rabbit’s eye. It won’t make sense until much later in the movie, when we learn what exactly rabbits have to do with the bloody chaos that is about to be unleashed. For now, though, the rabbit is just a clue—a trembling, vulnerable animal.

Get Out is an extraordinary movie, a great catapulting leap forward in the satirical examination of race in American screen fiction. Possessed of a golden plot—interracial couple visits white liberal parents upstate, who turn out to be enslaving black people—Peele focused on executing it perfectly, tying up all the loose ends and drawing the movie to a satisfying close. In his second outing, however, Peele has given himself a little more room to stretch out and experiment. Having been frustrated by the misinterpretation of Get Out as a comedy, Peele has responded by delivering a movie soaked in blood, terror, and ambiguity.

Us is stranger than Get Out, with deeper philosophical undercurrents flowing through it. The rabbit that greets you at the movie’s start is an invitation. Will you follow, like Alice in her Wonderland? The journey will be at your peril—there’s no telling how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Us is a movie about an American family: Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) is the mom, Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke) is the dad, and they’re vacationing with their kids, teenaged Zora (Shahadi Wright), and her little brother Jason (Evan Alex). After a tantalizing flashback to Adelaide’s childhood in the mid-1980s, we skip to the present day. Adelaide is now a grown woman. She wears a breezy cream linen dress, and the sun is shining over the beach on Santa Cruz.