Whenever a film opens the SXSW Film Festival in Austin’s grand Paramount Theatre, it’s met with riotous applause, hoots, and hollers. That’s due partly to festival excitement, partly to a crowd laced with studio guests and friends of the filmmakers, and partly to the good taste of the SXSW programmers, who pick films that will, at the very least, thrill or inspire laughter. But staring down a booming standing ovation after the premiere of his second film, Us, on Friday night at SXSW, Jordan Peele nonetheless joked: “I’m looking out at a sea of people going ‘whaaaaaaaat??’”

That’s because Us is, by design, a much more challenging swing for the fences than the popcorn-crowd-friendly Get Out. But the buzz from the Austin audience is that everyone was buying into Peele’s more ambitious second act—even if they weren’t sure exactly what it meant. An hour before the premiere, Get Out and Us producer __Sean McKittrick __ told Vanity Fair that he doesn’t think Peele will ever fully explain some of the film’s murkier layers of meaning.

If Peele’s Get Out, which began percolating during the 2008 presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and premiered days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, was the perfect movie for our national whiplash in 2017, then the far more nightmarish Us is the ideal movie for a weary America after two years under Trump. The conceit is fairly simple: the Wilson family is on vacation near the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk when Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), Gabe (Winston Duke), and their two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), encounter a terrifying pack of doppelgängers, which Peele refers to as “the Red family”—thanks to their matching crimson jumpsuits. The four menacing look-alikes appear late one night on the Wilsons’ driveway; what follows, plot-wise, is largely a standard home-invasion horror story, with a few added twists along the way. Peele implored the SXSW audience on Friday night to keep those twists under wraps.

Everyone in the cast brings their A-game in creating unsettling doubles of themselves, with Peele joking at the screening that fans would no longer be able to refer to Duke by the name of his breakout Black Panther character, M’Baku: “He can do a lot of other things!” Really, though, Us belongs to Nyong’o from start to finish. She’s never before had a film project that’s relied this heavily on her considerable acting gifts, and is equally convincing as both the fearful-yet-defiant matriarch hell-bent on protecting her family and the sneaky, graceful, brutish double who wields a nastily sharp pair of scissors. It’s an emotional, nuanced, and terrifying dual performance that outstrips even her Oscar-winning turn in 12 Years a Slave when it comes to lack of vanity and complete commitment.

On the heels of his Oscar-winning debut film, Peele could have done anything. As Get Out and Us producer McKittrick put it Friday, “He could have done Star Wars—an-y-thing. But he stuck with horror because it’s not only his zone, it’s his passion.” Two films into his career as a director, moviegoers can already begin to understand what “a Jordan Peele movie” feels like. But Peele warmly brushed off any attempts to box his movie into one kind of genre Friday night, alluding instead, with light frustration, to the heated debate that erupted in 2018 when Get Out was slotted into the comedy category at the Golden Globes. “That became the conversation,” Peele said from the stage of the Paramount Theatre. So, what should we call Us? “Who really cares?” Peele laughed.