Comedy — as an art form — can be undervalued. While its primary purpose is to make us laugh, great comedy speaks truth to power.

Horror, similarly, is considered a cheap thrill. But in its best forms, speaks to darker truths about society and humanity.

In that regard - it shouldn’t have been a surprise that with his directorial debut, Get Out, Jordan Peele, already a modern master of comedy with his great sketch series Key & Peele, proved that he could master horror.

The difference that time? The world took note.

Award nominations, Best Picture nominations, Get Out gained the respect of both general audiences and cinephiles alike, and made Jordan Peele a creator worth watching. Hollywood wanted a piece of him too, trying to place him on bigger blockbuster projects. Instead, he said “I got this", and decided to continue on his own path.

Peele’s second film - the all difficult sophomore release - Us has hit theaters this weekend, and I’m pleased to say that it underlines every bit of positivity he was met with his debut and cements him as a directorial, creative force.

For those who haven’t seen the trailers, I’ll give you the brief synopsis of what Us is about. It’s about a family - an average one not unlike yours and mine. A strong mother (Lupita Nyong’o), a kinda lame dad (Winston Duke), the awkward teenage daughter (Shahadi Wright), the sweet baby brother (Evan Alex). They’re off for a beach trip. Things are going well - they’re seeing their friends (Tim H Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss), they’re enjoying the sun - when, late at night, another family arrives at their beach house.

That family? Their twisted doppelgÁ¤ngers.

The film that follows is full of intense, creepy, disturbing action — peppered with Peele’s sense of humor (both light and dark) — almost in the shade of a less graphically violent Funny Games. But, as Get Out taught us - there’s something more here.

Peele continues to build movies in his unique creative vision. Beautifully shot, tension filled, but not afraid of human moments. It’s obsessed with vintage ephemera, yet incredibly of its time, all the while speaking to a greater truth of who we are.

The title Us, unsurprisingly, means more - us as a people, us as a family, us as a nation, us as a populace. But Us is also about “them". Them as a cumulative, them as a negative, them as the inverse of us.

And then there’s that ending. You’re going to be debating this one with friends for some time, and it seals that Us is a movie you need to see more than once. I already can’t wait to take my wife to see it and watch it again and again on iTunes.

Performances in the film are, unsurprisingly, great. Nyong’o’s been craving the big lead breakout role she gets here, and her acting - both as her self and her ersatz doppelgÁ¤nger are performances which will go down in the horror lexicon. I absolutely adored Winston Duke’s performance as the put-upon father, and without saying too much, Tim Heidecker has a moment in the movie which takes his history of surreal humor and spins it into a new light.

With Get Out, we got to see the birth of a new, strong voice in cinema. Us is its refinement. The sophomore curse? Dashed. I don’t know that Us is the straightforward crowd pleaser that Get Out was, but for sure, the film confirms that anything Jordan Peele makes from now on - I’m there opening weekend.

Us is in theaters now.