Jordan Peele, now on his third outing as writer and directer of a horror (or horror-adjacent) film with a title uttered by a character in a moment of duress, hits some writing roadblocks that have grown more cumbersome in each outing: Overlong setup segments (more on this in a sec), thematically messy overreach, characters that never rise above flat sketches, too many half-assed piss-takes. I won’t go so far as to say that Peele has outed himself as a bad screenwriter, but I think a little bit of discipline and a co-writer might be in order for film number four.

And yet Peele remains an exciting scene-by-scene director, constructing some thrilling and gut-wrenching moments. Moments of Nope thorrified and astonished me in varying doses. The big visual payoff on the mysterious, destiny-altering force at the center of the film is haunting and almost beautiful.

So what does it add up to? I can’t say I quite know myself. Let’s walk through it.

We need to start with the bad, unfortunately. Us had its own issues with laborious setup, but that build-up was only a half hour and at least had a sense of momentum and the narrative hook of returning to a place of childhood trauma. Nope’s table setting lasts almost a full hour. And it’s really plodding, aimless storytelling: Some kooky stuff is happening back at the ranch. We better hang around until something big happens.

There’s a scene partway through this stretch that seems like it’s turning a corner. We see some creepy figures darting around shadows, not quite visible, a la the stalkers in Us. But it’s all a prank, and once I realized what the movie was doing, I started getting actively annoyed. Fake out scares are part of the horror tradition, but that on top of a tedious opening stretched my patience. Peele’s impish, sketch comedy instincts linger; in this case, for the worse.

It’s not simply the lack of stuff happening that makes this opening hour so brutal. It’s that every character and bit of exposition feels like a splash of paint rather than a thoughtful composition: One of the opening scenes highlights the protagonists’ connection to very early cinema, but it never comes to anything (other than thematic heft). There are hints of colorful, complex family dynamics that gets no dissection or angst. Sibling protagonists OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer) have eye-popping charisma — Kaluuya in particular commands the screen in a low-key star turn — but not much development. They’re ciphers, not characters. The rest of the ensemble don’t even get as far as having identifiable traits. The opening act just kind of floats.

The movie’s turning point comes right around a flashback at the hour mark. We witness, from the edges, the dark, life-altering moment from the perspective of side character Jupe (Steven Yuen), hinted at earlier in the film. It’s the filming of a TV show gone nightmarishly wrong. It has no direct bearing on the plot, just a thematic one, but is unsettling enough to lurch the film out of its stasis.

It’s this and the following stretch that make up my favorite part of the movie. It’s a blast of almost eldritchian horror, set mostly on a rainy night. I was white-knuckle terrified. This segment also highlights the film’s sophisticated use of sound to accomplish all sorts of unsettling effects — some distant, off-screen screaming is as gut-wrenching as any on-screen violence could possibly be.

This is also where the film’s biggest thematic statement takes shape, though it is even messier and less coherent than Us, and certainly less potent than Get Out. Peele seems to equate humanity’s lizard-brain love of spectacle with destructive exploitation, literalizing the observation of violent spectacle into violence upon the viewer.

Peele takes a curious approach to the conclusion, shifting from rising horror to something that feels more like an adventure blockbuster or even a western. In broad daylight, we track the terrifying force that has haunted the movie. It feels almost too obvious to point out the Spielberg influences on this section, from the Jaws-esque obfuscation of the creature to the inverse-Close Encounters insistence on the dangers of looking up.

The final half hour is a pretty phenomenal continuous set piece, with lots of interesting moving parts that unfold with visual grace. Perhaps the most breathtaking sequences are the grand revelations of the film’s central terror, directly and squarely, as something almost abstractly beautiful. You could write a dissertation on the creature design on display in Nope’s conclusion, rife with animalistic strength. I see in it a biblical angel, and perhaps a movie camera, with floral and vaginal curves to its shape.

There’s a triumphant tone to Nope’s closing moments that seems to run perpendicular to the thematic thrust of the film. Why celebrate successful exploitation of wild creatures in the name of human spectacle when the rest of the movie argues at the senseless danger of that very thing? Perhaps Peele is leaning on some racial catharsis — a black man on a horse is still a central cinematic image 125 years after Eadweard Muybridge. But it rings discordant to me, a sense only amplified amidst buzz that Peele rewrote parts of the ending at Universal’s behest to make the film potentially franchisable. Yuck.

Overall, Nope is worth watching even in if it feels a bit sloppy and ragged. Its best moments are unsettling and gripping even if its worst moments — that interminable opening hour — are outright bad. It has a few too many untrimmed, misshapen ideas and images. But at least it has ideas and images.

And there’s no question that Us trends towards “delirious” as it approaches its conclusion. What starts as creepy home invasion thriller gradually turns into something more apocalyptic, more closely resembling a zombie movie. And then there’s the final 25 minutes which is something totally different entirely.

I don’t want to spend the entirety of this review doing a compare-and-contrast with Get Out, but I think there are some notable throughlines. The first is the aggressive undercurrent of racial and political allegory. Peele, like his obvious cinematic hero, John Carpenter, is rebelliously left-wing; Us has numerous parallels to They Live, including deep class consciousness. Us is significantly more untidy on its message delivery than wither They Live or Get Out, however. In fact, unlike Get Out, I think Us works better as straight-ahead horror than message movie; more on this in a moment.

One last Get Out comparison is that both movies do amazing work with actors’ expressive faces. Lupita Nyong’o has a camera-shatteringly beautiful and expressive face that gets to flip through a thousand different spotlit emotions. Some of her gazes straight into the lens are unforgettably creepy.

Anyways, let’s get to the meat of Us, which I like quite a bit. This is a tense and scary movie. Peele is an intuitive expert at crafting individual scenes and set pieces. I think Peele might be more of a visionary than an auteur; i.e., more image-maker than author. Us, moreso than Get Out, holds together with visual ideas within scenes better than as an overall artistic piece. (This shift towards great scenes but an uneven whole is a trend that continues even more strongly in Nope, Peele’s third film.) Nearly every scene in Us is constructed in a way to maximize tension: When the red-shirted intruders appear, they flit in and out of shadows and tight spaces long enough to be visible, but not so long for us to ever get used to their slightly alien quality. There’s a great running motif of small flames illuminating faces; this low, flickery lighting ratchets the suspense.

There is a slight problem with the film’s pacing, and I think this goes back to the “film vs scenes” struggle in Us, which has a root cause of an overall screenwriting sloppiness. As a front-to-back movie script, Us is fairly lumpy. Where this impacts the flow of the film is mostly in its first half: After a haunting opening in which a little girl gets trapped in a house of mirrors (that is so good and hurried it could have been even longer), we jump ahead to that girl, Adelaide (Nyong’o), as a grown woman, going on a vacation with her husband and two kids. And it takes awhile, a good half hour of slow-boil set up, to get to the meat of the story. (Another problem intensified in Nope.)

And then, as previously mentioned, we basically have three short films on top of that. One at the family’s beach house, one on the road, and one particularly balletic conclusion in an enclosed space. The last of these feels Argento-esque, as the violence approaches something graceful and expressive, with dancing as a key component of the horror. It’s a terrific ending, but the best scene takes place earlier, at the house of some family friends of the main characters: Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker star as a somewhat obnoxious set of wealthy parents, leaving immediately striking impressions, so it’s compelling when they get pulled into the horror shenanigans. This is also when the home invasion aspect of creepy doppelgangers really shines as a figurative concept: each new cloned intruder represents some demon or character flaw of an existing character.

What Us adds up to is a jolting, scary movie with an ambitious loopiness that I found quite charming. There’s just enough messiness and incoherence to keep it from true greatness, but it’s my favorite of Peele’s works to date.

But I cannot lie and say that the massive hype around Get Out and the well-trod discussion of its horror treatment of racism likely had no impact on my perception of the film. Had I come in blind, I think I would have enjoyed the film with a lot more enthusiasm. That’s because Get Out is really only clever to the point of building out its central metaphor: a horror set-up that reflects the idea of being a Black person in neoliberal America as a scary and dehumanizing experience.

To be clear, successfully rendering this concept is not a small achievement at all. Director and writer Jordan Peele does a terrific job in the first half of the movie of amping up the discomfort of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) as he encounters the “super-white” Armitage family; their awkward white liberal sensibilities grow increasingly toxic, as does the fact that their “hired help” of all Black people seem increasing inhuman and detached.

(If I put on my cynical hat for a moment… I wonder if the exceedingly white group of critics that poured praise on the film did so in part because they felt “seen” and wanted to make sure the world knew that they “got it” and weren’t part of the problem the film was diagnosing. I know I certainly had a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction myself, and that’s one way you can tell that the concept is brilliantly immersive and executed.)

Where the movie loses some of its steam is in the film’s second half. Once it’s clear that the movie is building towards the idea of an Armitage body-control conspiracy, the rest of the movie simply lets the dominoes fall without many surprises, though still plenty of tension. Some of the blasts of violence are creative and memorable; others are pretty generic.

My least favorite of the film’s bits is the thread with Rod (Lil Rel Howery). His role as the comic relief buddy and, in particular, the gags about his job as a TSA agent, feel like sketch comedy and out of place with the rest of the film.

Thankfully, the film looks terrific and is well-acted all around. Kaluuya leaves an immediate impression as a lead able to handle all of the tones of a movie like this — comedy, horror, romantic chemistry, etc. Bradley Whitford and Allison Williams are terrific in their respective roles as sweetly condescending patriarch and duplicitous girlfriend.

I enjoyed Get Out, but I’m particularly excited about the promise that Peele demonstrates as a creative storyteller and nuts-and-bolts horror director.