Jordan Peele established his talent as a writer-director with his debut film “Get Out,” so I was already optimistic regarding his upcoming take on Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone.”

Having now seen his sophomore feature, “Us,” I am fully on board with whatever he’s ready to throw at me next.

“Us” seems at first like an intimate tale of one woman’s past coming back to haunt her, but spirals into a giddily broad, apocalyptic scenario whose scale would come across as more absurd than harrowing, if not for Peele’s deft ability to recreate the hazy dream-logic that makes sense to us when we’re in the throes of a nightmare.

Lupita Nyong’o plays Adelaide Wilson, an otherwise average American mom whose family trip to the beachfront home where she grew up awakens some murky memories of a traumatic experience in a hall of mirrors just under the beach boardwalk.

The film opens with her childhood, as she takes in the 1986 Hands Across America benefit on her TV (as a fellow child of the Eighties, Peele acknowledges how much time we kids spent sat in front of the tube). As “Us” proceeds, the adult Adelaide constantly flashes back to those moments, revealing a few more details each time.

The flashbacks show that in the hall of mirrors, the young Adelaide saw a twin of herself and ever since, she’s feared the return of her sinister double.

Peele conveys not only the era-specific details of Adelaide’s childhood, but also the rhythms of Adelaide’s two families — the passive-aggressive bickering of the mother and father who raised her, and the affectionate arguments of her husband and kids as they try to enjoy their vacation together without getting on each other’s nerves — with lived-in authenticity.

Winston Duke, who costarred with Nyong’o as the imposing warrior chieftain M’Baku in “Black Panther,” stands out here as Adelaide’s husband Gabe, an endearingly dorky dad whose frustrations with the one-upmanship of his shallow neighbors Josh (Tim Heidecker) and Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) feels hilariously real.

This naturally familial atmosphere makes it easier to buy Peele’s more stylized touches, such as when the Wilsons are confronted late at night, not just by Adelaide’s mirror image, but by an entire set of doppelgangers of their own nuclear family, all wearing blood-red boiler suits and brandishing gleaming golden scissors.

Adelaide’s “shadow” has had enough of living a dark reflection of Adelaide’s life, out of the sunlight and out of sight, and as we learn by the end, she has even more reasons for her grievances than we’re initially led to believe.

It’s this mind-bending revelation that earns “Us” at least a second viewing, because rather than simply being a gratuitous shock for its own sake, it hammers home Peele’s message:

The cruelty and callousness with which we respond to those whom we regard as “others,” is actually damage that we’re ultimately doing to ourselves. Forcing them to subsist on our scraps, and relegating them to lesser spaces to keep them out of sight and out of mind, harms us as well.

Peele’s story unfolds into a surrealist fable without ever taking itself too seriously, and both its idiosyncratic imagery and its chilling final twist will stay with you long after you’ve left the theater.

Jordan Peele restores a sense of artistry and subversive politics to the horror genre, and I am here for it.