This is clearly a movie that was conceived of as a really cool, disturbing image — the one that opens the film, and which you’ve already probably seen some of, if you’ve seen any of the marketing material — and then built up from there.

This isn’t just my suspicion (though it was my suspicion), but also a thing that director Zach Cregger said outright in an interview: That he started writing the movie with this little girl’s narration, and that scene, and had no idea what it meant or why it had happened.

And so the thing is, when you have a movie that’s built around a cool image with no meaning, what you usually get is a mess of one variety or another. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a stylish mess with some cool scenes that don’t quite add up to anything larger; if you’re unlucky, it’ll just be a pile of irritating nonsense.

But the miracle of this movie is that it really works. Cregger managed to figure out why that thing happened, and built it into a story that not only makes literal plot sense, but also is about something on a deeper thematic level.

And then he took that story, and executed it brilliantly as a horror movie. As in Barbarian, he ramps the tension up so high it’s almost unbearable: The early bits of the movie build an incredible sense of dread, which isn’t even relieved with a few jump scares.

But then, right as it’s getting to be too much, we cut to another context and take things down a notch, and then go in completely different directions. Oh, there’s still plenty of tension and terror, but it’s leavened with some great character work and bits of comedy. And the movie is ultimately structured as something of a mystery, as we gradually learn, from different perspectives, what’s actually happening in the movie. That growing knowledge first serves to turn down the horror (as the unknown is always scarier than the known) but then to ramp it back up (as this known thing is pretty fucking creepy).

Between this and Barbarian, Cregger is two-for-two at making absolute top-notch horror movies. I hope someone keeps giving him money.