About "Us"

Minor spoilers ahead.

"Us" is one of those horror movies that made it difficult to sleep much afterwards. Part of it was because the adrenaline from the thrills and shocks kept me up. The film is not especially scary, but has some of the most unnerving cinema monsters I've seen onscreen in a long while. And part of it was that "Us" is one of those movies where the ending forces you to reexamine the entire story in a different context, and I spent half the night piecing things together and having little "a-ha!" moments. And once I finished doing that, there was a mountain of subtext to dig through.

Like "Get Out," Jordan Peele's latest film has a lot of coded social commentary. On the surface level, "Us" is a doppelganger story, one with a few novel conceits. The Wilson family, mother Addy (Lupita Nyong'o), father Gabe (Winston Duke), and children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), go on vacation near the Santa Monica beach where Addy had a traumatic experience as a child. When their shadowy doubles, the "Tethered," arrive in the middle of the night, intent on killing them, Addy has to confront her old ghosts to dispatch and escape them. As a pure horror film, "Us" is executed beautifully. The doppelgangers are monstrous and frightful. The scares are visceral. The suspense is even better.

However, "Us" gets a lot of its power from suggesting connections and presenting ideas that go quite a bit deeper - or at least appear to. No definitive answers are ever given about the origin of the Tethered, but we get just enough details about how they live and operate that it's irresistible to want to pick them apart. They're essentially fairy-tale monsters, and thus obviously symbolic of other evils. Some have suggested that the Tethered are stand-ins for an exploited underclass, like the Morlocks. However, unlike the Morlocks, their lives and actions are explicitly tied to their doubles.' Not only are the Tethered the dark mirrors of the main characters, but their relationships to each other are too. We hear speculation that they're connected to protestors or human lab rats. When asked point blank who they are, the response is, "We're Americans."

They also make for such memorable visuals, all dressed in red, with dead-eyed expressions, and frequently holding hands in human chains. We've seen similar elements in other movie monsters, but nothing quite like this. Lupita Nyong'o delivers a fantastic performance as both Addy and her double, who the credits identify as "Red." She is the most aggressive and fearsome of the Tethered, who slings accusations at Addy with a raspy voice and grimacing smile. Nyong'o's performance is mesmerizing stuff, and I'm already pretty sure that she'll be snubbed at awards time to the ire of genre fans.

The rest of the cast is great too. Winston Duke as the social-climbing Gabe has the lion's share the film's funnier moments. And yes, "Us" does have its share of laughs, including morbid family squabbles and some skewering of the obsessions of the suburban set. Some have taken issue with Jordan Peele's worldbuilding being a little shaky here, but nobody can criticize him for the pitch perfect family dynamics and the shaking up of common genre conventions. I also found the various homages to '80s culture a lot of fun, especially the reminder that Michael Jackson was once briefly a horror icon. The soundtrack, of course, is a delight.

Again, Peele has created a magnificent piece of horror with a trim budget and an inventive script. I doubt that this will be able to match the success of "Get Out," because the social commentary isn't nearly as specific, and the story is less clearly laid out. However, I like that "Us" is more amorphous and uneasy, because it makes the scares all the more potent, and allows for more interpretations. I like the theory that the Tethered are a manifestation of capitalist guilt, but I also like them as a racial dissociation metaphor, or an environmental apocalypse metaphor, or even a political metaphor. Is Addy Donald Trump?

I know it's still before Labor Day, but this hasn't been a great year for movies that aren't massive blockbuster tentpoles. Thank goodness for Jordan Peele and company.
---