Us

The next instal­ment of Jor­dan Peele’s pro­posed series of ​‘social hor­ror’ films is final­ly upon us with, well, Us. It’s an ambi­tious and sprawl­ing work most­ly in keep­ing with the tone set by 2017’s Get Out. As with that film, Peele is less inter­est­ed in pin­point­ing the cor­ro­sive aspects of Amer­i­can cul­ture, than he is in mak­ing his audi­ence look inwards.

The sto­ry opens in San­ta Cruz, 1986, as a young girl, Ade­laide Wil­son, wan­ders into a hall of mir­rors. Instead of an obvi­ous jump scare, Peele keeps the thing that ter­ri­fies her into wide-eyed shock off screen, allow­ing the encounter to hang in our minds for the rest of the film. Cut to 30 years lat­er and a now adult Ade­laide (Lupi­ta Nyong’o) is on the road back to San­ta Cruz with her hus­band Gabe (Win­ston Duke) and their two chil­dren, Zora (Sha­ha­di Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). After a stretch of build-up and some goof­ing around (which includes a charm­ing sing-along to Luniz’s ​’90s banger I Got 5 On It), a fam­i­ly iden­ti­cal to theirs shows up in their dri­ve­way, robed in red boil­er suits and wield­ing gold scissors.

With the dop­pel­gängers, who refer to them­selves as ​‘The Teth­ered’, Peele takes aim at how soci­ety inter­acts with under­class­es and Oth­ers; the Teth­ered appear as creepy, fun­house mir­ror ver­sions of our­selves. Their back­sto­ry and motive (which becomes more con­found­ing the more you think about it) is held back for most of the run time, yet the film still expends as much ener­gy in attempt­ing to define the dop­pel­gängers as it does the fam­i­ly at its cen­tre. Gabe’s dou­ble is a slow mov­ing, bru­tal brawler. Jason’s dou­ble is a pyro­ma­ni­ac with the man­ner­isms of a wild dog. Zora’s dou­ble is a silent creep who shares her run­ning ability.

Adelaide’s dou­ble, named ​‘Red’, is the ring­leader. She speaks in an unholy, gut­tur­al rasp and moves in a man­ner that alter­nates between a spi­der-like scut­tle and the refined move­ments of a trained dancer. In Ade­laide and Red, Peele has gift­ed Nyong’o roles wor­thy of her vast tal­ents. Her dual per­for­mance is the anchor of the movie, fill­ing both char­ac­ters with pathos and a clear sense of trau­ma, com­pli­cat­ing our view of the vic­tims and their assailants as the film goes on. Slow­ly, these extra­or­di­nary indi­vid­ual per­for­mances begin to meet in the middle.

The sup­port­ing cast around her are excel­lent too – as Gabe, Duke is on a charm offen­sive, drop­ping corny jokes, obsess­ing over a beat­en down boat he can’t real­ly oper­ate, and gen­er­al­ly just being adorable. Eliz­a­beth Moss and Tim Hei­deck­er are effec­tive­ly deployed as the family’s vac­u­ous and super­fi­cial token white friends, giv­ing us a clue into the kind of peo­ple with whom Adelaide’s fam­i­ly asso­ciates. Peele keeps his pro­tag­o­nists charm­ing even when they’re in per­il, which only makes us root for them harder.

But Us is sly in how it manip­u­lates our sym­pa­thies and then forces us to recon­sid­er them, sug­gest­ing that the peo­ple stalk­ing our lov­able pro­tag­o­nists may them­selves be the result of a sys­tem­at­ic injus­tice. In one telling moment, Gabe code-switch­es towards AAVE to try and scare The Teth­ered from his dri­ve­way when they first appear, high­light­ing his and his family’s edu­cat­ed, upper-mid­dle class background.

Us works on the same lev­el as a zom­bie movie; Night of the Liv­ing Dead by way of Hitch­cock. It starts as a home inva­sion movie which cen­tres on a black mid­dle class fam­i­ly to some­thing big­ger and more chal­leng­ing. The mon­sters are sham­bling, shriek­ing fer­al par­o­dies of humans, only here they’re decked out in match­ing uniforms.

Rather than just rep­re­sent­ing the worst and most sav­age human impuls­es, the Teth­ered embody the sins of the estab­lish­ment com­ing back to haunt them, force­ful­ly reclaim­ing a space in soci­ety that they’ve long been denied. There’s a lot to piece togeth­er here, as Peele is a lit­tle less didac­tic with the cen­tral metaphor of Us than he was with the sim­i­lar sym­bol­ic lay­er­ing in Get Out. It invites more clue-find­ing than that pre­vi­ous film, keep­ing the over­all mean­ing fair­ly opaque.

Us also swings a lit­tle wild­ly in terms of its struc­ture and tone – it’s often hys­ter­i­cal­ly fun­ny and enter­tain­ing in the moment, but the gags can feel a lit­tle at odds with what’s unfold­ing on screen. Some­times Peele’s film seems like it might buck­le under the weight of its ambi­tions, as it gets increas­ing­ly out­ra­geous and fever­ish­ly expands on its own inter­nal mythol­o­gy, mix­ing the hor­ror with extreme­ly dark com­e­dy as it moves from one wild sce­nario to the next.

But it man­ages to hold on, and it helps that all of its for­mal aspects are so engag­ing. The set-pieces are sus­pense­ful, ter­ri­fy­ing and slick­ly direct­ed. One stand­out sequence lat­er is expert­ly scored and chore­o­graphed to a slowed-down, night­mare ver­sion of ​‘I Got 5 On It’, of all things. Peele knows bet­ter than to rely on cheap, tem­po­rary jump scares, elic­it­ing shock through sim­ple move­ments of the cam­era – Mike Gioulakis (who also shot Under the Sil­ver Lake) pro­vides some tru­ly creepy, mem­o­rable imagery. These moments aren’t always announced with boom­ing score cues; silence is val­ued just as much as Michael Abel’s impres­sive score, com­prised of oth­er­world­ly chants and boom­ing percussion.

Despite some minor stum­bles, Us is a supreme­ly con­fi­dent and ambi­tious sec­ond out­ing from Peele. He uses the genre to explore aspects of Amer­i­ca that its cit­i­zens would often rather not. Though it does clash with the tone in one or two instances, Peele’s sense for com­e­dy is often a wel­come touch – at some points, it’s even sur­pris­ing­ly cru­el. Us cements Peele’s rep­u­ta­tion as one of mod­ern horror’s most excit­ing voic­es, and it’s hard to resist men­tal­ly pro­ject­ing what the hell he might come up with next.