Us, writer/director Jordan Peele's much-anticipated follow-up to his horror masterpiece Get Out,
is finally here, and it was worth the wait.
What starts as an apparently simple home invasion fright fest quickly evolves into something
bigger, as Peele spins bigger and bigger ideas into a movie with bigger and bigger implications.
The result is a conceptually weighty horror film that keeps you guessing and thinking
right up to the very last minute, and that means we've got plenty to talk about.
With that in mind, here are the best and worst things about Us.
Oh, and it should go without saying, but there are SPOILERS AHEAD for the entire movie.
You've been warned.
Horror cinema has a huge capacity for pushing actors to their emotional and physical limits,
and the genre's long tradition of placing vulnerable women at the center of stories
means we've gotten truly legendary performances out of some major talents, from Jamie Lee
Curtis to Sigourney Weaver to Toni Collette.
Adelaide, played by Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong'o, is the center of Us, and she rises to the
occasion by adding another legendary performance to horror film history, a performance made
all the more powerful by her dual roles.
As Adelaide she is vulnerable but strong, scared but determined, loving but savage.
As Red, Adelaide's Tethered double, she is both an entirely different personality and
every bit Adelaide's mirror image.
She jerks and twists when Adelaide is graceful, grins when Adelaide gasps in terror, and croaks
where Adelaide speaks.
"Be careful…"
It's a magnificent pair of performances, and while there are certainly plenty of other
things to recommend about Us, her daring and brilliant performance is the first thing many
moviegoers will come away talking about.
The Tyler family who join the Wilsons join for a day at the beach in the first act of
the film, are presented as shallow, bickering people with no real sense of love between
them.
While that creates plenty of opportunities for comedy, it does mean the blow is dulled
a little bit when their murders happen midway through the movie.
Yes, that sequence is funny and gets quite tense when the Wilsons show up, but you get
the sense that the Tylers didn't really need to be as broad as they are, particularly when
the film already roots us in the emotional reality of the Wilsons.
Before he was an acclaimed genius of horror, Jordan Peele was an acclaimed genius of comedy,
thanks to his collaboration with Keegan Michael Key, which resulted in the TV series Key & Peele,
and their film Keanu.
Peele never made some kind of hard cut from one genre to the other, though.
As a horror fan, he has an innate understanding of the role comedy plays in scary movies,
something he demonstrated over and over again with his debut horror feature, Get Out.
"How you find me?"
"I'm TS motherf---ing A. We handle s---."
Us is another masterclass in balancing laughs and scares, beginning with the interplay of
the Wilson family as they travel together in the car and continuing throughout the entire
film.
"What's I got five on it mean?"
"It's about drugs."
"It's not about drugs, it's a dope song.
Don't do drugs."
Like his horror, Peele's comedy starts small, with little Dad jokes from Gabe and comforting
family banter.
It continues to build from there until it's intertwining with the scares, as Gabe wrestles
with his Tethered double on his new boat.
Ultimately, in the most desperate situations in the film, the comedy provides a welcome
sense of fun, as the Wilson family can't help commenting on how bizarre their situation
is even as they're trying to survive it.
All of that, plus a welcome needle drop from NWA, means that Us is often as hilarious as
it is terrifying.
Us begins with a relatively tight concept - evil duplicates are invading, and trying
to kill… us!
"What are you people?"
"It's us."
As the film expands and expands, it keeps expanding until it essentially has nationwide
implications, and the themes just keep expanding with it.
Because of that expansion, Us gets messy and not just in terms of the body count.
The film swells until it becomes not just about our own dark sides, but about how some
people prosper while others suffer in an unfair system.
And how the powerful manipulate regular people in unseen ways.
And about empty gestures of charity and hope that are mostly about public relations.
And about the lengths we'll go to in order to take what we feel we deserve… and so
on, and so on.
These are all valid themes!
But by the end, the film tries to throw these things at us all at once, and some of them
land hard while others simply fall by the wayside.
It's a shotgun approach to the symbolism at the heart of the movie, and it doesn't work
as well it should overall.
It could even be said that, without Get Out to compare it to, we wouldn't notice the difference,
but it's there, and it's noticeable.
Still, you gotta give the movie credit: even if its reach exceeds its grasp, at least it
tried to reach at all.
With Us, Jordan Peele created some legendary creepy nightmares called the Tethered, and
they live up to all the promise they had in the film's trailers.
"Stick with me, and I'll keep you safe."
"Run!"
The design of the Tethered is deceptively simple, and even though we don't learn why
they look the way they do, red jumpsuits, gloves, sandals, and scissors, until late
in the film, their look works from the very beginning, when we see them standing in the
Wilson family's driveway, silent and stoic.
As the concept at the movie's heart continues expanding, and its mythology gets more complex,
the Tethered themselves remain deceptively simple movie monsters.
Their behavior can change a bit and their motives can become more clear, but the deliberate,
almost robotic way in which they pursue their goals does not, and that makes them terrifying.
They're extremely effective movie monsters thanks in part to Peele's less-is-more approach,
and the actors inhabiting them make them unforgettable slasher villains.
As the film's final act leads Adelaide down into a series of tunnels, we finally learn
what the Tethered really are: genetic copies of people living on the surface world, human
in body but vacant in spirit, who were created to serve as underground "puppets" for the
powerful to manipulate the citizenry.
It eventually all went wrong, and the Tethered were simply left in the tunnels to fend for
themselves… until Red herself began to organize the uprising we see in the film.
It's an intriguing explanation for a lot of seemingly unrelated things, but the way it's
finally revealed to us, with Red explaining it all via voiceover, could've been better.
We've seen this villain do all manner of frightening, unpredictable, and compelling things, and
now in this moment she's reduced to monologuing in a dark room because the film has to dish
out a whole bunch of information in a very short time.
It's perhaps the one inelegant thing the film has to offer, and it still manages to be interesting
even if it's clunky.
Peele is such a talented writer, skilled at wielding high concepts in new ways, mixing
comedy and drama, and pacing in a way that makes it look easy, that he could shoot his
films in a style that's merely competent and still come away with hits.
As long as everything's in focus and the editing isn't confusing, the story will still work
and the characters will still come through.
Peele isn't content to just keep things adequate, though, and that shows through in the visual
flourishes present throughout Us.
Every frame of this film looks amazing.
It doesn't matter if you're a fan of horror or not, this is some of the finest visual
storytelling you're likely to see in any movie in 2019.
The eventual explanation for who and what the Tethered really are and why they were
created is an intriguing one, and helps to set up that amazing final shot of bloody Hands
Across America.
But things start to fall apart a bit the more you think about the logistics of it all: Why
was the entrance to the Tethered's underground tunnels unlocked?
Why didn't more wander to the surface world more often?
Why can the Tethered act with free will in some scenes and become mirror images of their
counterparts the next?
There are probably great explanations for these questions, but the film is too interested
in moving relentlessly forward to give them to us, and that might take a little air out
of the story's tires if you get stuck thinking too much about it all.
On that same subject, it's confirmed in the movie's final moments that Adelaide is actually
the original Tethered, and Red was the original Adelaide who she strangled and locked up in
the tunnels after that first carnival encounter all those years ago.
The twist works, because it's the kind of thing that just burrows into your brain as
the credits are rolling… but it also feels like the last brick that almost makes the
tower beneath it start to topple.
If there's one impulse the movie maybe should have resisted, it might be this one…
unless we get to explore the true implications of this revelation in the inevitable sequel,
Us, Too: A Bus Full of Us!
Now that sounds scary...
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