In 2017, sketch comic Jordan Peele made his directorial debut with an unbelievable horror film called Get Out. It reached near-universal praise, nabbing him an Oscar for his writing efforts in the process, and when word came back around he was helming a new horror flick titled ‘Us’… the world eagerly awaited.
Director: Jordan Peele
Writers: Jordan Peele
Starring: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Evan Alex, and Shahadi Wright Joseph
Runtime: 1 hour and 56 minutes
MPAA Rating: R (sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language)
Us is a terrifying, bloody display of originality. Without spoiling anything, the film centers around a family of four vacationing in their summer home. The mother, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), had a traumatic incident in her childhood involving a doppelganger that she fears is still following her well into her adult life. One night, her family is visited by a family of sinister lookalikes with far more sinister intentions. As they cling desperately to any chance of survival that they can, all kinds of revelations unravel raising the stakes tremendously.
While I think Get Out is a much stronger film narratively, held together by a more intimate nature and more compelling themes, Us still showcases Peele’s unwillingness to submit to by-the-numbers filmmaking. There’s not one thing about this nightmare of a film that made me think “Oh, he was inspired by this film” or “That’s a reference to this film”. It’s undeniably pure Peele.
That doesn’t exclusively apply to the very layered plot, that extends into the spooks, the acting, the approach to visuals, and more. This is a horror film that depends almost entirely on its actors, not the visual effects or the tense score, but how well the actors can both reflect terror and portray absolute menace given they’re all playing dual roles.
The second the family of duplicates arrives, they give off an overwhelming feeling of utter dread. The way Red, the mother’s twin, behaves is almost otherworldly. When she walked on screen the first time, several people in the theater (myself included), audibly said: “Oh f**k…”. Her body is stiff, yet she walks like a cartoon character would speedily move on their tiptoes in a very unnerving fashion, her voice sounds like she has had her vocal cords stripped from her, and she has a wildly vivid vocabulary that seeps deep into your brain.
It’s an instant and early contender for an Oscar-worthy performance as far as I’m concerned. Nyong’o transforms herself, making you forget she’s playing two roles, and it’s nothing short of captivating.
The other actors do an incredible job as well with the father, Gabe (Winston Duke), serving as comic relief in some of the more intense moments. Now, just like Get Out, some of these moments land… some really don’t and can kill the tension in a negative way. Peele is no doubt a master of comedy just as he is horror but sometimes they fail to mix in the theatrical setting as opposed to when he would do it on his sketch comedy show.
There’s one specific moment that doesn’t come from Duke’s character in Us that feels borderline parody, something that would come from Key and Peele. It’s funny but perhaps a bit too jarring, even in the more intensified world of Us.
While Get Out felt grounded in the real world, Us feels like a parallel universe where reality is slightly heightened. Characters sometimes feel almost aware that they’re in a horror film, referencing their “kill count” (which plays into one of the themes), and sometimes events unfold in a slightly humorous way despite them being really grim in the grand scheme of things. This isn’t a knock, it gives Us a lot of character and charm.
It also allows for the movie to have a certain amount of lightness instead of being a fest of misery where you watch people choke on their own blood and mercilessly plead for help. Us feels “fun” to put it incredibly simply while Get Out had more weight and a sense of realness to it.
Where Us really stumbles is in its twists and overall narrative. I promise not to spoil anything but when you leave the theater and start really picking it apart, you’ll realize some very glaring issues with continuity. It has lots of plot holes, some minor, some fairly large.
Part of the problem is a very heavy exposition dump which on the surface is supposed to answer lots of questions but in doing so raises many more… which have either no answer or very unsatisfying ones that cause problems with the quality of writing. Had Peele perhaps left a bit more mystery here, not feeling the need to overshare details and instead just letting the viewer interpret it themselves with clues throughout the film, it could’ve been a much more coherent story.
Peele also seems to have forced a twist that is just there for the sake of having a twist, it’s something that could’ve been revealed very early on (and should’ve, probably) but it’s saved until the end for a “Ha, gotcha!” moment. All these narrative issues come towards the very end so it’s not like it ruins the entire movie, it just doesn’t go out on quite a big bang as it maybe it likes to think it does.
That said, there’s still some high-quality filmmaking to be found here. For eagle-eyed viewers, you’re going to see lots of great imagery, symbolism, and details that enhance the experience in numerous ways. I quickly pulled my phone out to do a quick Google search on something I saw near the start of the film and when I realized how it connected, it was a very euphoric feeling.
The Verdict:
Us is an incredibly creative horror film with lots to love through its rich performances, painstaking level of detail, and goosebump-inducing frights. It’s not as tightly constructed as Jordan Peele’s Get Out, resulting in an unsatisfying and frustratingly convoluted story at times.
If you take it at face value as just a horror movie, you can likely walk away feeling like you saw one of the best in the genre with the inability to forget what horrors you just witnessed. If you’re expecting something that reaches the narrative heights of Get Out, you might come away feeling like Peele didn’t fully deliver.
