Us

​Warning: major plot spoilers below!

In February 2017, in the unfathomable first months of Trumplandia, Jordan Peele's Get Out was released to nearly unanimous praise. Here, many critics said, was a film disturbingly indicative of where we were at as a country: simultaneously fetishizing and fearful of black culture, our social institutions engineered to segregate and oppress, with even supposedly progressive ideologies like white liberalism complicit in the exploitation of black manhood. It was indeed the bold, stylish introduction of a vital new voice in American cinema, and it reiterated what fans of Night of the Living Dead have known for years: the most audacious social and political ideas can be smuggled into the horror genre with relative ease and tremendous power.  

 Two years later, Peele's second film as writer, director, and producer, Us, has been greeted with feverish enthusiasm by everything from The New Yorker to Den of Geek. The anticipation began in the wake of Get Out's release and avalanched with a teaser trailer for Us that premiered around Christmas, which made brilliant use (as does the film) of Luniz's 1995 rap single "I Got 5 on It." It's hard to think of a recent American film release that has achieved a similar level of event status, not just in the sense of blockbuster expectations but in the hopes that the movie would have something insightful to say about the American experience at a deep social or political level. 

There have, of course, been notes of disappointment greeting Us' release, generally addressing the movie's thematic vagueness and muddled story and its (perceived) inferiority to Get Out. There's no question that Us is narratively unsatisfying at first, and that its satirical targets are broad and ambiguous. But in its messy, ambitious weirdness, the movie puts the onus on the audience to not only pontificate about the story's loose ends (which is common enough) but to also draw the connections about what the hell the movie is trying to say about American culture (which is less common; it forces viewers to be social analysts instead of just hardcore movie buffs). As Richard Brody more eloquently puts it, "Us is a movie that defies the jigsaw-fit, quasi-academic interpretation that pervades recent criticism." The pieces don't fit snugly together, certainly not in such a programmatic way as in Get Out, and that makes Us all the more dense and troubling. Sure, the story may be half-baked and sloppy by accident (though given Peele's precision as a craftsman, that seems unlikely); regardless of intentionality, though, its unwieldy nature makes it an even more urgent, electrifying encounter.   

Freud's notion of the uncanny, that repressed trauma that inevitably rises to the surface as something doubled or eerily familiar, is inextricable from the horror genre, and it's present from the start of Us, which opens with an onscreen title about the endless miles of subterranean tunnels that lie beneath America. Already, we have the metaphor of the nation as a troubled mind, functioning on the surface but dealing with a festering subconscious. The story proper opens with a flashback to 1986, with a young girl (whose name we later learn is Adelaide) watching a Hands Across America ad on a boxy television. (The TV set is lined with old VHS tapes, prefiguring the primary role that pop culture artifacts will play throughout Us as indicators of a cultural mindset. Coincidentally, I happened to see Gaspar Noé's Climax around the same time as Us, which has a similar early composition in which movies and books surround an old television; in both movies, the works of art made by people in a particular society are seen as keyholes into that time and place, in ways both liberating and foreboding.) Hands Across America, as we glean from this advertisement and as Peele slyly reminds us throughout the film, was a naive but well-intentioned dream of harmony and social betterment whereby millions of people would "tether" themselves across the contiguous United States, donating to charities to help fight hunger and poverty. The event only raised about $15 million and was deemed a failure by most, unsurprisingly making it clear that the stark rift between lower and upper classes could not be solved by a one-time public intervention. 

Young Adelaide then goes to a Santa Cruz beach with her parents, who bicker the whole time and seem to have little interest in connecting with their daughter (though her progressively drunk father does win her a Thriller T-shirt at a carnival game—a ubiquitous cultural touchstone that swiftly raises dichotomies between white and black, rich and poor, horror and comedy, social acceptance and taboo). Wandering away from her parents as they argue, she stumbles into a cavernous hall of mirrors, where the power soon goes out. In a genuinely chilling scene, she whistles "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and hears someone/something whistling it back to her, a nightmarish duet. In typical horror movie fashion, she tiptoes backwards and bumps into a figure; turning around slowly and spying something offscreen, she screams in terror.

Fast forward to present day. Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) seems to have it all: wealth, as indicated by her family's opulent home, handsomely decorated and dotted with tasteful modern-art paintings; a loving family, including amiable husband Gabe (Winston Duke), teenage daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and young son Jason (Evan Alex), who looks to be about eight years old. She's trepidatious to revisit Santa Cruz Beach, the site of the traumatic childhood event that continues to give her nightmares (though the audience is still unclear exactly what happened), but is roped into going along for a weekend vacation by her husband.     

The night they return from the beach (and after Jason spies a man near the ocean wearing a red jumpsuit with blood dripping from his fingers), Adelaide sees the source of Us' evil: a family of doppelgangers standing in their driveway, wearing the same red costumes. They move quickly, stealthily; aside from Adelaide's double, who goes by the appropriately sinister name Red, none of them speak, only able to express themselves through croaks and grunts. For a good stretch of the film (and also the scariest), Us is essentially a home-invasion thriller, though it has the added twist of a family being menaced by their mirror images. It's here that Peele also displays his preternatural gift for balancing horror and comedy, as when Gabe tries to escape on his prized new motorboat, affectionately called Craw Daddy, with a stuttering, malfunctioning engine.

Us isn't free of didactic, blunt moments, as when Red responds to Adelaide's question of who they are by hissing, "We're Americans..." Elsewhere, on two different occasions, a mysterious man is glimpsed on the beach holding a sign that reads Jeremiah 11:11, though at least that over-the-top allusion requires a little outside research (it's a passage in which God condemns sinners who occupy His land and refuses to grant them clemency: "I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them"). These sledgehammer-obvious moments of commentary conflict with Peele's otherwise blithe tone, his agile balancing of horror thrills with biting comedy (an unexpected appearance of NWA's "Fuck tha Police" is especially funny), but the tension between these various registers does make the movie more raw and unpredictable. 

The viewer's mind races at the allegorical implications of the story, which is posited from the beginning as a war between the haves and the have-nots. An early monologue delivered by Red makes this clear: "On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys, soft and cushy," she wheezes in reference to Adelaide. "But the shadow's toys," she says of herself, "were so sharp and cold they sliced through her fingers when she tried to play with them." It's no coincidence that the targets of terror throughout the film are wealthy families—not just the protagonists, the Wilsons, but also their white friends Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), who lead carefree, alcohol-soaked lives with their bratty twin daughters. It's as though the long-festering discord between America's social strata has finally come home to roost, with the underpriveleged reaping vengeance against the elite. The fact that these haves and have-nots, the fortunate and the unfortunate, are essentially the same person—and that apparently everyone in the country has a doppelganger lingering somewhere in the nation's Id—emphasizes the point that wealth and status are mostly the result of social circumstance, if not outright luck and coincidence. All that separates Adelaide from Red is a series of events that impacted their upbringing (as a shocking twist ending makes clear), and we get the sense that if Red had been shown affection and received an education and been given opportunities to express herself, she could occupy the same class as her well-off counterpart. It's the nature vs. nurture debate, as well as the cornerstone of liberal policymaking: if people in undernourished communities were given the same education and job opportunities and public amenities as anyone else, wealth could be more equitably distributed. But as often happens when delivering political themes through visceral genres like horror and science fiction, such ideas come off as more jarring and thought-provoking than any political op-ed.    

Does the movie's elucidation of its backstory strengthen these interpretations? It's hard to say. Us commits what would be a narrative sin in most horror movies: it simultaneously over- and underexplains its source of evil. After Jason is abducted by Red near the Santa Cruz beach, Adelaide ventures into the house of mirrors where all of this trauma began and discovers a series of hallways leading to an escalator going down into the bowels of the United States, the unknown. The imagery here is striking: flickering electric lights, endless vanishing perspectives, rabbits pattering over otherwise empty tile floors. But it's here that Adelaide finds Red, who rattles off expository dialogue made even more clunky by her foreboding, inhuman voice: apparently someone discovered how to clone human beings, though the doubles that were created lacked a soul. These clones, called the Tethered, were imprisoned in underground lairs and were made, Red explains (though it makes no sense that she would know this), in order to elicit complacency from the humans above ground. Everyone throughout the United States has a shadow mirroring them underground, duplicating all of their actions in a sad zombie imitation of human life, without the creature comforts of modern society. (The scenes of the Tethered milling about in bleak hallways as they imitate their doubles dancing and riding rollercoasters and enjoying their lives are unintentionally silly but admittedly provocative.) How or why the pervasive presence of the Tethered would force the American populace to acquiesce to the status quo is made unclear, though it's a rich metaphor: the existence of a less fortunate doppelganger as a reminder of how easily everything could be lost. Nor is it explained who or what created the Tethered—the government? A corporation? Something else entirely?

There are other revelations up the movie's bloodstained sleeve: a pas de deux between Red and Adelaide both ornate and grimly beautiful, a reappearance of the Hands Across America imagery, a final plot twist that begs questions about identity formation and that undermines the audience's sympathies. Give Us credit for swinging for the fences, even if it sometimes seems like the ideas are too immense to adequately convey in the movie's relatively modest trappings. (Horror is my favorite genre, but using its tropes to spin the themes of Dostoyevsky and psychoanalyze America's class struggle may be too overambitious to pull off—which is of course a good problem to have.) Giving Peele the benefit of the doubt (and why wouldn't we?), it seems likely that the writer-director left some things maddeningly unresolved in order to give more space for audience interpretation, making the movie's vagueness and nonsensical story benefits as well as flaws (a gambit that appears to have worked, considering the batch of feverish thinkpieces that have already been written about the film). 

So little time has been spent in this review discussing Us' formal pleasures and dazzling cast because they're as skillful and enjoyable as expected: Mike Gioulakis' slowly-tracking cinematography, which makes visceral use of offscreen space and the borders of the frame; Michael Abels' haunting music, an intermingling of choral chants and sharp percussion; committed performances by awe-inspiring actors who manage to balance comedy, terror, and humanity. (Lupita Nyong'o is the undeniable highlight, imbuing both of her characters with strength and vulnerability, but credit is also due to Tim Heidecker, who somehow manages to nail the farcical-terrifying weirdness of a lecherous character that could have gone terribly awry.) It's no surprise that Us is sharply crafted and treated with the kind of care and precision almost unheard of in the horror genre (and sadly undervalued in American movies in general). But what is surprising, and will continue to keep Us in the cultural conversation for the foreseeable future, is the flexibility of its interpretations: beneath the elegant veneer of Us' aesthetic is a knotty web of ideas that aren't easily grasped.

It's pointless and probably unfair to Peele to try to pick a preference between Get Out and Us. We should simply be content (and breathlessly excited) that American cinema has a new auteur who crafts imaginative stories, embraces the stylistic and thematic potential of underappreciated genres, and approaches the lived experience of modern life through a proudly black perspective. (In fact, racial commentary isn't the foremost concern on Us' mind, but the very fact that its central family is black, prosperous, happy, and initially normal is something of a leap forward in itself: these characters' skin color doesn't define or totalize them.) But after the lean, concise satire of Get Out, the sprawling messiness of Us and its monstrous metaphors show an admirable willingness to get weird and difficult. It's a movie riddled with gaps and illogicalities. But like the violent tensions of American life, maybe it shouldn't be easily comprehended.  

Us

B+

Runtime: 116m.
Country: USA/Japan
US Release: March 22, 2019
US Distributor: Universal Pictures

Director: Jordan Peele
Producers: Jordan Peele, Jason Blum, Ian Cooper, Sean McKittrick
Writer: Jordan Peele
Music: Michael Abels
Cinematography: Mike Gioulakis
Editor: Nicholas Monsour
Cast: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon, Madison Curry, Ashley Mckoy, Napiera Groves, Lon Gowan, Alan Frazier, Duke Nicholson, Dustin Ybarra, Nathan Harrington, Kara Hayward