After Get Out, hearing that Jordan Peele directed a movie is like a guarantee of entertaining excellence and hearing that his sophomore film will be horror is an added promise of nuance and texture. Add Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke as the stars of the film, especially after their success in Black Panther, and Us is a serious contender for one of the best films in 2019. Us definitely delivers, and unless you hate horror movies, you should definitely see it in theaters. The following contains mild spoilers, but out of context may not make any sense until you watch Us.
Because I expect a lot from Peele, I may sound as if I’m too harsh on this film. I watch a lot of films, and I grade on a curve. I enjoyed it, would not hesitate to see it again and unequivocally encourage you to see it. I thought that it had wonderfully clever and funny moments (Chekhov’s flare gun), gave us several scenes that will be iconic stills in the future, scared me without using cheap jump scares or lame soundtrack cues and was not surprised that it has already been analyzed exhaustively. Just the line, “We’re Americans,” immediately evokes a horrific history and a ponderous present about the socioeconomic nature of life in America, especially the casual cruelty and necessity of others’ suffering to make prosperity possible. If Americans had a Game of Thrones house motto, ours would be consumption over empathy, comfort over humanity.
The introduction of a new conspiracy theory was suitably terrifying. The idea of having no agency in any of your life choices and being forced to act with no understanding of the context worked. It is a nightmare of slavery with no overseers or visible enforcement structure. Peele deliberately roots his horror in reality, not the supernatural. Evil for Peele is man made, not organic. If he were willing to make it more mysterious and not have an elaborate speech explaining everything at the end, then it would not elicit more practical questions about the logistics of the origins of exploitation in this world. How did you make all those red jumpsuits and assemble golden scissors if you are condemned to life as an inexplicable echo? (Loved the Michael Jackson meets Michael Myers shout out, and shame on people for not noticing the John Carpenter shout outs.)
I instantly knew the twist from the beginning, and the previews for Us gave away too much about the plot. Also filmmakers need to have control over the previews shown before their movie because the juxtaposition of a preview with the feature film can give away a crucial plot point like the pairing of the Collette preview with The Wife. Us had a similar issue, but I won’t say the name of the preview in case it does not appear at your showing then you look it up, and I’ve given away a crucial twist.
It does appear that we have reached a period when black women are given the full range of humanity at its nadir and zenith, not just selfless paragons of virtue who live for others, but who want things as desperately as others. As a black woman, I’m happy that there are more opportunities to explore the wide spectrum of human behavior, but I know how stereotypes work. Every mass gunman could be white (they aren’t), but a white man won’t be automatically seen as a white gunman. How will people look at black woman after seeing specific media creations of individual black women who stray from the uniform of benevolence? It isn’t a problem for the filmmakers, but the consumers.
I actually liked Adelaide even though I knew the twist because she appreciated everything, and when it was necessary, she fired her husband from having ideas. The little girl that never took a bite out of her candy apple, didn’t listen to her mother and does stupid stuff albeit she may have been compelled grew up to become Oberlyn Martell dancing around and talking instead of killing. Stop playing! For me, the saddest moment was at the denouement when we see the echo win the t-shirt, and he seemed like the only echo genuinely happy to get so close to reality whereas the others seem miserable, bored or pained as if they were in The Red Shoes.
Us introduced some evocative notes, but it felt as if they were not completely followed through and stopped short, specifically the dancing theme felt undercooked though central to the plot. Because Peele is so focused on having a twist, he never fully explores the implications of that twist though he alludes to it—unevenly and inconsistently in my opinion. If you’re the personification of a mirror, but one experiment goes wrong, i.e. gets more volition than intended, and the reflection somehow ends up on the wrong side, then how does a reflection and reality merger affect the rules of Peele’s imagined world. In one pivotal scene during the denouement, it doesn’t. The rules appear to be unchanged by virtue of a lifetime of location, location, location, but it doesn’t really make sense if you think about it.
Early in the film, spiders are visually harbingers of dread, but that image appears once. The track and field theme feels important, but once again, is dropped soon after the first installment. It felt as if the majority of the kids’ plotline ended up on the cutting room floor. The goal of the doppelgangers fell flat. Peele’s image of revolt and its subsequent consequences worked brilliantly in the middle, but when followed with essentially nonviolent, symbolic action, it felt anticlimactic. I actually expected and kept waiting to revisit that image after the commercial, but didn’t anticipate how it would return. The personal image of revolt contrasted with the protagonist’s family’s initial encounter then subsequent interruption fell in line with the Keeping up with the Joneses friendly rivalry set up since the beginning of the movie—initially innocuous and friendly, but now Darwinism in action. After Lupita, Elizabeth Moss gave the best performance, and that entire scene felt more organically like a revolution than the stagey denouement. It was the twenty first century equivalent of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead with no shade or disrespect intended to the excellent Zack Snyder remake.
The casting was outstanding. Little Adelaide and Zora look similar to Lupita! I even thought that the actors playing the little girls may be related, but nope, the casting director is just that good.
Us did surprise me in sharing an introductory homage moment reminiscent of one of the multiple opening scenes in Gasper Noe’s Climax. Both films were released in the United States at roughly the same time, are horror movies, but belong to very different schools of horror and country origins, yet Noe and Peele definitely drink from the same pool. Books and VHS tapes tightly frame the television as something plays on screen. These books and VHS tapes are Noe and Peele’s version of a cameo and reflect what cultural products influenced them and specifically this movie. Please let me know if other movies have a scene similar to this one. Both movies center dancers.
I really enjoyed Us, but I don’t think that it will hold up under similar intense scrutiny that Get Out did. There were too many dangling threads, the third act was not tight enough, and the themes weren’t fully explored. If you like a solid, tense, beautiful and evocative story, definitely see it, but It felt like a solid, almost finished draft, but needed a little more work to reach perfection. If another director was at the helm, it would hurt the movie, but Peele is so good that his drafts are better than the average filmmakers finished product.