Us is the movie Jordan Peele made after the era-defining Get Out (2017). The movie’s not that scary, but that’s fine; it looks good, and there are some good performances, and a couple funny jokes. But mostly, this one rides a “who Deserves to win” twist that’s effectiveness seems contingent on whether or not you’ve already considered what people Deserve generally, irl. If you’ve 1. thought about your social position and resources, and found that a violent revolution by (say) an invisible underclass that wants what you have enough to kill you for it (out of basic desire, but also to satisfy a sense of justice) is in some way understandable, or 2. thought for any amount of time at all about the deeply arbitrary nature of what body, year, and X/Y coordinate your consciousness was embodied in, then 3. there’s not really much else going on here. Us is a tableau on ultraviolent circumstances where everyone is in a bad place, with no explanation provided, no accountability, no lesson, definitely no justice, and no antagonist. Therefore: what, exactly?
If you’re as suspicious and distrustful of power and its pursuit as I am, you probably find it as false a choice in your own life as onscreen over “who the victim is” here. The question isn’t “which one of these families Deserves to escape,” because it’s both, duh; “we’re Americans.” And while I don’t “believe in” violence, I also don’t know that I believe institutional justice exists at all, and can relate to the irrational impulse to make an ugly and evil mark that stems from the powerlessness of that feeling. Which is to say, the main annoying tragedy of this movie is that it looks at a symptom, but never up at its cause; whoever Deserves whatever justice is not present in the movie. Instead all you get is an irrational false-choice survival struggle between bit players. This is a movie that’s supposed to be “about” ethical responsibility, but it’s just people commonly screwed by an invisible third party killing each other. That’s not fun or interesting to me; it’s what so much of regular life already just is.
If the movie really wanted to say something true and dark about “who is a Real Person and what they Deserve,” it would’ve ended with the mass murder of the replicants by military helicopters, as they stood exposed in their long line. But that larger point about the absolute safety and true ownership of violence by real power goes completely unmade.
Get Out was one the best recent films about race while also being a horror movie, with airtight connections between message, plot, and even sources of audience tension. Us takes a step back and is more of a funhouse-style horror movie with a loose metaphor floating in the background that’s entirely optional to your enjoyment of the movie.
Us’s opening 20 minutes have a real hangout feel, something that Get Out’s deliberately lean structure couldn’t accommodate. We get to know the Wilson family and their dynamic while they’re on vacation in Santa Cruz, a period of the film that’s positively breezy, which I would watch a whole movie of. Eventually red jump-suited nightmare doppelgängers pop up and ruin the vibe. What follows is a kind of 80s/90s low-stakes dream-logic horror, punctuated with ample comedic respite to let the audience reestablish a baseline and relax. Think Phantasm, or Nightmare on Elm Street, or even C.H.U.D., both of the latter of which Us shouts out in its opening shot. This isn’t the scariest movie – it has a lot of haunting imagery, but it’s more interested in having a good time. (Probably my favorite “scary” imagery was just a beach scene shown from the perspective of someone who just really doesn’t like the beach; kind of a deep summertime blues vibe.) If we were living in a period devoid of scorched earth horror films I could see this bumming me out, but we’ve had plenty of great genuinely scary and disturbing movies recently so I found it refreshing to see the film operate take a casual approach in this respect.
It’s also nice to see horror of this kind presented so well. Horror movies like this often have a kind of workman-like quality to their actual construction, due to budget or the Barton Fink problem (“What’s all this egghead crap?!”). Since Peele has some serious filmmaking chops and a lot of fire behind him, we get to see what this style of film could be like with serious polish applied to wild ideas. Some of these wild ideas work, some are a tougher pill to swallow. The world-building in Us doesn’t really stand up to much logical scrutiny, which is maybe an unfair standard to hold a film of this genre pedigree to, but I think that’s the kind of issue you’ll get when you make a movie that’s of such high quality in other areas. The central metaphor the film is pushing is also lacking for most of the film, and while a great last minute twist does a lot to elevate and reframe it into something a lot more interesting, it also kind of plunks it into “I’ll have reevaluate on rewatch” territory.
While watching, though, I wasn’t really bothered by any of these bits which I feel are lacking now. It’s an extremely fun and generally good-natured movie, and it’s a lot funnier than I think it’s been getting credit for – I had more or less no idea it was funny at all before watching. While a lot of attention has been focused on Lupita Nyong’o’s wild double performance (using a very odd vocal trick for her doppelgänger; I saw it in a pretty live theatre, but when she first spoke, it got completely silent), everyone gives great performances, especially Winston Duke as “useless dad.” Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss are both great as well, and have something of an insane comic chemistry? All of which is to say I had a really nice time and left the theater feeling really relaxed, light and invigorated. While I gotta say that these feelings probably don’t bode well for this being a future horror classic, it does bode well for it being a really fun great movie, which I’d highly recommend.
(The cover image on this post contains a Robert Beatty sample and a Margaret Wise Brown sample.)