by Jason Adams

Most folks first reference the voice, the Batman-needs-a-lozenge croak that Adelaide's underworld doppelganger Red speaks with, when praising Lupita Nyong'o's dual performance in Jordan Peele's Us, and for good reason -- she put a lot of work into it, meeting with people who've suffered from the very real neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia that's brought about by trauma, and that work memorably shows. I made the Batman joke but only because it's very nearly already as iconic a choice as that one -- go find somebody and talk like Red at them and see how movie-savvy people will get it; the percentage won't be low.

You'd also get a lot of mileage talking about Lupita's physicality in the roles...

Both characters are dancers, which becomes especially important in the last act as their warring personalities -- chaos and control, chaos and control -- smash into one another at a million miles an hour. There is no distinction between Plié and Piledriver in their prescribed Pas de Deux.

But for me the highlights of Lupita's performance for me lay in her eyes, and specifically those of Adelaide's. Red's eyes are lost eyes, empty eyes, wild and terrifying even in that last revelatory act once we know her story -- I'd say especially once we know her story do we understand just why her glance is extra unhinged. It has every right to be.

Adelaide's eyes though, are the eyes that truly make Us a Horror Movie, because they are the eyes of the caught. The compromised. Her eyes are the eyes of a person who knows, even when they're smiling and all seems relaxed, that the ground beneath their very feet is crawling with secrets. Adelaide is a ghost haunting her world, and her haunted eyes burrow into that part of every viewer (i.e. every one of us) who's ever done something bad and is now just sitting there waiting for it to come out. 

That's a child-like sensation -- I ate the cookie I wasn't supposed to eat and I am going to be punished. It's that pause where we're waiting for the punishment. Adelaide's been living in that space for a long time, since that beach night rendezvous that never should've happened, and the genius of Us and Lupita's performance is the way that childhood gets arrested and her guilt gets flipped -- heroism subsumed by the desire to swallow up our secret selves; our misdeeds played as success stories, the great big American Dream stretched from shining to shining shore.