by Chris Feil
With his Academy Award winning debut feature Get Out, Jordan Peele distilled an expansive theme into one formidable package. His follow-up Us - a film as giddy to scare us as the kind of carnival house of horrors that its young Adelaide wanders into in the film’s opening moments - does the exact opposite. Here Peele builds upon a single idea, one that doesn’t come into its clearest view until the final moments. Whether Peele is asking us to look inward or look outward, he has shown to be one of the sharpest modern storytellers when it comes to exploring an expanse of intertwined psychosocial ideas.
After her brief ominous prologue, we are reintroduced to the adult Adelaide Wilson, played by the immediately knighted scream queen Lupita Nyong’o. Adelaide is beginning a summer vacation with her husband Gabe and two children, Zora and Jason, but she is seemingly ever at ease. After returning to the beach of her unspoken trauma brings her lingering paranoia to the surface, her family is visited upon by a doppelgänger one. And each of these uninvited guests has brought a very large pair of scissors.
Us satisfies immensely in part because Peele is as concerned with developing Adelaide’s inner tension as he is in molding specific family dynamics. As oblique as some of the thematics at play in the film initially appear, Peele establishes them around what feels like a very real family unit, one crafted with believable petty annoyances and protective affection. And their center of gravity is the unacknowledged weight of Adelaide’s fear of the world around them, like a stone in their shoe they have learned to live with and adjusted their posture accordingly.
All of this is fully realized in the sensational performance that Lupita Nyong’o gifts us with. As Adelaide, she is able to humanize a very tricky and internal psychosis, giving clarity to the sense that her fears have festered and solidified over time. Then as her mirror image Red, she becomes a terrifying manifestation of all of it and also something frighteningly unfathomable. Seldom does a single role in any genre demand a performer to flash this much range, and Nyong’o delivers something unquestionably robust. It’s a performance both moving and unsettling in its physical expressiveness, a Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter all in one and an unflinching headfirst dive into the film’s capacity for the deeply strange.
But the showcase provided for Nyong’o is also reinforced by an equally adept ensemble playing their internal and familial roles to their capacity. As Gabe, Winston Duke emerges as our new quintessential cinematic dad, spouting dad jokes and feigning control with thoughtful comedic precision. With a performance as hilarious and comfortable with the many levels at play in Us, one can hope and easily imagine that we will see him everywhere after this.
Elsewhere, Shahadi Wright Joseph as Zora and Evan Alex as Jason bring smart, understated layers to the family dynamic (particularly in how they approach Adelaide’s baggage as a sibling unit) without the trappings of shrieking child horror performances. As Gabe’s married friends, Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker make the comedic and unsettling most out of limited screentime as a couple built on suppressed self-loathing.
In playing with the dualities of evil opposites that are also mirror reflections of our deepest concerns, Peele turns an individual’s story into a tapestry of contemporary ailments. The target here is status and engineered societal divides, and the fear of dismantling - of the self, of our protective units, and especially of the barriers that separate “us” from “them”. Some of the film’s most fascinating aspects are how such ills extrapolate out from the personal to the global, and how we pretend to remedy it. Whether in forced niceties between acquaintances or large scale empty demonstrative shows of togetherness, here embodied through the Hands Across America moment of 1986 - a campaign who’s cutesy logo visually depicted a literal divide across the map antithetical to its purpose. When asked who they are, Red flatly states “We’re Americans.”
All of this allows Peele to create a very fun film that finds the sinister in the mundane and pushes the limits of mainstream for the bizarre. You can forgive the film’s slight overlength considering just how much the writer/director gives us to chew. Even as the film works in a traditional horror structure, its intellectual rigor makes it unpredictable. It’s as daring an allegorical vision as Darren Aronofsky conceived with mother! but not nearly as haughty, and Peele never falls prey to pretension. Us is first and foremost a great time at the movies.
Perhaps most rewarding of all is that Us gives the audience the most special of delights for horror films: Peele leaves us with dozens of mysteries to be explored on rewatch. Trust that we will be unpacking the layers of meaning in this film - and the terrifying genius of Lupita Nyong’o’s performance - for quite some time.
A-