Us Review: We Should All Be Scared of Ourselves
There’s very little room for mystery in the world. It’s all been Google-mapped and GPS’d to hell. Everything is searchable, as we’ve come to expect—and few things annoy us more than a web search that fails to yield an answer swiftly or, worse, a cell phone rendered useless by an unexpected gap in service. We should know everything—or at least be able to know anything at a moment’s notice. Take away that security, that hubris, and suddenly the world becomes frightening.
The best thing that Us—the wildly anticipated second film from Get Out writer/director Jordan Peele—does is suggest that there is, in fact, much that we do not know. It does this with symbols and foreboding, with matching red jumpsuits and leather-finger gloves, rabbits and sets of golden shears that appear too elegant to be deadly weapons, but aren’t used as anything but. All the objects must mean something, something that’ll make us feel in control and capable of knowing everything again. We’re pulled forward not just because we want to see our heroes survive, but because we hope that maybe we’ll get the answers that we want. That we deserve. But that’s awfully selfish when there’s a family fighting for their lives in this movie.
Us begins with the Wilson family—Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), Gabe (Winston Duke), Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and Jason (Evan Alex)—as they travel to their secluded summer home near Santa Cruz. It isn’t long, however, before their home is invaded by macabre doppelgängers, twisted mirror images of themselves that only seem interested in their torment.
As a horror-parable, Us is delightfully on the nose. (Get Out wasn’t subtle either, it just seemed that way if you were white.) “We are Americans,” Adelaide’s doppelgänger tells her during their first terrifying encounter, in a line that feels like it’s more for us than for Adelaide. The threat that the Wilson family faces is, literally, themselves, and belaboring that point—however topical it is—feels cheap, especially when you consider all the other things the movie is out to do: warping iconography both familiar and uncanny, cracking the foundation beneath you, and eliciting tremendous performances out of its small cast, who pull double duty with aplomb. (Nyong’o, in particular, delivers twin performances that are utterly engrossing and unsettling, culminating in a third-act confrontation that is one of the best full-on showstoppers we've gotten in a major release this year.)
In his films, writer/director Jordan Peele works in a genre he likes to call “social thrillers,” films that use outlandish and unsettling conceits as a means of telling stories about things that we, as a society, are unsettled by. While Us eventually explains plenty of things—maybe too much—it still leaves plenty of room for questions, the answers to which you won't ever really be able to pin down. And that's kind of the point: trying to solve other things, other people, other, other, other—that might just be the thing that gets us all killed.
