There have always been two sides to horror: on one hand, it is violent, sometimes schlocky, and mostly plot-driven (read: entertaining); and on the other, it is more subdued, introspective, and terrifying not through blood and gore but via psychological dread. Fans and critics alike argue over which approach to the genre is the best, and filmmakers tend to gravitate toward one or the other, depending on their own artistic leanings. But several other writers and directors understand that horror can be both entertaining and thoughtful, viscerally and intellectually terrifying at the same time. The late Wes Craven comes to mind here as a prime example of a filmmaker who consistently made both crowd-pleasing and psychologically dense horror movies. And his true successor is undoubtedly Jordan Peele, who is himself a straddler of two supposedly opposite worlds, that of comedy and terror.
His debut feature Get Out showed (or rather, reminded) audiences that a film can be both wickedly funny and deeply unsettling at the same time. For Us, however, Peele widens his scope from Get Out, both figuratively and literally, creating laughs that are mostly awkward, humor that borders on the absurd, and terror so universally rattling no one person can walk away from the film unscathed. He examined racism in his debut, specifically the hypocrisy of seeing black men and women as inferior while simultaneously coveting their bodies. Us, at least on the surface, isn’t about racism, but this is only because Us is about classism, which includes matters of race.
But even then, classism is only a small part of the conversation Peele wants to have. It begins with a flashback to 1986, where our protagonist Adelaide (played as a child by Maddison Curry and as an adult by Lupita Nyong’o) wanders away from her bickering parents at the Santa Cruz boardwalk and discovers a spooky hall of mirrors down on the beach. Upon entering, she meets another little girl who looks exactly like her. This proves traumatizing for the girl, who stops speaking for an unknown period of time, though Peele suggests it’s quite awhile. We then flash forward to an adult Adelaide, on route to her summer vacation home with husband Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and son Jason (Evan Alex). While Adelaide seems to have her life in order, she is still haunted by her experience in the hall of mirrors, fearing that one day her double will come back to torment her again. This fear comes to horrifying fruition when the double, Red, arrives at their home with exact duplicates of every member of Adelaide’s family in tow. Their goal? To violently dispatch the Wilsons and assume their identities.
One might misconstrue the film as a simple thriller about a family tormented by their doppelgängers, and indeed, the classic struggle of good versus evil does serve as the backbone for Us, but at its core, the film questions our very definition of good and evil, asking both the tormented family and the audience, “What makes us good, and what makes them evil? Is there really much difference?” Or, as the young boy aptly puts it around the inciting incident, upon finally seeing the faces of the strange beings who’ve just broken into his family’s summer home and realizing they look just like his family, “It’s us.” He may as well have said, “They’re us.”
Discussing the film any further from here will dip into major spoiler territory, so we’ll continue this conversation below. For now, know that the entire cast—including appearances by Elizabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker as the Wilson’s hopelessly rich and out-of-touch friends—are brilliant in their respective roles, but Nyong’o is the real gem here. Her dual performance as Adelaide and Red is mesmerizing, and it cements Nyongo’s status as one of the best actresses of the present day, if not all time. The eerie score from Michael Abels heightens the film’s atmosphere without drawing attention to itself, and the cinematography by Mike Gioulakis evokes the sumptuous colors of It Follows (which he also shot), as well as horror classics Halloween and Deep Red, among others.
From a writing/directing standpoint, Peele certainly outdoes himself, proving he is no one-trick pony when it comes to expertly crafting horror. His masterstroke here is subverting audience expectations. Whatever you think might be around the corner, you aren’t prepared for what’s actually waiting there.
RECOMMENDATION: Watch the move at full price, in the theater and at home, when the Blu Ray comes out. You’ll want the big screen for certain grand images, but it’s not so epic in scope that you’ll lose much on the small screen.
PAIR WITH: Any of the films Peele named as having a “shared language” with Us (particularly the aforementioned It Follows, as well as Michael Haneke’s Funny Games); Body Snatchers (1993)—while Peele pays homage to the Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the single brown leather gloves worn by the doubles are the same worn by Leonard Nimoy’s character in that film), thematically speaking, Us is a closer relative to Abel Ferrara’s remake/sequel); and Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Read on for a spoiler-rich analysis of the film below
The doppelgängers, we ultimately learn, come from a subterranean lab, a failed experiment at creating psychically linked puppets to control the masses above, after which the doubles were abandoned and left for dead. And their murderous ascendence to the surface isn’t just limited to the Wilsons. As Red states, “We are Americans.” The doubles plan to rise up, slay their counterparts and take their rightful place on the surface. From the viewer’s perspective, while we may not condone their actions, we can at least sympathize with their motives. Who among us wouldn’t feel justified in taking, by any means necessary, what we believe is rightfully ours.
And, conversely, who among us wouldn’t fight, as the Wilsons do, to preserve what we believe to be rightfully ours. The Wilsons match viciousness for viciousness when dispatching the doubles, to the point their “kill count” becomes a joke among them, as they squabble over who gets to drive their friends’ fancy SUV—a point of contention earlier in the film, as Gabe believes Josh (Heidecker) only purchased the vehicle to spite him; this game of keeping up with the Joneses also compelled Gabe to by a speedboat in order to match his friend’s wealthy possessions.
This is the key to Peele’s grand statement: that as Us fights Them and Them fights Us and Us fights within Us’s own ranks, no one ever questions who ultimately started this fight to begin with, and, more importantly, why. Who created the doubles down in that underground lab? We know they aimed to control the population above, but to what end? These questions are left unanswered, as Red and her doubles seek to destroy their counterparts above, and as their counterparts fight back against their doubles, neither side realizing they’re both victims of the same larger entity. Two sides of the same coin, cut from the same cloth, practically twins separated at birth. What the boy said is true: “They’re us.” But this means the inverse of that statement is also true: “We’re them.”
Peele cements this counterpoint with an expertly crafted twist in the film’s final minutes. He reveals that the double Adelaide met at the boardwalk funhouse knocked her unconscious, chained her down in the subterranean laboratory, and assumed her identity—meaning that, throughout the film, Red, leader of the doubles, was in fact the surface-born Adelaide all along; and conversely, Adelaide was the malicious double that stole her counterpart’s life. This makes Red’s vengeful actions clearer (she wants to take back what was stolen from her), but also complicates her motives even further, given that she targets all surface-born people and not just the lone double that wronged her, aligning herself with and leading the plight of the people forced upon her in childhood. Moreover, the twist muddles our support of Adelaide, whom we previously viewed as a victim only; learning of her “evil” actions all those years ago subverts our previous support of her cause, our championing of her plight. Were we rooting for the wrong iteration of this person the entire time? Perhaps, though it cannot be said we should have aligned ourselves entirely with Red either, given the impersonal nature of her war, her desire to not only reclaim her life but also slaughter millions of innocents. Again, perhaps her ire should have been targeted not entirely on the monster that robbed her, but of the system that created the monster to begin with.
The bottom line, however, is that Us does not present its audience with any easy answers, but it is a film everyone should see. Peele utilizes the basic fear of the unknown, especially as it relates to those unknown aspects of ourselves, of our own minds, and seamlessly uses this concept to broadly examine the horrors of interpersonal relations, of how we see other people, how they see us, and how, ultimately, we see ourselves. In this way, Us is a thoroughly modern, but also timeless, horror film that will undoubtedly stand out as a hallmark of the genre.
