Oh man, did I ever squirm during this movie. Quentin Tarantino once said of his work that he treats suspense like a rubber band, in that he keeps “stretching it and stretching it and stretching it to see how far it can stretch.” Jordan Peele can stretch his rubber band long past the point where it would snap for other writers. His infallible sense of humor came across like a sixth sense in his sketch comedy, Key and Peele, and even parts of his hit thriller, Get Out (2017). With Us, a much scarier movie, he again proves that he is just as literate in the horror genre as he is in satire. He simply knows how to creep people out, and he doesn’t need a big budget to do it.
The key to the success of Us, as it was with Get Out, is the ingenuity of its premise. Get Out was about white people who lured black people into spiritual slavery. The plot of Us — a film Peele wrote as well as directed — is a little more elusive and owes itself to a degree of subtext; it will almost certainly give rise to many “fan theories,” if it hasn’t already. Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and her family have just arrived at their summer cottage in Santa Cruz. Her husband Gabriel (Winston Duke) is eager to unpack and take the kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex) to the beach, but Adelaide is more reluctant. The town brings back sour memories from her childhood; back when she used to vacation to Santa Cruz with her own parents, she got lost during a trip to the carnival.
Watch how Peele meticulously, and masterfully, builds the opening flashback scene: a young Adelaide wanders from her absent-minded father, who is absorbed in an arcade game. The tacky boardwalk lights slowly fade as the camera stalks the little girl into a dark, menacing funhouse. Becoming panicked, she races to what she believes to be the exit, only to crash into another mirror. She can only walk helplessly in circles, trapped among her own reflections, until she turns to face a reflection that doesn’t meet her stare…
Now, as an adult, Adelaide thinks back to this experience. What if her life is being lived by two beings? What if the two cross paths again? That night, she looks out the window and sees a family in the driveway. They invite themselves in, and Peele gives us a closer look — the strangers are doppelgängers of Adelaide’s own family.
These villains are vivid, disturbing creations. They dress in blood-red jumpsuits and clench tremendous scissors in their gloved hands. Imagine how much tension would be lost if the script had started them off killing away; it’s more frightening to sit down with the monster than to be chased by it. This is good for Nyong’o, who has enough screen time to make her duplicate downright terrifying. She speaks with a voice so hoarse and vile that it sounds about as human as a box of nails. The doppelgänger tells Adelaide what she somehow already knows: she has come to kill and replace her family.
Why? Why can’t these copies continue to live without conflicting with their counterparts? Because their goal is to be human, and to be human is to have a unique identity. The two bodies can be separate, Adelaide’s doppelgänger remarks, but “the soul remains one.” The line makes my skin crawl.
The remainder of the movie answers whether these replicas succeed in claiming their own lives. This is a more violent and emotionally wary movie than Get Out, one that often blurs the lines between good and evil. At times, Us risks devolving into a conventionally gory slasher, but at its core lies Peele’s haunting concept, which keeps moments tense where they would otherwise get clouded by dead air. If you get a good long look at the ghost in The Conjuring, the effect is lost, because the movie otherwise relies on jump scares to startle you. The images in Us remain in our heads because they contain scary ideas, not scary instants.
Does the movie get a little too expository toward the end? That’ll be for you to decide. Some viewers will want fewer answers, and some will want many more. The conclusion seemed a little inconsequential to me, but that’s all I’ll say regarding the matter. Everything that precedes it works as a bone-chilling thriller, backed by a solidly original plot. Peele takes more after “The Twilight Zone” than Halloween, and he laces his cutting-edge technique with an old-fashioned flavor of suspense. We don't quite know what to trust on the screen, but we can sure trust him behind a typewriter.
