Every detail matters in Us, whether it’s the band T-shirts worn on-screen, the VHS cassette titles casually placed on a shelf or the innate will to fight for survival that fuels its main character, Adelaide Wilson.
Wilson (Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o) has lived in fear for decades, terrified that her “shadow” might one day finally catch up to her, following a brief but traumatic experience as a child on the Santa Cruz, California boardwalk when she wandered, unsupervised, into a seemingly empty funhouse.
Trapped in a hall of mirrors, Wilson became convinced she encountered her doppelganger while wandering in the dark, and that memory has haunted her ever since.
When she returns to the same boardwalk years later, this time with her own family — husband Gabe (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and son Jason (Evan Alex) — the life and world she knows is flipped upside down.
Us is the second film from writer-director Jordan Peele, following his award-winning deconstruction of racism in Get Out, and while the film might seem on its surface to be inspired by the home invasion subgenre made popular in violent epics like The Strangers and Funny Games, Peele has much more on his mind than simply gore or well-timed jump scares.
Us is a wake-up call, a four-alarm internal fire, meant to shake viewers to our core, if only so we might finally realize the role each of us is playing in the destruction of civil society, and our complicit acceptance of the rage that’s spilled forth over the past four years.
We have become our own alchemist’s ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, but instead of symbolizing infinity, we are essentially heralding our impending doom by allowing humanity to be replaced by our worst, darkest impulses.
This message is conveyed throughout Us, whether it’s the street prophet holding a handmade sign bearing Jeremiah 11:11 (Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them) or the subterranean tunnels that stretch out beneath the sun-sparkled beach, which hide a terrible, apocalyptic secret.
Peele hints at where he will take Us early on. The film opens with a description of the thousands of miles of tunnels that exist beneath the United States. And those VHS titles I mentioned earlier, they’re for films like The Goonies and C.H.U.D., movies that featured hidden worlds full of wonder and terror beneath our very feet.
But Us is not all doom and gloom. Much like the Black Flag band shirts worn by two separate characters, which can’t be a coincidence, Peele’s film mirrors the early pioneers of punk rock by refusing to be labeled or trapped inside one single genre.
It's the kind of movie that inspires you to talk back to the screen: Get in the car! Don't go down there! Look out!
And Us is intentionally funny throughout, even at its darkest points, dropping pop-culture references that perfectly fit the narrative. It's also scary as hell, such as when Jason wakes up after their day at the beach to tell his parents, “There’s a family in our driveway.”
That family, who they are, and what they represent, is meant to send chills to the furthest tip of our spines, and Peele succeeds.
What might happen if we as a society ceded control to the simmering hate bubbling deep within our own personal cauldrons? What if, instead of fantasizing about murdering a neighbor for a slight transgression, we actually acted on the impulse?
Peele drills down deep into Rod Serling territory (which is fitting, given that he’s producing a current iteration of The Twilight Zone) in the film’s marvelous third act, taking viewers deep underground, back to that same mysterious network of tunnels he hinted at earlier, and it’s a thrilling descent into madness that both answers many of the movie's core questions and suggests a deeper conspiracy that might, hopefully, inspire a future follow-up, if he’s so inclined.
If Get Out was Peele’s ode to Hitchcock, then Us is his exploration of the brutal social commentary that defined George A. Romero’s best work.
Such cerebral horror is meant not only to frighten but to inform, to traumatize and to galvanize, and hopefully audiences will both revel in the funhouse jolts but also heed the dire warning.
We’re at a tipping point in our history.
We’re subjected every day to new examples of our unbridled anger and unchecked hate.
Thankfully, Jordan Peele, as a filmmaker, is wise enough and brave enough to hold up a mirror and force his audience to confront the scary truth: We are them and they are Us.
If only one version of ourselves can survive, which will it be?
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Mar 14-21, 2019.