Coastal View News
Before filming “Us,” writer/director Jordan Peele had his
cast watch certain horror movies so they could all be on the same page. They
included “The Shining”, “Funny Games”, “Let the Right One in”, “The Birds”, and
“The Sixth Sense”. These movies are all super atmospheric. They make impending
doom visceral and pervasive, like a thick, noxious fog settling in around you, enveloping
you, obscuring your vision, filling your lungs. These movies are horrifying in
part because the malevolence they portray is readily perceptible and yet at the
same time mysterious, a-rational, and utterly unknowable. It’s not supernatural—at
least not always—but it sure isn’t natural either.
And that’s how “Us” starts out. A little girl in
pigtails. Perfect, ruby-red candy apple in hand. A stormy night on an eerie beachside
boardwalk with her inattentive, bickering parents. Glittering lights. Dark
corners. Screaming rollercoaster-riders. Carnies. Freaks.
And yet Adelaide Wilson (Madison Curry), innocent and naïve
as she is, doesn’t perceive these poisonous vapors settling in around her. As
her drunken father distracts himself with a carnival game, she wanders off—past
a grizzled man holding a piece of cardboard with “Jeremiah 11:11” written on
it, by some nefarious-looking teens, and down the steps toward the beach, where
Adelaide finds a funhouse-looking thing that says “Find yourself” next to a
big, blinking arrow pointing into its dark depths.
If Adelaide would have had time to look up the proselytizer’s
passage, she would have learned it reads, “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.” Don’t go in
the funhouse, Adelaide!
She drops her candy apple and scampers inside. Outside,
the clouds rumble, lightning peals, and, suddenly, the lights go out in the “fun”
house. Adelaide whistles to lighten the mood. Someone whistles back. Adelaide
does not, as advertised, find herself
in what turns out to be a maze and hall of mirrors. Instead she finds another
child much like her. Exactly like her—her
spitting image—waiting for her, calm, still … but angry.
Fast forward 30 or so years and, somehow, Adelaide
(Lupita Nyong’o) is a well-adjusted woman with a lovely little family—a husband,
daughter, and son, all portrayed neatly in one of those cute little stickers on
the back of their car as they head to their vacation home by the beach.
Adelaide seems normal enough. But she doesn’t feel totally
normal as she finds herself, by happenstance, at the same beachfront where the incident
took place so many years ago. Despite her anxiety, and the pleading reminders from
the score that terror is lurking, everything looks all right at first.
But then a family shows up. It’s late at night. And an unidentified
foursome is just standing there, all in a row—kind of like that sticker on the
car—right outside Adelaide’s house. As this other family sees to inviting
themselves in, Adelaide’s son, Jason (Evan Alex), offers a partial
identification: “It’s us.” Indeed,
the intruding family appears to be a carbon copy of Adelaide’s family. Exactly
alike in appearance.
Who are they? What do they want? What are they going to
do? These are some natural questions—questions that, of course, don’t get
answered right away. Instead the truth is revealed slowly and painfully amid
all sorts of intensity, brutality, helplessness, hopelessness, and horror.
Though, to be honest, I say the horror in “Us” abates a
bit once the second family shows up. It’s just a different kind of movie, and
the intense, mysterious atmosphere dissipates and gives way to a grizzlier, more
in-your-face—though I think less terrifying—kind of film.
One way or another, “Us” remains super intense throughout.
And it gets more complex as it goes on, both plot-wise and thematically. Peele
kicks around ideas about class structure, systematic oppression, and deep,
psychological questions about the self. Which are fun to think about. This
movie is also well written, acted, shot, composed, etc. In short, it’s a good
movie.
But it doesn’t quite live up to its promise or cinematic
inspirations (e.g., “The Shining,” “Funny Games,” “The Birds,” etc.). While the
mood set in the earlier part of the film would have made Hitchcock and Kubrick
proud, it does not maintain this oppressive aura throughout. We get relief, or
something near enough. Which is a bad thing for a horror movie to give.
Furthermore, the thematic material—about class,
oppression, the self—while interesting, doesn’t really deliver the goods
either. It’s as if Peele wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do, what he wanted
the doppelganger families to represent, or what he wanted to say. He had some
interesting ideas and just threw them out there for us to go Rorschach on.
Which is a little disappointing. Though certainly not
disappointing enough to ruin the overall cinematic accomplishment of Peele’s
sophomore run.
