If Shrek was to review Us I can foresee his intro: Us is like an onion; it has layers. Us is Jordan Peele’s sophomoric follow up to his 2017 break out feature Get Out. A good debut is something plenty of directors achieve but a sophomoric effort that tops it can foreshadow a career of success and longevity.
The film opens in Santa Cruz 1986. A young girl, Adelaide, has drifted from her family on a crowded wharf and wonders into an deserted house of mirrors. What she finds in there, ‘alone’ in the dark, sends her temporarily mute.
Present day Adelaide, (Lupita Nyong’o in a stellar performance) is grown up with a family of her own and back in Santa Cruz on holiday. While she clearly has anxiety about returning to the sea side carnival her affable husband Gabe (Winston Duke) convinces her to accompany him with their two children Zora and Jason (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex).
They meet up with family friends Kitty and Josh – Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker. Tim gives a performance worthy of six bags of popcorn*. His casting is appropriate seeing as him and Peele are perhaps the only two men capable of producing both comedy and horror at such a high level.
Despite the setting of sunshiny holidays cinematographer Mike Gioulakis does tremendous work at conveying a sense of unease in public locations. No surprise given he got his feature film start in 2014’s It Follows.
After an unsettling day out things get even more unnerving as a family of exact doppelgangers appears at their driveway late in the night. From here you could expect the film to disseminate the way most horrors would: more glimpses of the family, unsettling events, a refusal to acknowledge how bad the situation is from a spouse in denial, culminating in a supernatural finish in which the not everyone escapes the house. That would make a good film.
Peele puts the kibosh on the expected and instead makes a great film, taking the 0-100 route of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! Unlike Aronofsky’s attempt which had a mixed reception, Peele nails outlandish, biblical avant-garde, and does so on a grand scale.
While Get Out had a quirky original twist, it was conventional horror done well. Us is unconventional, exciting and will no doubt get better with every rewatch. Peele has thrown a plenitude of ideas out on the table to dissect and digest. There’s so much duality in the feature, duality is itself the grand theme of the movie. Even the title has a double meaning. It’s quite fun to pick it all apart afterwards. Would be viewers would do well to look up the biblical verse Jeremiah 11:11 before going to see this. The palindromic verse is a big key in this enigmatic puzzle.
Peele is developing his own style that’s interesting and bitingly insightful. It’s equal parts infuriating and beguiling someone can be so successful at comedy and make these kinds of movies. His command over the film has all the makings of a seasoned auteur, producing terror and comedy at whim. The tension and terror that courses through the blood of every scene will bring commercial acclaim. The myriad ideas and themes that are on screen to unpack will guarantee critical success.
Us is in Australian cinemas from 28 March through Universal Pictures.
*Tim Heidecker hosts a wildly hilarious film review series – On Cinema At the Cinema. In which nearly every film, no matter how banal, earns a rating of 5 or even 6 bags of popcorn.
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