Jordan Peele’s Us seems shaped by everything from Haneke to Hitchcock, from Almodovar to John Carpenter to, indeed, Polanski. But it’s Peele’s own wry aesthetic and penchant for dialogue that’s at once realistic and off-beat that sets his second film apart. So often in the film, which opens today, what’s most impressive is not the scares, many of which are well orchestrated, but the in-between moments of a family eating fast food for dinner, or a boring car ride to a summer home that features memorable diagetic music (there’s some of that Haneke).
Much praise has already been collected by Peele for his careful craft — and the film is impressively put together — but, as in Get Out, what sells the scares is that Peele is such a studious observer of the banality of daily life.
After a spooky flashback cold-open, Us begins as Haneke’s Funny Games does, with a somewhat idealized but recognizably human family driving to a vacation home. Again, Peele, who also wrote the screenplay, excels at this sort of exposition, which in typical horror films is excruciating. We find the Wilsons at ease with one another. There are jokes and banter. But the spooky aura of the cold open hangs in the air. Where Get Out had a more straightforward relationship to form, Us is more observant of its characters faces, the camera seeming to study, even probe, them. It moves its angles slightly in between shots. Scenes shot in broad daylight seem to be imbued with the coldness of midnight.
The central conceit of Us is hinted at with prefatory text across a black screen at the beginning of the film. As the trailer revealed, a family is haunted by bizarro versions of themselves. Where these versions come from and what they want is at once intellectually stimulating and cockamamie if you mull it over for too long. Peele’s penchant for allegory is a gift and a curse. One wonders whether he received studio notes to the effect of “Explain this in dialogue.”
Indeed there are tense, highly memorable scenes that are freighted with long, verbal explanations of What’s Going On. Not a crime in itself (Hitchcock does this all over the place in Vertigo). But too many details in terms of the Hows and Whys just serve to thicken the sauce needlessly.
Story aside, the picture belongs to Lupita Nyong’o. Her character, Adelaide, walks through life haunted by a childhood trauma — a shopworn horror trope Peele twists into something legitimately interesting. Nyong’o is a screen acting ninja of body language. When Adelaide tells her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), about the childhood event, Peele writes her a dramatic monologue that borders on the maudlin. But it’s Nyong’o’s posture that sells it. She hugs her own elbows as if to protect a body she isn’t quite sure is hers.
The scares and the blood and the gore Us has on offer is better than most horror submissions these days, which tend to linger on the violence in a cheap, juvenile way that doesn’t interest Peele. In Us, the manner in which the characters commit their violent acts actually reveals something about them. (What a concept.) Of course, most discussions of the film will center around the meaning of it all.
Unlike Peele’s first film, Us is more ambiguous in its thematic destinations. The ideas of doubles, doppelgangers, shadows, and mirrors have a deep mythos all their own and can be read in any direction you like. The cognitive bias programmed in us by Get Out is to see the film as, on some level, about Race in America. Put a gun to my head and I’d say I read Peele’s film — which is at bottom about a permanent and exploited underclass who are out of sight and out of mind — as an allegory for the prison system. The inmates are exactly like you, only in red jumpsuits.
Us — THREE STARS
Directed by Jordan Peele
Rated R
Universal Pictures
Blumhouse
Monkey Paw
116 min.
Lewis On Film 