Us (2019)
As a young girl living in the coastal California town of Santa Cruz in 1986, Adelaide walked away from her parents while at the beach boardwalk amusement park, into a seemingly empty fun house, and saw something that would negatively affect her the rest of her life. Flash forward to today, and Adelaide is now married with two kids, and her husband, Gabe Wilson, has a yen to visit Santa Cruz for a family vacation, not knowing about her deep-seated fear of her experience there. Despite her qualms, she consents to go, and while things appear harmless, she has a bad feeling about it. Her feeling would turn out to have merit, as they are soon visited in their rental by another family of four that looks just like them, except they mostly can’t speak well, and they’re dressed all in red. The house soon becomes under siege by the doppelgangers, resulting in a battle for survival – a battle for continued existence, really – between the Wilsons and the Others.
Exploring the eerie nature of “Us”, in which our greatest enemy happens to be the darker side that exists within all of us that we try to keep buried down deep inside. In the film, they’re called The Tethered, as they exist beneath the surface, but they aren’t allowed to grow and prosper like our more adjusted selves – they are the shadows that we try to not allow to come to light.
Although she may be too young to be as old as her Adelaide was meant to be in 1986, Us features a strong central two performances by Lupita Nyong’o in a dual role. Winston Duke performs well, especially in the comedy, as hubby Gabe, though it is interesting to note that the way he’s made up – especially in the eyeglasses – makes him a sort of doppelganger for Jordan Peele himself. Also interesting to see Elisabeth Moss in a supporting role, having been in another terrific doppelganger movie called The One I Love just five years prior.
In another aspect, Us could be seen to represent that similar namesake, the U.S. In fact, when the Tethered are asked what they are, the response is, “We’re Americans.” The films starts, significantly, in 1986, just on the verge of the unifying event called Hands Across America, in which Americans from all regions and ways of life were all united by holding hands with our neighbors to form a single entity as Americans. It’s a far cry from the United States of today, where we’re a fragmented society who only identify with our own tribes, interconnected with all others through the internet, but that connection reveals our darker selves – the ones that lie in the shadows that can say how we feel deep inside without much fear of the kind of repercussions that we might get in the society that exists more personally. And we’re rapidly being consumed by our own nature – our fear of Others, our neighbors, and our shock at the decrepit nature of our darker selves. Our country, once unified, has been invaded from within, and our hands that once held our neighbors to show our unity is now one that forms a barrier.
The rabbit symbolism is like that thing you want to embrace, but rabbits are nervous and not easily embraced, and many people who own bunnies feel badly that they have to keep them confined in cages, partially due to the fact that they will likely destroy something valuable, including themselves, when given free rein of the home. So too are the tethered, the part of us we keep locked inside, and who naturally can’t be embraced because that is not part of their nature. We don’t feel badly knowing they are confined, because we don’t know they exist, and if they make their presence known, we’re more disturbed by that existence than their confinement.
Easter eggs abound, from the “Thriller” shirt (in which the darker side of Michael Jackson comes out for a bit, but knows all his moves), to the location of Santa Cruz (where The Lost Boys was being shot during the 1986 setting), to a VHS of The Man with Two Brains in which someone else’s mind shares space within another’s body. It even references the Bible, with a homeless man holding a sign reading Jeremiah 11:11 (which 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.”), which also is notably the time on the clock when the darkness begins to take over within the film – a time that further represents the mirror duality that is the main theme of Us. The entire film is really a meta-reference excursion into many of the things that unnerved its author over the years, especially in terms of films he has found scary. (Peele included a ten-film homework assignment (including The Shining, Funny Games, It Follows, A Tale of Two Sisters and The Babadook) for his main actors to watch before they played their roles in order for them to have the vibe of paranoia he was striving to achieve).
I’m of two minds when it comes to Us, appreciating the social commentary, especially as it relates to our class-based dual system of lifestyles between haves and have-nots, that Jordan Peele deliberately brings to horror, but I also feel that, as a horror film, it is a mixed bag when it comes to adequate scares and tightly edited suspense. It is effective in spots, but taking the film at face value rather than trying to read the subtext reveals an uneven experience that benefits more from its comic relief than it does its explorations of terror. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to which this film pays an obvious homage, also was a reflection on society that struck at a certain uncomfortable nerve for audiences in the 1950s, but Us, while equally relevant to our times, doesn’t quite have the same holding power, resulting in an effort that is peppered with brilliance, but the conceptual elements don’t quite mesh with the basic narrative in a way that isn’t persistently pointing out that relevance.
Qwipster’s rating: B
MPAA Rated: R for violence/terror, and language.
Running time: 116 min.
Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker
Director: Jordan Peele
Screenplay: Jordan Peele