Thought Jordan Peele Couldn't Top 'Get Out'? Wait 'Til You See 'Us'

Us

★★★★

A family of four is at their summer house, on holiday. One night, they’re met with a gloriously-unnerving horror-movie image: a mirroring family of shadow doppelgängers, clad in red jumpsuits and sandals, wielding golden scissors. They’re a vivid vision of the uncanny, full of menace, clearly here to do ultra-violent ill. But, the question — which is soon spoken aloud by the family’s father, Winston Duke — still begs: “What are you people?” The answer, amazingly: “We’re Americans”.

So goes Jordan Peele’s glorious follow-up to his classic debut, Get Out. Whilst the elegance, simplicity, and pitch-perfect socio-political parable of his prior picture is absent, Us doesn’t suffer for its lack of comparable clarity. It’s a clear level-up movie: more audacious and ambitious, bursting with ideas, blessed with the kind of daring afforded to a filmmaker who conquered the world on his first try.

It’s also brilliantly directed, Peele showing a command of pacing and tension, assembling his nightmarish puzzle via repetitious images. It’s — of course — full of mirrors, reflections, echoes, and doubles, in both word and vision; its plot, in turn, unfolds in twin narratives, two journeys to the same beach and boardwalk, 30-odd years apart.

It’s the same beach and boardwalk that The Lost Boys was filmed at, and Peele’s ambitions for Us, evidently, include all manner of Easter eggs and fanboi flexes. There’s Jaws T-shirts and Halloween masks. VHS copies of The Man With Two Brains, CHUD, and The Goonies. He’s ’fessed to being inspired by a Twilight Zone episode called Mirror Image, and the echoes of films from The Birds to Funny Games to A Tale Of Two Sisters to The Babadook will delight, well, film-nerds at least.

Peele is also brilliant at balancing horror and humour; having them offset each other, both ratchet up and relieve tension; laughter, as always, a way of sugaring the pill. And, so, here, we get Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss playing a comic riff on day-drinking, hipster-couple privilege. Duke does a turn as dad-joke dad, desperately uncool to his kids and comically-inept at seducing his wife. In his cluelessness, he buys a boat; this a transparent attempt to keep-up-with-the-Joneses with Heidecker, who owns a luxury boat called, amazingly, B’Yacht’ch. And, maybe the most amazing, unlikely laughs — in keeping with the film-referencing — come when tension is at its highest, and there’s a comic discussion of Home Alone in the context of protecting yourself from intruders.

Us starts out as a kind of metaphysical invasion-thriller: these doppelgängers arriving, on a dark night of the soul, as, seemingly, a manifestation of repressed trauma. The family’s mother — played by Lupita Nyong’o, and in the childhood past by Madison Curry — is still dealing with the psychological terrors and PTSD that came from seeing her double back in her childhood.

In a gloriously chilling and evocative cold-open, Peele summons the fears of a child at a carnival at night: the shadows, the creepy employees, the overheard adult conversations, the public sexual displays, and the thrum and noise of the rides. Curry eventually walks into a haunted-house-esque attraction called Shaman’s Vision Quest (‘Find Yourself’, it drolly pronounces) in which there’s a hall of mirrors, the perfect place to discover a cracked reflection that’ll haunt you forever.

Three decades on, she’s back with her husband (Duke) and kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex). She protested coming here, is brittle with paranoid fear, and agitated to leave, but she’s evidently never told her family about the formative, frightening experiences of her scarred past. At first, it seems that this night-of-the-doppelgängers will mark the moment when the mask of steely repression cracks, the ongoing ramifications of past trauma made manifest in a horror-movie gambit.

But Peele, evidently, has bigger fish to fry, Us a film that constantly expands in scope, vision, and ideas; sowing the seeds for all manner of interpretations as it descends — sometimes, via an escalator, literally — into some nightmarish parade of shadowy imagery that’s Jungian, Freudian, slasher-film-ian, even biblical. There’s allusions to a Bible verse, Jeremiah 11:11 (which is then evoked on clocks; the perfect time for a film about doubles), which pronounces: “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”.

In the Bible, this is a warning of ill fate set to befall the people of Judah and Jerusalem, largely for worshipping false idols. Here, it’s a harbinger not just of the imminent arrival of murderous mirror-people, but a warning for humanity. “I forgot, no one cares about the end of the world,” Joseph says, sarcastically, early on, in a throwaway line that’s a reminder that, in a Peele movie, there’s no such thing as a throwaway line.

Here, ultimately, the villains aren’t the creepy doubles, but the people who they’re just like. Us is a ridiculous, nightmarish vision of America itself; an empire teetering on the edge of oblivion. If Get Out was about the “lie” that Obama’s presidency had led the US into a post-racial climate, Us is a horror-movie born of Trump’s America, the contemporary dystopia.

The movie’s title pulls obvious double-duty in evoking Peele’s home country, and is knowingly all-inclusive. Us isn’t about one woman’s dark past, or, even, about a grand conspiracy. Instead it’s about the darkness that exists behind the polite façade of society, and about how these polite societies have long been founded on — and flourished by — the subjugation of others. It’s a film about humanity’s capacity for cruelty that fingers viewers for their complicity. Befitting a film about doubles, Us, ultimately, asks the audience to look in the mirror.