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The lower clbad comes to destroy us and we deserve it. This is the simple and basic message of Jordan Peele's witty meta-horror film, Us. The "we" with which he aligns the viewers is an American family of four middle clbad people, the Wilsons, and "they" are their defenders. Doubles deprived of their rights lived in a mysterious place, cut off from the comfort of society. This other mother, her father, and her two children appear one night in Wilson's Lane, dressed in a blood-red jumpsuit and brandishing large golden scissors, to better slice their counterparts. Clbad war rarely broke out with such a frightening panache.
Despite the social theme of the film, Us is different and less inventive than Get Out, Peele's astonishing debut as a writer and director. This film was a scathing critique of racial badumptions and stereotypes, hidden in comic horror. It overturns the formula and works best as a smart, complex structure of this kind, with a clear but never profound message. Peele masters the horror part. By using the clbadic tropes of the genre in a fun way while channeling primordial fears, we can make you laugh and make you tremble at the same time.
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The film begins slowly, allowing Peele to leave clues as to what will happen. We are full of small visuals and references to attract the audience again and again to find more. In the opening scene, which takes place in 1986, the camera appears in a television commercial promoting Hands Across America, a real event in which people from across the country joined together to raise money for hungry and homeless. Anyone who has seen the trailer of the film will immediately notice the resemblance between the event logo – a row of figures carved in red, like paper dolls – and the red combination doppelgangers.
The other references are more obscure. A homeless man with stubborn blonde hair holds a sign indicating Jeremiah 11:11. He returns through the film, but Peele leaves it up to viewers to go home and search for the biblical reference to his sign. (He is scary.)
It is first seen as a theme park, where a little girl walks in a hall of funhouse mirrors. A sign says, "Vision Quest: Find yourself," and that's exactly what she found. Little Adelaide sees her doppelganger and has been terrified since that day.
The slight differences between the doppelgangers are more alarming than the exact duplicates could have been
When the film jumps to the present, Adelaide is Lupita Nyong'o, married to Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke), who adds comic relief as a sometimes unconscious guy who tells jokes to his father. Their teenage daughter, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), is still on the phone. Jason (Evan Alex), their youngest child, wears a mask on his head inexplicably. They are at the family home on the beach, near Adelaide's childhood trauma site.
The action resumes when the doubles invade the house. Each of the actors has a dual role, and Peele has directed them with such nuance that the slight differences – the faces of the doppelgangers still remain as violent as they are – are more alarming than the duplicates might have been. The film is centered on Nyong'o, whose performance as a double is particularly disturbing. Her voice is croaking and stops, as if she had not spoken in years, while she empathically tells the story of a girl who "had a shadow ". This girl was a princess who had found her prince and a happy life, while the shadow was hungry and lived in the dark. Joseph brilliantly displays the scary look on his face as the devilish counterpart of Zora. Like Nyong'o's movements, the physical movements of his double are as fast and punchy as those of an animal.
The family fights invaders in scenes that Peele creates with refined precision. They try to escape by boat and by car. Adelaide hits the others with a poker at home – always strangely at hand in horror movies. Scissor cuts evoke Hitchbad. The melodramatic musical signals, drawing attention to the danger in the style of the old movies, indicate that We are a meta-layer removed from these hokey movies, that the urge to shout: "Do not continue this dark road! Trick that Peele knowingly installed. Even though the scenes become a bloody mess, the film is still lucid, ranging from large shots of corpses to suspenseful angles seen from the beleaguered family's point of view.
The film takes an unexpected and spectacular stylistic twist
Peele continues to intensify the action, but the film then takes an unexpected and spectacular stylistic turn. As we are about to understand the secret of the Funhouse encounter, the film becomes more imagistic, almost surrealistic. The music is striking and modern, and we see young Adelaide and her double dance in ballet clbad. These scenes evoke the movie Black Swan, rather than slasher movies. The sequence is a revelation, proof that Peele can be an exceptional filmmaker in a totally different way.
Even if we look at it, social issues remain underpinned. The Wilson are black, but their race is not treated as a problem. The exception is a scene in which Gabe confronts the doubles in the alley and deliberately modifies his grammar to give a brutal sound, using the image of the threatening black man as a stratagem. Even in this case, the film leaves it to the viewer to deduce the commentary on racial stereotypes.
Peele himself was direct on how the film deals with America. "This country, and how this country looks at the world, we are afraid of the alien," he said, describing his theme. "Nobody really wants to look at their faults, their guilt, their demons." In the end, Hands Across America, a well-intentioned event, was subverted into a symbol of evil. The scariest lesson from us: you could be your own evil twin.
★★★★ ☆
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