A Sophmore Entry That Needed Freshman Ambitions

Rating: 6/10 (24 March 2019)

Watching the trailer's for Jordan Peele's Us I felt intrigued, but also apprehensive. The trailer was such a perfect vector of chaos, mystery, and nightmarish imagery, that I was afraid the movie itself would not be able to deliver on its unsettling nature as potently. Ultimately, I feel like I was right- but not due to a lack of trying.
In fact, trying too hard might be Peele's weakness in Us. This is a movie where my praise and detractions feel like they almost perfectly cleave down the non-spoiler/spoiler line. The characters are (mostly) well-written, the performances are outstanding (Lupita Nyong'o is the stand-out of a strong cast), and many of the movie's set pieces are well thought-out and shot, especially the climax. However, walking away from Us I couldn't help thinking of the movie's inescapable Stephen King vibe, which is both a blessing and a curse. King is probably the best there is at creative horror scenarios and populating them with likable people. He is also not known for restraint, prone to throw in everything but the kitchen sink, even when it works to the detriment of the overall nightmare he's concocting. Us excels at the first part, then falls prey to the second.
The premise comes straight out of a bad dream. On a stormy night in 1986 young Adelaide Wilson wanders off on the Santa Cruz boardwalk and stumbles into a mirrored funhouse where she encounters her doppelganger, dressed exactly like her, hair styled exactly like her, but aggressive and possessed by a kind of feral fury. Jump to present day and adult Adelaide (Nyong'o) is beside herself emotionally as her upper-middle-class family returns to the same beach for a summer vacation This is when they are all accosted by their red-jump suited double who bear scars, malevolent grudges, and incredibly lethal scissors.
If Us had kept its scope to the cat and mouse between the Wilson family and their homicidal "tethers," then Us could have been an excellent thriller, perhaps even an exceptional one. But as the movie progresses you feel Peele's desire to deepen the nightmare, which becomes as unwieldly as a Jenga tower until it collapses in the final two minutes.
*** Spoiler portion of the review begins here ***
I'm not sure where Peele's desire to explain the Tethers and their origin comes from. Perhaps he was afraid audiences would react poorly unless his nightmare had a narrative explanation. Or perhaps the movie's midway mark when it goes from being a home invasion horror to a mash up of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dawn of the Dead is because he felt that the world-ending nature of his attack of the clones calamity better highlighted its haves vs have-nots allegory. I don't think Peele has such little faith in his audience to believe the former, so I side with the latter, although I contend a movie with a smaller scope could have been just as effective at driving the point home.
The worst part of Us is not that it is a bad movie, it is that it is a irreparably broken great one. Everything that Peele had working for him kept me with it, despite the nagging questions that began piling up. How exactly does an organization not only create perfect clones of people, but make sure that the clones will have children that are essentially clones of their topside counterparts? And exactly how many clones are we talking about? One for one with the residents of Santa Cruz? California? The United States (the underground bunker where the final showdown takes place doesn't look anywhere near big enough to work for any of those)? I know I'm not supposed to ask these kinds of questions, which is why I wish Peele hadn't brought them up in the first place. But by the end it's clear he is enamored with the idea of going deeper and deeper down his own rabbit hole (pun not intended) so when the last reveal takes place, a mere few minutes away from the ending credits, it broke me. It's not only a switcheroo because apparently nowadays it's not actually a horror movie unless it has some redefining twist at the end, it's a trick that plays dirty with an audience that has swallowed a lot just to get to that point. It's kind of surprising that a Jordan Peele movie would have me walking out mentally comparing it to certain M. Night Shyamalan films, and not the ones we fondly remember, either. Us isn't a bad film, however the gap between what could have been and what is is the scariest thing about it.