Double trouble.

Rating: 5/10 (26 March 2019)

When Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) returns to Santa Cruz, the site of a childhood trauma, with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), she finds her family stalked by a group of doppelgängers intent on doing them harm.
My initial thought: that's no way to play whack-a-mole. You don't just stand there and hit the same mole over and over. Couldn't the actor be bothered? Still, I'm a reasonable person and can let that slide just so long as the rest of the film is good.
Unfortunately, it turns out that iffy whack-a-mole tactics are the least of this film's problems.
Character development is fine-I liked the central family, and their obnoxious friends were fun, but once the shadow people appear, it all starts to go a bit pear-shaped...
I understand that the home invasion scene is intended to be dark comedy, which I'm fine with, but I'd liked to have had some genuine tension and a few solid frights along the way. At no point did I feel scared, which is disappointing when you've signed on for a horror movie. I also don't understand why the doppelgängers don't kill the family straight away (other than for the convenience of the plot), but that's just one puzzler amongst many.
Peele finally hits his horror stride with the attack at the neighbours' home, and the fight against the shadow twins, but once it becomes apparent that the phenomena is nationwide, the film takes a serious nosedive. Rather than leave the nature of his villains mysterious, Peele gives us a ridiculous back story to the shadow people that makes very little sense whatsoever.
The viewer is expected to believe in the creation of thousands, nay millions, of underground shadow people who control the population above through puppetry. These people live in a network of tunnels and, so I understand, eat raw rabbit meat. This premise leaves countless unanswered questions, none of which are adequately addressed. It's a half-assed attempt at an explanation which would have been best left unsaid.
Peele then expects us to swallow the idea that the countless shadow people have been organised into an army by Adelaide's evil doppelgänger. Clad in red jumpsuits and armed with scissors (acquired from a subterranean red jumpsuit and golden scissors warehouse, no doubt), she plans for her people to invade the world above. To what end? To overpower their more privileged doubles and then hold hands in a chain across America, as an act of defiance and solidarity.
All of this is intended as a metaphor for class divide in America, mirroring the fight between the haves and have-nots, and the struggle for equality, but the subtext comes at the expense of logic and narrative cohesion. Peele closes matters with a silly twist ending that only raises further awkward questions.
My closing thought: could have been great, but the whack-a-mole incident is just the start of it.