A huge amount of potential, squandered

Rating: 6/10 (25 March 2019)

Hot off the heels of "Get Out", I went into the cinema with absolute conviction that I would be swept off my feet by Peele once again. Those first 25 minutes or so are indeed incredibly gripping, suspenseful and practically oozing with possibilities and potential. Peele once again flexes his chops with great character writing, stellar cinematography and a healthy dose of symbolism, but things take an awkward turn after the full introduction of our antagonists, the Tethered.
The Tethered start out as an awesomely creepy concept -- mysterious, twisted simulacrums of Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) and her family. They twistedly reflect each of their "real" counterparts, and their ominous arrival at the Wilsons' holiday home is great. Nyong'o -- hell, all of the main cast -- do an excellent job at portraying these eerie, alien parodies of the family. As the film goes on, however, they suffer from coming off as rather incompetent. I also definitely think it would've been better if the Tethered only copied the Wilsons rather than copying everyone.
At first I thought that Peele would play an almost sympathetic/misunderstood monster angle, that they could be redeemed possibly through their interactions with humanity (there's some remnants of this in the ending 'twist' which I'll get to later). Peele throws these seeds of doubt and intrigue out the window, and the clones just become these screeching, gimmicky comic villains who run around killing people with scissors. It's not like they even have any special abilities or anything (they're not even any more durable than normal humans), so it's not believable that they're positioned to be this global threat. Pretty much any rando with a gun could kill them en masse.
The script quality seems to decline fiercely and noticeably as the film goes on. The human characters become distractingly self-aware and the black comedy starts to ruin suspenseful scenes. Peele ends up falling into the trap of feeling the need to over-explain the Tethers, resulting in a tedious expository scene towards the end that ruins all their mystique and raises far more questions and plot holes that could've been ignored otherwise. How have so many doppelgangers been produced without anyone else ever interacting with them? How have they obtained all these identical uniforms, scissors, etc?
All this feels symptomatic of the uneven tone of the film. Does it want to be a 'pure' horror film? Does it want to be a self-aware screwball parody? Does it want to be a biting satire of American life and history (more on that)? I could've bought the Tethers' origin story if the film was going in a proper psychedelic direction, but for the most part it's pretty grounded until the end. The indecisiveness wounds the film quite a bit.
It's a shame too because I really like these characters. The family and their dynamic are easy to invest in. Adelaide could have easily been written as a bland emotionless trauma victim but she's instead a likeable, good-humoured and mysterious figure throughout the film. Her husband Gabe, in the spirit of Rod from "Get Out", provides great comic relief (although it's mostly his excess of funny moments that distract from the horror).
Last main point I want to address is the racial/class symbolism and allegory throughout the film as it's an important part of Jordan Peele's style. It's all well done (if very hamfisted). You've got the classic handcuff-and-chains imagery, caged rabbits, phone-camera footage of brutality, "angel numbers", etc, until Adelaide's doppelganger just outright says "We are Americans." Way to spell it out, Jordan.
So overall, I'm disappointed with "Us". There's a really great idea in there that just hasn't been executed particularly well, and worse, Peele's main claim to fame, his previously demonstrated talent for screenwriting, has let him down here as he makes a lot of rookie errors. That final twist kind of summarises everything that went wrong here; it feels like the cool twist ending to the interesting story that Peele seemingly started out writing, but not a good one to the one he ended up making.