Sophomore Slump from Peele

Rating: 5/10 (26 March 2019)

I haven't felt this disappointed by a film in a long time. Jordan Peele is one of the best new directors/screenwriters in Hollywood, but "Us" will not be remembered as one of his finest.
The film starts out promising enough, with a terrifying opening scene on the Santa Cruz boardwalk where a young Adelaide Wilson sees her doppelgÃ¤nger in a creepy funhouse mirror. As an adult, Adelaide Wilson (played by the amazing Lupita Nyong'o) has been traumatized by the experience but has told no one. Returning to Santa Cruz with her husband and two children, she begins to see strange signs and coincidences (the number 11, frisbee patterns, and other "symbolism" repeated ad nauseam) that make her feel unsettled. Eventually, a creepy family that looks exactly like her own shows up in front of the families guesthouse. The resulting home invasion and chase scene by the evil doppelgÃ¤ngers is extremely terrifying and the absolute peak of the film, with Jordan Peele mixing his mastery of humor, suspense, and terror. One scene in particular, involving the song "Good Vibrations", Tim Heidecker, Elizabeth Moss, and their evil doubles, is perfection.
However, the film falls flat on its face in the third act when it nearly goes full zombie film, starting with the painfully clichÃ© scene of a news report depicting widespread panic throughout the United States. Peele then felt the need to explain the reason for the doubles, and the explanation that follows is so uncreative and silly, that it reaches mid-career M Night Shyamalan levels of absurdity. The concept of the "tethered people": underground doppelgÃ¤ngers that follow every single person below the USA in tunnels/sewers and re-enact their exact movements for some unexplained reason is simply asinine. The fact that Peele had to start the film with text explaining that there were hidden underground tunnels all across the USA to make his concept believable highlights its own flimsiness. In fact, I haven't seen such a laughable concept/twist since "The Happening", and you could feel the air being sucked out of the theatre as the explanation unfolded.
The final ending twist, that Lupita's Adelaide Wilson character was actually one of the underground "tethered" people and switched with the real Wilson in the opening funhouse scene, was creative but it came too late and followed too much nonsense for it to be effective. Had Peele omitted the concept of the "tethered" people or found a better way to explain it, he could have landed the twist ending and made a more effective film.
With "Get Out", Jordan Peele broke horror film conventions by creating something that was not only very original but also a brilliant modern social commentary on race relations in the United States. With "Us", the results were neither original nor brilliant. The outcome is an average film that is derivative of older, better, horror films and shares more in common with the worst of M Night Shyamalan's career.
I have faith in Peele as a director/screenwriter, and I know his best work is yet to come. But for the moment, "Us" is simply a result of growing pains after a highly successful debut film.