Us

Rating: 6/10 (31 March 2019)

Writer and director Jordan Peele debuted and scored an Oscar winning hit with Get Out, it was a fantastic film, and when I heard and saw the trailer for his next movie, I was really hoping it would be as good. Basically in 1986, young Adelaide Thomas (Madison Curry) is on vacation with her parents in Santa Cruz. On the beach, she wanders off and enters a funhouse, where she encounters a doppelgänger of herself in the hall of mirrors. Adelaide is later reunited with her parents, but she is unable to speak. In the present day, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) is an adult, and heading to the family beach house in Santa Cruz with her own family, husband Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke) and their children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). Adelaide remember the traumatic incident from her childhood, so she is apprehensive about the trip. But Gabe brushes off her concerns, he is eager to impress their friends Josh (Tim Heidecker) and Kitty Tyler (Elisabeth Moss) and buys a boat. At the beach, Jason wanders off and sees a man wearing a red jumpsuit standing alone in the sand with his arms stretched out and blood on his hands. Later that night, a strange family of four appears in the driveway of the beach house. They stand still and do not respond when Gabe communicates and then tries to intimidate them. Eventually they move towards him, attack and break into the home. The Wilsons realise the four intruders are doppelgängers of themselves, led by Adelaide's double, Red (Nyong'o). Each of them is wearing a red jumpsuit like the man on the beach, and Jason's doppelgänger Pluto (Alex) is wearing a white mask, to cover his deformed face. Red, the only doppelgänger who speaks, tells the Wilsons the story of a girl who lives a happy life while her shadow suffers. The family is then separated by their opposites: Red makes Adelaide handcuff herself to the table, Zora is taken by Umbrae (Wright Joseph), Gabe is dragged onto the boat by Abraham (Duke), and Jason is sent to "play" with Pluto in a closet. Umbrae is interrupted by an investigating neighbour while chasing Zora, she stabs him with a pair of golden scissors, while Zora escapes. Gabe is able to throw Abraham overboard and kill him with the boat's malfunctioning motor, while Jason finds Pluto mirrors his actions almost exactly. Jason is able to distract Pluto with a magic trick and escapes, locking Pluto in the closet. Red goes to the closet hearing Pluto's cries, giving Adelaide time to break free. The family regroups and escapes on Gabe's boat. Meanwhile, the Tylers are also murdered by a set of doubles shortly before the Wilsons arrive. The Wilsons kill the Tylers' doubles and turn on the news to see that millions of doppelgängers, calling themselves "the Tethered", have been murdering their real counterparts throughout the United States. The doppelgängers subsequently join hands together to form a massive human chain, which the newscasters speculate is a form of protest. The Wilsons drive away in the Tylers' car until they are attacked by Umbrae, who is killed after being launched into a tree from the top of the vehicle. As day breaks, the Wilsons arrive at the Santa Cruz boardwalk, where they find their own abandoned car on fire. Pluto has set a trap to kill the Wilsons by lighting a trail of petrol to the car, but Jason, remembering that Pluto mirrors his every move, walks backward so that Pluto steps into the fire and is killed. Red then reappears and abducts Jason. While Zora and Gabe recuperate in an abandoned ambulance, Adelaide returns to the boardwalk funhouse from her past. She walks through a secret tunnel in the hall of mirrors, which leads to a facility underground, overrun by rabbits. There she finds Red, who states that the Tethered were created by the U.S. government in an attempt to control the public, but the experiment failed and the Tethered were abandoned underground. For generations, the Tethered were trapped beneath the surface, doing nothing but mimicking the actions of their above-ground counterparts until Red organised them to escape. The two fight, Adelaide manages to kill Red, she rescues Jason, and promises him that things will return to normal. When the family leave town, Adelaide thinks back to the night she first met Red in the funhouse, it is revealed that she is actually one of the Tethered and had taken Adelaide's place in the surface world. As the family drives away, helicopters hovering above see the Tethered joining hands together across the United States. Also starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Russel Thomas / Weyland, Anna Diop as Rayne Thomas / Eartha, Cali Sheldon as Becca Tyler / Io, Noelle Sheldon as Lindsey Tyler / Nix, Ashley Mckoy as Teenage Adelaide Wilson / Teenage Red and Napiera Groves as Dr. Foster. Nyong'o, Duke, Moss and the younger cast members all do their parts fine, it is written and directed reasonably well by Peele, it is a very creepy concept, people on holiday terrorised by evil lookalikes who want to get revenge and kill their counterparts, there are enough thrills to keep up the pace, the social commentary themes are clever (the title spelled "US", the quote "we're Americans"), and it makes you laugh a little, I admit I personally did not find it as inventive as Get Out, but it is a worthwhile horror. Good!