Four Characters in Search of an Author

Rating: Null/10 (18 June 2019)

In the bonus track of the DVD of "Us," writer-director Jordan Peele described his film as an actor's exercise, allowing each of the performers to play his or her double. He also described his main inspiration from the film "Alien." Unfortunately, the actor's exercise and the unimaginative incorporation of techniques from "Alien" could not sustain interest in this film for two hours.
The film's main premise had some potential in idea of the Doppelgänger that occurs in a family of four that is "invaded" by their exact look-alikes from another dimension. The opening flashback was intriguing as a little girl gets lost in a subterranean world underneath an amusement in Santa Cruz called "Find Yourself."
But once the "creatures in red" began their invasion of the family home in Santa Cruz, the film became repetitive and overly violent. The so-called "untethering" process of the creatures was never fully explained, and the film became no more that predictable, grade-B horror.
There is a famous Italian play by Luigi Pirandello called "Six Characters in Search of an Author" the combines bone-chilling elements of the supernatural with some substantial philosophical insights based on the same concept of the "double" as apparent in "Us." But the film was a shallow exercise in style over substance.
There was potential to explore the passage from the Bible when a man was standing on the Santa Cruz boardwalk holding up the sign "Jeremiah 11:11": "Therefore this is what the Lord says: 'I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them." But there was no religious context explored other than the creatures in red who worship a god apparently named "Tether."
Peele's previous success in "Get Out" was due to the combination of the horror techniques and a strong social message. There was nothing special in "Us," was a set of variations on all of the familiar clichés of the horror genre.