Directed by: Jordan Peele
Starring: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Evan Alex, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Tim Heidecker
Us plays like a Twilight Zone episode stretched out to an interminable length. After the runaway success of his Get Out, Jordan Peele's previous film which netted him a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, we now have Us. If this movie is any indication, Peele is a one-hit wonder. Critics have hailed Us as another Peele masterpiece. Get Out was an amusing horror comedy with social commentary thrown in. Very entertaining, yes. Masterpiece, no. Peele doesn't even approach entertaining here.
You can read my review of Get Out elsewhere on this blog. I will tread carefully with my plot recap so as not to reveal spoilers, but maybe I would be doing you a service by revealing such plot points. But, I won't. It isn't my duty to tell you how to spend your hard-earned money at the movies. Us begins in 1986 Santa Cruz. A television ad for Hands Across America plays. For those unfamiliar with Hands Across America, it was a semi-successful attempt to create a human chain holding hands from coast to coast to raise awareness and money to fight hunger. We Are the World it wasn't, and it came at a time when America was ready to move on from such songs.
A young girl named Adelaide wanders away from the Santa Cruz boardwalk while her father was playing Whack-A-Mole and finds herself in a house of mirrors where she comes face to face with a doppelganger. The encounter has a negative effect on Adelaide for a while, as it renders her unable to speak or communicate her fear. We move to the present day, with Adelaide (Nyong'o) married to a stable guy named Gabe Wilson (Duke) and mother to two young children, Jason (Alex) and Zora (Joseph). They are one night into their vacation getaway at their wilderness home when Adelaide sees a family standing menacingly in the driveway. There is a wife, a husband, and two children, all wearing red. When they break into the house and hold the Wilsons hostage, we see they are a family of violent doppelgangers who wish to murder their counterparts.
Us then becomes a high-concept slasher film with people being offed in bloody, brutal slayings. It turns out the Wilson isn't the only one with their own set of doppelgangers. Their friends (Moss and Heidecker) have their own group of look-alikes to fend off, which they do with less success than Adelaide and company. The entire Santa Cruz area is besieged by red-clad evil twins and after killing their targets, they hold hands to form the human chain a la Hands Across America. Soon, we learn of the diabolical reason for the doppelgangers' existence, which involves the alleged thousands of miles of abandoned tunnels underneath the nation and scientists who wanted to make clones to, what, ensure Hands Across America is fully realized 33 years after its first attempt?
I simply shake my head. What else can I do? Us isn't scary, funny, or involving. The Wilsons aren't fleshed enough for us to care about why they are being targeted, or why we should want them to succeed in killing their evil clones. The plot is explained, but the explanation hardly enlightens. Critical reviews of Us have been mostly glowing and genuflecting, crediting Peele with providing racial and oppression subtext which frankly isn't present, no matter how much you want it to be. Sometimes film critics can be as pretentious as art critics who look at a painting and attempt to bestow upon it some bogus significance. They simply can't admit they don't know what the hell they're looking at either. Peele is such a hot commodity now that nearly anything he pitches will be made. I shudder to think of what that will mean in my movie-going future.
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