Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)
The family that's tethered together dies together
Get Out is admittedly Peele’s superior film, but Us is my favorite.
Whereas Get Out is admired for all the right reasons — chief among them how its Oscar-winning script, developed over numerous years, deftly handles its central theme and weaves it across a tight yet thoroughly entertaining 104 minutes — my reason for preferring Us is precisely because its meaning isn’t so clearcut.
I like that you can apply your own meaning to it. I like that it is so open to interpretation.
Does that mean that not everything makes complete sense? Sure.
But is the result that the film as a whole means significantly more, even though what it means varies vastly between individuals? Absolutely.
Us as a horror film is, it’s fair to say, a little bloated. There’s a whole backstory to the terror that unfolds, but the gist is this: a family is terrorized by a horrific family of doppelgängers.
It’s clean. It’s simple. It’s undeniably scary shit.
But yes, there is more to it than that. There’s a lot more, in fact: a whole doppelgänger community living in deep tunnels that spread across America.
And it turns out everyone has a double down there — their lives a sad imitation of the lives we live up here. So it’s not just our family that is attacked by their fairground mirror selves on this fateful nights. It’s everyone. The doppelgängers have risen up and are hellbent on overthrowing the status quo!
Cue lots of bloody violence which is as brutal as it is fun to watch.
The idea of evil doppelgängers is pretty spooky on its own, but make some of them mute, feral children and that scare factor is upped significantly.
Peele does a gangbusters job both on the page and behind the camera in making Us a big budget horror film for the ages.
It’s fun. It’s thoughtful. It’s downright scary. A truly great horror film.
It’s a crying shame that horror movies aren’t taken seriously when it comes to awards recognition. Lupita Nyong’o’s performance is staggering and fully deserving of winning the Best Actress statuette, never mind just being nominated.
As to what the film means to me? I don’t want to impose on your own interpretation, but to me it’s about autonomy, or the lack thereof.
That theme can be expanded to various degrees across the film, but at its core the baddies in Us are retaliating against their lack of autonomy.
It’s worth noting that the theme is also present in Get Out (isn’t autonomy what you lose in the sunken place?) as well as Nope which demonstrates that both TV chimps and UFO clouds dislike their existence being controlled by anyone other than themselves.
But with Us, even this reading feels like it’s only just scratching the surface. There is so much to dig through here, so many ideas, and the film invites you to bury yourself in it and unwrap it like an onion, while always inviting you to consider what it all means to you specifically.
Or just take it at face value. Either way, it’s still a scary fun horror movie.