Review: Jordan Peele’s Us Stylishly Filters the Horrors of Economic Oppression

Peele’s follow-up to Get Out unnervingly speaks to the issues affecting a divided nation.

Us
Photo: Universal Pictures

In Get Out, Jordan Peele smartly and unnervingly used the lens of horror to refract black anxieties about living in white America. The film’s central terror, “the sunken place,” a sort of limbo within the self, was a metaphor that encompassed issues of identity, consciousness, and the autonomy of one’s own black body. Peele’s follow-up, Us, suggests a more elegant C.H.U.D. for the Trump era. Even though it’s not as tidily satisfying as Get Out, the new film is both darker and more ambitious, and broader in its themes.

Us opens in 1986 with a little girl, Adelaide (Madison Curry), wandering an amusement park in Santa Cruz, California. She drifts away from her distracted father and takes refuge during a storm in a hall of mirrors, whose signage invites her to “Find Yourself”—and she does, literally encountering her doppelgänger. In the present, Adelaide Wilson (now played by Lupita Nyong’o) revisits the same area with her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and their teenage daughter (Shahadi Wright Nelson) and prepubescent son (Evan Alex). A trip to the beach reawakens her fears of her shadow self, and that very night, her lookalike—also now grown—and red-clad lookalike family invade the Wilsons’ home and terrorize them.

These invaders are glass-darkly versions of the Wilsons, rawly animalistic semi-clones seeking vengeance for the cursed opposite-but-equal lives they’ve been forced to lead: Every time the Wilsons had a hot, tasty meal, their counterparts ate raw, bloody rabbit, and every time the Wilsons bore loving, well-enough-adjusted children, their counterparts birthed psychotics.

Advertisement

Peele’s script adopts an idea that Michel de Montaigne expressed in the title of his essay “Le profit de l’un est dommage de l’autre” (which loosely translates to “The Profit of One Is Harm to the Other”)—not just that capitalism has its winners and losers but that every gain a person makes directly correlates to another’s loss. The Wilsons are conspicuously upper-middle class—they have a summer house, a sweet car, even a boat—and their crimson-suited doubles represent a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I reckoning with a version of what their lives might have been like. This seems to play on the fears of some economically ascendant African-Americans: What do I owe to the community? Have I left others behind? Have I gotten soft?

As in Get Out, this film’s African-American characters come under assault not in the inner cities of the white imagination, but in supposedly safer upper-class suburban spaces. But Us also moves past such racial themes. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) The shadow vengeance meted upon the Wilsons is in fact a plague, and it’s one that touches every family in Peele’s film. It’s a plot point that the filmmaker introduces with the unexpected—and quite violent—deaths of the Wilsons’ closest friends: the bourgie, boozy, and very white Tylers, including a mother, played by Elisabeth Moss, who sips rosé at the beach before it hits “vodka o’clock.”

In Us, Peele is less concerned with blackness than he is economics, as the howling, homicidal doubles that torment the Wilsons represent an avenging under class. “What are you people?” Gabe asks when the terror begins. “We’re Americans!” his wife’s double hisses. It’s tempting to read these Americans as the embittered Trump base, rising up to destroy the false idyll that was the comfort—for some, at least—of the American status quo.

Advertisement

The film’s screenplay is carefully constructed, so much so that the punchline to a seemingly throwaway knock-knock joke is retroactively understood as a clever foreshadowing of horrific things to come. Drawing on his comedy background, Peele has an uncanny ability to insert laughs into moments of high dread, relieving the tension without diffusing it. And that tension can be overbearing; Peele’s filmmaking is sophisticated, crafting eerie atmospheres and maximizing suspense as his camera moves with the gracefulness of Adelaide the one-time ballet star, glimpses of whom the viewer occasionally sees in flashbacks.

The most striking visuals come near the end, as long-deferred exposition introduces a nightmarish sci-fi subterranean clone town consisting of tunnels that resemble hospital corridors. There, doubles were compelled to mimic the movements of their surface-dwelling counterparts. These damned bodies without their own souls then come up for air to kill and then hold each other’s hands, inspired by Hands Across America, a commercial for which opens Us. (And on the shelf next to the TV showing it is a VHS copy of C.H.U.D..) In the ’80s, this collective action, we’re told, was meant to raise hunger awareness, and that’s what it does in the present as well, though in a different way. The nationwide mole people, come to eradicate their oppressors, are certainly hungry, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually—for the comforts and pleasures and basic necessities they’ve so long been denied.

Score: 
 Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Anna Diop, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon  Director: Jordan Peele  Screenwriter: Jordan Peele  Distributor: Universal Pictures  Running Time: 116 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Henry Stewart

Henry Stewart is a journalist and historian. He's the deputy editor at Opera News magazine and the author of the books How Bay Ridge Became Bay Ridge, True Crime Bay Ridge, and More True Crime Bay Ridge.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.