Review: “Us”

PEELE, Jordan, “Us”, Universal Pictures/Perfect World Pictures/Monkeypaw Productions, 2019.

“Therefore thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.”

-King James Bible, The Book of Jeremiah, 11:11

I tuned in to Peele’s Oscar® winning film “Get Out” and I was suitably impressed: there were many things to enjoy about that film so I felt his follow-up effort would also pay watching. I have come away from the experience a little bewildered, a little puzzled and a little excited, so it wasn’t a waste of time by any means. Again, there were lots of things to like, but also some stuff which I wasn’t so keen about. Let’s take a look:

Firstly, the politics. I had a knee-jerk reaction to this film which stems purely and simply from my adherence to genre writing of all kinds. Most horror vehicles tend to expose a “normal” set of individuals to an outré experience, following M.R. James’s oft-quoted dictum. After years of Stephen King style horror material – and of those who pattern themselves after, or who are related to, him – “normal” has come to mean middle-class, straight and white. My genre detector was suffering at the start of this movie because while the family here are certainly middle-class and straight, they most definitely are not white. Hollywood expectations tend to cast black characters as sidekicks, or comedy second-stringers; here, our main protagonists are all African-American and this is a refreshing change. It’s not even the same as in “Black Panther” – that film posited an alternate reality wherein the black characters could smile with bemusement at others’ inability to assume their equality, while blithely demonstrating superior weapons and technology; it was not attempting to be the ‘real world’, as is the case with this film. Previously, we’ve been asked to cheer such events as L.L. Cool J. surviving “Deep Blue Sea”; however, that character was a clown, even down to the costume they made him wear, and he had little agency. Here the change is, at last, a real one, and is to be applauded.

So I re-set my genre scanners and carried on. Oddly, the music kept throwing me out. Being a black American family, of course they’re not going to be listening to loads of Joni Mitchell or James Taylor, playing in the background, or on their car stereo; they’ll be tuning in to R&B, house, hip-hop and rap. Having re-calibrated, I was okay with all this, but when the action began to heat up, there were a number of tunes playing in the periphery that seriously grated with what was going on. At some points, I was nervously thinking that there would be problems when (if!) the police arrived and that our heroes would be wrongfully accused of misdeeds – again, according to cinematic expectations – and, although this never turned out to be the case, the music was sketching in those exact scenarios that were playing in my mind. I get that playing Public Enemy while our heroes break into a white family’s house and kill the occupants – monstrous though they be – can be viewed as ironic; I question the value of it here. However, our director likes to be funny.

Jordan Peele loves him some horror material and he likes to throw his references around. We have stylistic winks and call-backs to “Friday the 13^th”, “Night of the Living Dead”, “The Lost Boys” and a bunch of other mainstays (acknowledged in the Special Features material included on the disc) but there are others which were not so highlighted - Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games” for example, to which is surely owed a clear debt in terms of the premise. There’s a nice homage to Rene Magritte as well in the initial sequence where young Addy encounters herself in the mirror maze, but perhaps that’s just me projecting. This is not to say that a director should be completely forthcoming with all of the sources of their inspiration; however, having sat through the extra material on this disc I was less than impressed with the waffle and self-indulgence on display. Don’t gleefully expound on how the red jumpsuits harken back to Michael Myers, only to then drone on at length about how the wildness and untameable quality displayed in the eyes of rabbits underscores the duality of human nature – I mean, please.

The movie creeps along effectively, growing in scope as it does so. Initially, the menace only encompasses Addy – the mother of the family – and the incident which scarred her when she was young; then it begins to affect the entire family; then the neighbours and finally, the entire country (effectively ‘the world’ as far as this film is concerned). As it does so, it neatly confounds expectations about what is happening, keeping the viewer off-kiltre and on edge the whole time. Then it collapses down the rabbit-hole of its own creation.

Mr Peele’s main problem, as far as horror is concerned, is twofold: he likes to mix things up with comedy and he over-explains things. The first is not normally an issue, however a little goes a long way and when you use it a lot, suddenly you’ve jumped genres. There’s a line when the character called “Red” says that she and her partners are “Americans” that’s pure (probably unintentional) comedic gold – Peele should have left it at that. This film doesn’t really jump across into the realm of comedy, but there are moments when it comes awfully close. Somebody needs to take another critical look at “Macbeth” it seems. The second point, however, is a BIG problem.

This film opens with some unnecessary scrolling text about tunnels and other abandoned subterranean places under the continental United States. This is, frankly, useless information; not necessary. Then towards the finale there is a long expositive monologue from Red about puppet doubles and shady (possibly government) activities to duplicate every citizen in the country. Again, none of this is useful, necessary, or even wanted. There is enough going on in the background of this narrative for the audience to fill in the blanks. It wasn’t necessary in “Night of the Living Dead”; not necessary here. These info-dumps are detrimental; the information could have been parceled out in any number of other ways – this was just clunky. “Get Out” also has this issue, so it’s not just a blip.

Contrast this with the constant Bible references to the Book of Jeremiah, chapter 11, verse 11. We get hit with it over and over again, but does anyone in the story ever look it up? Not once. I’ve reproduced it here at the start of this review just for anyone who might be interested and, as is clear, it’s just a cheesy homily (taken out of context, of course). This is just “some evil-sounding shit” that Samuel L. Jackson’s character in “Pulp Fiction” might crib to boost his street cred; as far as this film is concerned, it’s practically meaningless.

There is a twist at the end of the story too and I won’t spoil things by revealing it. It’s supposed to be an M. Night Shyamalan level of face-slap but it turns out to be just a squib. In “The Sixth Sense”, the twist forces the viewer to re-visit in their mind (and with the help of a short cinematic medley) all of the instances that are dramatically altered by the revelation of this new information. The “twist” here does nothing of the kind; it’s meaningless. Of the two characters it concerns, nothing is fundamentally altered about their natures and nothing is changed as a result. Their motives and actions remain intact. It’s a bit like finding out that more than one necklace was stolen at the end of “Ocean’s 8” – tacked on, ad libbed, and capable of undermining everything that the movie has built so far. Interestingly, the promotional images for this movie skate pretty close to letting the cat out of the bag…

Given the amount of time spent with the characters concerned, I was surprised that no clues were worked in to their back stories and no moments were offered that would allow us to be alienated, or to empathise with them, when the ‘shocking reveal’ is announced. These two characters have stakes in this game, and they are both extremely invested in its outcome; nothing of the real nature of that is ever shown to us though. It’s just extra information along with a bunch of other extra information (the finally-revealed premise of the entire narrative) which sounds dubious at best. For a director who claims to hold Hitchcock in such high regard, this is a missed opportunity.

What’s to like, then? Most credit goes to the actors, particularly the bravura performance of Lupita Nyong’o. Considering that, for most of the run time, there are eight characters on screen being played by only four people, this can only be called a marathon effort and an Herculean piece of work. The character design – both for the “originals” and their “tethered” opposites – is inspired and creates great sympathy and harmony on both sides. The effects are nicely where they ought to be – in the background and subtly in service to the narrative, not dominating it. Dialogue is fresh and lively, revealing personality and motivation without feeling heavy-handed. And the whole thing looks amazing.

Is this enough? I know I’m probably going to be dismissed as having failed to fall totally in love with this piece and also with Jordan Peele (the latest mover-and-shaker in the horror department of the cinema industry), but I’m just not feeling it, as the saying goes. This is certainly good; but not great. If this turns out to be Peele’s “Crimson Peak” then he can go to bed a happy man – worse things have been done in the name of horror entertainment.

Three Tentacled Horrors from me.