If Jordan Peele introduced us to the terrifying sunken place in Get Out two years ago, in Us he strengthens his determination to remind us that it’s no delirium. It exists, right beneath us, alive and breathing with our very own selves.
Peele’s follow-up to his scorching debut is a testament to the director’s heft as he climbs the staircase of narrative ambition, with absolute confidence. If Get Out was admired for its sharp-edged grace, and how it married personal with the political, Us magnifies the same grace in all areas of political connotations. It imagines cinema not as a mere tool of thrilling entertainment, but something that will compel a nation to introspect.
The film opens with a young girl Adelaide (Madison Curry) at an amusement park at Santa Cruz beach. Her parents are busy squabbling, as she ventures out of their attention span, and wanders into one of the attractions – “Find Yourself”.
Find Yourself has a maze of mirrors, wherein Adelaide encounters her many reflections, along with something that will alter her for good.
This prelude is set in 1986, at a time when “Hands Across America”, a dubious charity campaign to raise funds for the poor was splashed across the US. A commercial of the campaign pops up too as a cue for forthcoming implications.
Three decades later, the young Adelaide/Addie Wilson (now played by Lupita Nyong’o) is married to bespectacled goofball Gabe (Winston Duke). They have two children: their moody teenaged daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), who finds her phone more interesting than her surroundings, and a young son Jason (Evan Alex) who likes the idea of being behind a mask.
Peele paints the Wilsons as a prosperous family, indistinguishable from an average white American family. They even have unerring faith in the police. As they head back to their summer house, they meet their white friends from the beach, the Tylers who are more affluent. The Tylers are a classic American family – Kitty (Elisabeth Moss making most of her limited time) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), and their twin daughters, Becca (Cali Sheldon) and Lindsey (Noelle Sheldon). This summer beach is also the same beach which had brought unthinkable horror in Addie’s life. The trauma of that night lingers on.
Things take a turn when a family of four appears on the driveway of the Wilsons. Two adults and two children holding hands and standing still. Dressed in red jumpsuits, bearing large scissors (a beautiful device for cinematic slicing), when they break in, Jason looks at the intruders, and mutters, “It’s us.” They’re not unknown strangers, but another version of themselves, their exact copies. Played by the same actors, with uncivilised precision, the family of doubles doesn’t speak except for the other Addie (the end credits name her “Red”) who speaks as if her words are a result of choking. She launches into a gagged soliloquy, introducing them as ‘the tethered’. “What are you people?” the Wilsons ask. Red answers, “We’re Americans.”
This is the point at which the film reveals its grand scheme. If racial prejudice made Get Out a searing work, Us spreads its tentacles to include an entire nation, in a bid to spare none. To their utter horror, the Wilsons also comprehend that they’re not the only family under attack. The Tylers, and consequently the entire city is under siege by an army of doppelgängers.
The title Us also refers to America, which is the playground of Peele. He brings forth the historical amnesia of a nation and slices it into pieces of horrific recall.
Great works of horror have always mirrored hushed socio-political and personal traumas, and Us slaps the unconscious past of America hard to wake it up.
There is also deliberate warning in “Jeremiah 11:11”, which a Google search revealed the following: “Therefore, thus says the Lord, Behold, I am bringing disaster upon them that they cannot escape. Though they cry to me, I will not listen to them.” The film throws breadcrumbs all over, to remind the world that our destruction will be because of us, for the misdeeds of our past that we have consciously erased from our memory.
Every choice in this movie is deliberate. Us warns us about abandoned tunnels in America which in cinematic parlance can take you back to Them! (1954), and in psychological terms can lead you to Dostoevsky’s existential nightmares about doubles and the underground.
White rabbits hop on to remind you of the looking glass, and the title sequence, with its expansion on caged rabbits hints very slyly at the dominant colour in American society.
Structurally, the film is devised as a home invasion shocker, but it is hardly content in staying within the limits of a genre. Peele knits the story tightly in relentless jolts to rattle and keep you constantly on your toes, never once ceasing to lose control. The nerves jangle with its Hitckcockian score (Michael Abels hits it out of the park), and breath gasps as it puts the viewer in the chair of its characters, aided by Mike Gioulakis’ lens that relishes the genre’s flourishes. When they are amped up by the deft editing skills of Nicholas Monsour, the film’s dread gives you the chills because it keeps the worst out of view.
Peele, without a shred of doubt, is turning out to be a virtuoso filmmaker, who finds pleasure in the excavation of cinematic memories. He gives delicious allusions to masters: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Fuller, Haneke, Spielberg and many more. Michael Jackson’s Thriller saunters in through t-shirts, but popular songs pop up to find humour in horror, a kind of skillful balancing worth doffing your hat to.
The puzzle of the film falls into place eventually, but Peele holds your rapt attention till the very last minute. The writer-director manages to go this far, because he has employed actors who are fully at the service of his vision, playing dual identities with distinct individualities. But it decisively belongs to the majestic talent of Nyong’o who Hollywood refuses to notice despite her Oscar winning turn in 12 Years A Slave. Here, she curates a performance so phenomenal, you’ve got to pinch yourself to believe the range of it. If her human self is a mix of scream queen and motherly fear, her tethered self is an elegant ballet of distilled terror.
Us is an indictment of our society that largely relegates the lesser fortunate to the terrible shadows.
It holds the complacency of the larger mass, mostly middle-class, that exercises a certain immunity to lead a life that is too self-contained to notice anything else. (In India, this job is done by the caste hierarchy.) As the home-invasion spirals into a game of survival, Peele amplifies the tale to its political lensing without ever compromising on the pleasures of its electrifying premise. Our world with all its misfortunes is all there, but Peele spices it up with a shocking twist. In the garb of an arresting horror film, Us is planting the seeds of a mutiny.
In its mirror inducing split images of doubles, Us places our lives in the context of all the hell-inviting sins. But in its world-building exercise of political gambit, it never forgets the personal, the Jekyll and the Hyde hiding within us. All of this while you bite your nails in anticipation and fear.
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder)
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