Us

Roly and I went to Morley's Event cinema a week or so back to check out Jordan Peele's Us, his follow-up to Get Out. Now Get Out was a pretty fine flick but I reckon Peele goes one better here. Us is, at different times, a home invasion thriller, a Cronenbergian body-horror, a black comedy, a pseudo-zombie film, a social commentary/political satire on class structures and even at a pinch, a sci-fi/fantasy. So it really gives you a chance to choose how you want to view it.

The film starts out showing us a moment from 1986 where a young girl and her parents are at a fair in Santa Cruz, California. Girl gets lost in a house of mirrors on the beach and has a bit of a freak-out. Flip forward to present day and a family of four visit the same beach. Things start getting creepy right about here. And throughout this set-up, Peele layers in little clues that foreshadow events to come. I won't give away much more - have a listen to the pod below for the spilled guts - suffice to say that Peele takes a mighty swipe at modern USA society. This from an interview in The Guardian:

“We are our own worst enemy,” says Peele, “not just as individuals but more importantly as a group, as a family, as a society, as a country, as a world. We are afraid of the shadowy, mysterious ‘other’ that’s gonna come and kill us and take our jobs and do whatever, but what we’re really afraid of is the thing we’re suppressing: our sin, our guilt, our contribution to our own demise … No one’s taking responsibility for where we’re at. Owning up, blaming ourselves for our part in the problems of the world is something I’m not seeing.”

I'd seen the trailer for Us and was slightly concerned that it was going to be pure home invasion horror, which I can pretty much take or leave, but once the workmate's family became involved, the whole story opened up and took on a less confined feeling. The story is neatly unpicked and, as ridiculous as it is, it only made me raise an eyebrow at one point. I'm still not sure how much each of the characters played (brilliantly) by Lupita Nyong'o actually remembered of their histories. There's an exposition scene in an underground classroom that didn't quite sit right with me.



The VHS videos next to the TV at the beginning are a neat touch - C.H.U.D (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers), The Goonies, The Right Stuff (?) and The Man with Two Brains - all hinting at things to come (not sure about The Right Stuff, though). Among the many other little treats in the film are a fascination with shadows. A real spider crawls out from under a bigger sculpture of a spider and the family walking on the beach cast long shadows of themselves. There's a whiff of biblical shite in here too. 'Red' Lupita mentions 'god' a few times and Jeremiah 11:11 is riffed upon throughout. The actual verse reads - "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." And indeed, there are bagfuls of not hearkening in the film. A fair bit of crying unto as well.

Oh, and the song over the final shot is the dog's bollocks. It's called Les Fleurs by Minnie Riperton and it fits really well with the epic nature of the end of the film. Bravo, Mr. Peele.

See also:

For another dose of doppelganger action, try Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique (1991). And one of the films Peele noted as an influence on him, Dead Again, directed by Kenneth Branagh, also in 1991.

OH, AND POD BE RIDDLED WITH SPOILERS!!!!

Listen to "Us" on Spreaker.

The Sisters Brothers

I saw The Sisters Brothers a couple of weeks back at the Paradiso as part of the French Film Festival. This is the first English language film by Jacques Audiard and only his eighth film as director. Cards on the table time - this geezer is one of my favourite active directors (along with Denis Villeneuve). A Prophet, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Rust and Bone are among the best films made in the past 20 years. So by these measuring sticks, The Sisters Brothers comes up short, but not by too much.

The film charts a typical Western cinema journey. Character A has something or has done something and Character B has to hunt him down. The Quest type of plot as outlined by Christopher Booker and repeated ad nauseam throughout film (and story) history. Here though, it coalesces quite nicely with another of Bookers plots, the Voyage and Return. Character A, in this case, is Riz Ahmed's chemist Hermann Warm (and later, Jake Gyllenhaal's John Morris). Character B here are the titular brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters - John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix. All these guys knock seven bells off it but special mention has to go to Phoenix. He's getting better with every film. The film meanders along nicely for the first two acts then picks up pace a little after a 'situation' occurs. All the while there's a mirroring of two buddy films - the damaged, violent brothers on one hand, and the idealistic, possible lovers on the other.

There are confronting 'Audiardian' moments peppered throughout. Eli ingest a spider while sleeping and later vomits up hundreds of baby spiders. A bear attacks the camp but is only the aftermath is shown. Eli buys a new-fangled toothbrush and later notices Morris also has one. The chemical substance Warm has developed to find gold comes into play. And there's a fantastic sequence where the brothers turn up in the town of Mayfield and are confronted by the local town overlord (also Mayfield) played by trans actor Rebecca Root. Shit hits several fans.

Overall, the The Sisters Brothers is a unusual reworking of the old American Western style and its all the better for that. It does flag a bit at times (it's just over two hours long and could do with some snips) but I found myself thinking about it on and off in the weeks after seeing it. Result. One final note, Rutger Hauer's in this too and his input consisted of zero lines, one glimpse of him through a window and finally him lying in a coffin. A pretty good day's work, I'd say.

See also:

If I had to pick one other Audiard, I'd plump for A Prophet (2009) and....ah, what the hell, another Audiard, The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005). Mints.