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.