Written by Henry Jacobs, 2023
As far back as I can really remember, art has always mattered deeply to me and has affected the way I’ve seen things. At the risk of sounding like I’ve let my own personality be crafted for me rather than by me, the media I’ve consumed over the years, in a way, feels like it’s become a sort of intricate layer of my personal identity. The movies I’ve picked up ideas and slang phrases from, the music I’ve endlessly pored over, the books that have let my imagination expand to places that I can barely describe in words, even the images that I’ve absorbed have all been woven into the fabric of how I perceive the world around me. I guess all of this is to say that the art I’ve loved over the course of my life has definitely influenced who I am. Sometimes it’s hard for me to tell if other people have this same experience. Obviously, other people besides me have spiritual (or near-spiritual) connections with the art they’ve either consumed or made themselves, but as is the case with many other common human experiences, it can be difficult to determine if anyone else besides yourself has experienced it.
Personally, within the last few years I’ve really come to love horror films. I feel like I talk somewhat frequently about the horror genre in my reviews; in fact, I feel like I’ve even started talking regularly about the frequency at which I talk about horror in my reviews. However, it remains true that getting into the genre has probably been one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in my entire movie-watching journey. I guess a little more than a year ago now, I saw Jordan Peele’s Get Out for the first time (embarrassingly late, sure). Because of its reputation, I was prepared to write a review on the movie after I saw it. I was sure that my mind was about to be blown. And I watched it, and I liked it. It was good, I understood why it became the big deal that it did, but once I sat down to write the review, I just couldn’t. I didn’t have enough to say about it to fill up several pages. Since it’s October again, it was time once again to write a Halloween-themed horror review. Us had always been one of those movies I never admitted I hadn’t seen because of how popular it is, so I figured I may as well give it a try, especially considering my ever-budding love of horror. I’m not quite sure why, but I honestly expected to be bored by Us. I was prepared to admire its level of filmmaking or whatever and move on with my life. By sitting down and watching it, I was almost daring it to make enough of an impression on me to the point where I’d have enough to say to review it. It turns out that Us probably left more of an impression than any other horror movie I’ve seen anytime recently, and maybe even any movie I’ve seen recently.
To even get too deep into describing the plot of Us would probably delve into the territory of giving away spoilers, so I’ll keep it relatively brief. In the year 1986, a young girl named Adelaide (Madison Curry) wanders off from her parents while at a beach boardwalk. She walks into a seemingly deserted hall of mirrors attraction, but encounters a doppelganger of herself. After her parents find her again, she talks much less and seems psychologically scarred by the event. Years later, a grown-up Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), along with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and son Jason (Evan Alex) travel to their beach home in Santa Cruz, CA, which is near the boardwalk from 1986. Adelaide is immediately uneasy about being back, and her uneasiness only grows as strange coincidences start to occur all around them. Eventually, she reaches a breaking point, and tells her husband that she feels like her doppelganger is still out to get her. Not long after she tells him this, doppelgangers of the entire family, all wearing red jumpsuits, appear in the driveway. After the doppelgangers break into the home and explain themselves (vaguely, at first) to the family, it also becomes apparent that red-jumpsuit doppelgangers of literally everybody else have suddenly appeared to kill their lookalikes.
I said what I did in the beginning of the review because while watching Us, it became clear to me that the film could only have been made by someone who finds themself deeply, deeply affected by the art they’ve been exposed to over the course of their lifetime. Us, to me, feels like a melting pot of sorts. It is the type of art that I feel like I always want to see – it is influenced not only by other movies, but by other mediums of art as well. Jordan Peele made something with this film that is probably extremely hard to pull off well without it ending up completely convoluted. To say “something came over me” while watching this movie is probably a stretch, but I had moments while watching Us where I felt like I was in complete understanding of what the movie meant to me, not to anyone else. The thing about this movie is that it does not have a fully discernible meaning, at least not on the surface. I’ll be honest, I expected this to be an obvious metaphor for racial inequality before I watched it. But it is not that at all, at least not necessarily. I think part of the reason why everybody loved Get Out so much is because everybody felt smart watching it. Everybody knew what the meaning of it was, everyone understood the parallels between the horrors within the movie and the unfortunate realities of our society today. Get Out, while littered with subtext all throughout, is ultimately not a difficult movie to understand.
The same cannot be said for Us. After watching it, I looked online and glanced at some other opinions of the film. It turns out this is a somewhat divisive movie! I am not trying to insult anyone’s intelligence, but maybe part of the reason why a lot of people didn’t love this the way they loved Get Out is because they were expecting something as readily accessible as that. This is not to say Us is inaccessible, because I really don’t think it is, but it is to say that the meaning of it is not pre-decided for the audience. You take away from this movie what you want to. And to me, that is one of the best things about it. You can decide it’s about classism, you can decide it’s about discrimination, you can decide it’s about the duality of man, you can decide it’s about personal growth, or anything else that you want. Part of Jordan Peele’s directorial style is making sure everything in his movies is fully deliberate, down to the last details. I think this helps the movie, because it gives the audience plenty to latch onto when creating their own theories about what the film means to them. However, I will say that one of my main criticisms of Us is that Peele maybe hints at too much stuff? When the family is captured and in control of their doppelganger counterparts, Gabe asks them, “What are you people?” Their response is, “We’re Americans.” To me, this was probably the most eye-roll inducing moment of the movie. Part of the beauty of Us is that it has no clear-cut meaning, so at times it felt like Peele, who wrote, directed, and produced the film, sort of disrupted this by partially hinting at meanings but then dropping them and moving on. Throughout the film, white rabbits are often present, and at some point one of the doppelgangers cuts the head off of a white rabbit stuffed animal. This symbolizes something, surely – but it’s frustratingly vague. The film overall having no specific meaning I feel like is a strength, but the inclusion of random hints at meanings that aren’t there is slightly annoying.
Something that could be considered an issue with this movie by some is that it isn’t especially scary at all. I remember when this came out, there were headlines that said stuff like “Is Us Too Scary to Even Watch?” which is honestly laughable. There are a few moments I’d say are sort of creepy, but there is nothing in this movie that will make you uneasy to think about while alone in the dark. At this point, I’ve realized that no matter how “smart” a horror movie is with its psychological elements, it’s just not gonna be memorably scary without at least a few good moments of startling imagery. For example, 99% of The Ring is not scary at all, but there’s one frame that is startling enough to make the entire movie memorable. Us has nothing like that, and people who are looking for a true scary movie are probably going to be disappointed. What makes up for this, however, is that Us is extremely funny. While the family is driving to the beach, Zora, who is written as a teenage-girl-always-on-her-phone type character, says, “Did you know that there’s fluoride in the water that the government uses to control our minds?” Upon receiving no reaction from the rest of the family, she says, “I forgot…nobody cares about the end of the world.” I laughed out loud at this, and from this moment on, I realized this was a “funny” horror movie. The film’s true comedic scope hit me, however, once the actual “scary” stuff started happening. I found it all hilarious; I was laughing at the guttural voices and screaming the doppelgangers were doing and didn’t find myself scared by anything. Talking about this next part is sort of a spoiler, but the entire sequence inside the house of white friends is just so, so funny. The doppelgangers of the white friends are in the middle of killing them, and as Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) is crawling on the floor bleeding to her death, she tells her virtual assistant to “call the police.” The system, named Ophelia, mishears her and starts playing “F**k tha Police” by N.W.A., which becomes a perfect soundtrack for the black family to enter the home and start fighting the white doppelgangers (the line “it’s gonna be a bloodbath” is mixed perfectly into the scene). The music used in this film is souch a nice touch at all times. Sometimes when decades-old recognizable hits are randomly thrown into a contemporary film, it can feel distracting and pointless, but “F**k tha Police,” “Good Vibrations,” “Les Fleurs,” and “I Got 5 On It” are such smooth additions to the soundtrack. I will say, though, the horror remix of “I Got 5 On It” made specifically for the film borders on completely ridiculous. Anyways, like I was saying, Us is essentially best viewed as a comedy, at least in my opinion. Maybe not everybody will agree, but that’s kind of the power of this movie: it can shapeshift into the kind of film that you feel like seeing.
The script is honestly kind of brilliant at times; this movie makes fun of everything. It’s very possible that I’m making some decent reaches concerning what Peele was trying to do with this film, but I feel like I saw this movie as a satire of media in general. To me, it felt clear he was making fun of movie dialogue without it even being obvious. In one scene, Adelaide and Kitty are sitting on the beach together, and Adelaide is noticeably uneasy about being back on the same beach from all those years ago. Kitty asks her if she’s good, and her response is “I have a hard time just…you know, talking,” and Kitty says, “Oh, I get that. No, I totally get that.” In another scene, Gabe ponders the meaning of the doppelganger murders, and wonders out loud if this is “some kind of f**ked up performance art.” While this line is delivered unironically and would be taken seriously in most movies, Zora rolls her eyes at her dad’s borderline corny observations. Literally all of the actors and actresses kill their performances, too. Lupita Nyong’o in particular is absolutely amazing as both her normal character and “Tethered” doppelganger counterpart.
When I was a lot younger, I vividly remember looking in the library at a tween-targeted horror book about a kid with an evil twin. I sat on the library floor for a long time reading the book, and while I can’t remember if I even checked the book out, its cover art has always stuck with me. I’ve tried for a long time to find the title or author of this book again (I’m 95% sure it’s not I Am Your Evil Twin by R.L. Stine), but I never have. The only part of it that I still remember is the image on the front of the book of the protagonist and his evil twin. I was reminded of this book by Us, partially because of the film’s themes involving evil twins, but also because the film reminded me of the lasting power that media in general can have. Us is a culmination of a lifetime of Jordan Peele’s artistic influences, all mixed together into one absurd and completely original film that I would recommend to anyone. If you’re in the mood to kick back and watch a cool thriller movie, this will work well for that. If you’re in the mood to have a bunch of fun watching a dark comedy that can be interpreted as having almost any meaning you want it to, then this is also the film for you. While the final 30 minutes of the film bring the momentum down a little, I’d give Us an A. This is honestly one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, and one that serves as a good reminder that the beauty and meaning of art is truly in the eye of the beholder.