This is Not — Us
A Movie Review of Jordan Peele’s Us
Tim Heidecker … Josh Tyler / Tex
Back in 2013, there was a film that came out called Coherence. It starred actors Nicholas Brendan from Buffy The Vampire fame, Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, and Elizabeth Gracen, once linked to President Bill Clinton during his more turbulent times of sexual misconduct. But this film was not about that. It is a film more aligned with Jordan Peele’s film in that it’s about doppelgangers. In this film, four couples are having dinner at the host’s home while a comet is passing over the earth and is noticed from the ground. As it journeys across the sky, a blackout occurs and as darkness envelops the area, the dinner couples notice one house in the neighborhood has lights on. Curious, they investigate and discover that the house is the same house they are in and that they have doppelgangers. This film drew you in effectively and you became intrigued by the intimacy of the dinner arrangement as it was mostly shot with interior settings.
I had no expectations going in as I watched Us, the latest incarnation and sophomore work from writer/director Jordan Peele. This was classified as a horror film but I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as more of a psychological yarn and I had to watch it a second time because I nodded out the first time. The antagonist hasn't enhanced beings with some sort of unique power, they didn’t possess superhuman strength or mind manipulation, they were just doppelgangers. So, let’s take a look at how this whole thing got started.
We open up to a carnival scene and a little girl, Adelaide, is with her parents as the father attempts to win a prize for his little girl at a game of chance. He wins a T-shirt and moves off to another game. The mother has to leave and instruct the father to keep an eye on the little girl. He assures her that he will as he becomes too involved with the game, Whack-A-Mole. He falls into a tired trope of the inattentive father which leads to the second overused trope, the kid who wanders off from the parent.
When she does this, she wanders off pretty far. You begin to ask yourself, where is she going? She also seems to know where she is going as if she’s done this with some familiarity. The kid seems old enough to know not to go too far but this is not the case. Wasn’t this the 80’s where parents were diligent in telling their kids not to wander off or talk to strangers and not wind up on a milk carton? So we have to ignore this premise for the sake of the film. She goes down steps and dark passages and winds up in an underground facility. It is there she discovers her doppelganger wearing the same clothes as her. Without any explanation, where did the doppelganger get the same clothes as her counterpart?
We jump to current times. The little girl has grown up, she, Lupita Nyong’o, is married to Abraham Wilson (Winston Duke) with two kids, a boy, Jason, and a girl, Zora, played by Evan Alex and Shahadi Wright Joseph respectively and they are traveling to her hometown for a vacation destination. They settle into their vacation home and soon the wife starts to have second thoughts about going to the beach. She’s starting to recall the trauma she had experienced. The father, quite frankly, discounts her feelings when she reveals what happened to her as a child as they forge ahead with their plans. Once at the beach they run into their married friends as they settle into the normal chit-chat. At the beach, you start to get the feel that Peele’s vision is more of a tip to the hat to Alfred Hitchcock when you see this huge flock of seagulls on the beach diving for scraps of food while the boy is running along the shore. He wanders off and that action scares the mother who comes running to him as she expressed her concerns for him becoming lost or kidnapped by someone.
Back at the vacation home, night has fallen. When nighttime comes, that’s when all the bad comes out. What comes next is some uninvited guest, the doppelgangers, much to the surprise of the Wilson clan. Dressed in red jumpsuits, nothing is given as to why the doppelgangers showed up. Where have they been living all this time? How have they been surviving? Who was feeding them? Were they abandoned? One of the who, what, when, where and why are ever explored. The “Tethered” as they are called, are the homicidal organism with no regards to human life.
The doppelgangers barge into Wilson’s home as the shock is registered on the Wilson clan faces. Adelaide’s doppelganger, Red, gives reasons as to why in a haltering solo as she is the only one who can speak. The doppelgangers systematically begin to torture to the Wilson family with death but they rally and survive the attempted murders. They escape their home and head to the friend’s home Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker) but they are experiencing their own doppelgangers who quickly kill them and their twin daughters. The Wilson’s arrive just seconds after they are killed. The Wilson’s have unwittingly become soldiers in a fight they didn’t sign up for. They get the upper hand on their friend’s doppelgangers and dispatch them fairly quickly. As I think about it, how did these doppelgangers get into their friend’s home so easily? They don’t appear to be too sophisticated since we are to assume that they’ve been living underground these many years so how did they get through a two-story home with a security system? They moved through the house like ninjas.
There is some filler like one of them is where Jason is captured by Red. Maybe she caught him because he was still wearing that stupid mask that seems to be glued to his head. Man, I was so sick of seeing that mask stuck on his head. It was so annoying and kept taking me out of the picture. We move to the climatic third act that’s not so climatic. It’s a fight scene between Adelaide and Red. It’s no Kill Bill fight scene and it’s quite surreal as Adelaide appears to get cut numerous times with the scissors. And by the way, how did they get so many scissors? Adelaide kills Red and in the most strange response, Adelaide comforts the mortally wounded Red and cradles Red’s face in her hands. You just battled to the death with your opponent and now you want to comfort her. Odd. She and Jason hobble back to her remaining family at an ambulance and they leave the location in said vehicle while the rest of the “Tethered” have joined hands as there are hundreds perhaps thousands of them and they are stretched across the city but you don’t know if they are blocking the roads cause this is the end of the movie. Adelaide looks at her son as she remembers the past and we get the reveal that Adelaide was actually Red in the beginning but at this point, do we really care?
Ratings: C
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