Us is part uncanny comedy, part home invasion thriller, and part zombie horror.
The word “American” in a title (American Beauty, American Psycho) usually serves notice that an attempt will be made to diagnose a national condition, with the possible exception of American Pie. Jordan Peele, who made Get Out, has taken a subtler route with Us. If the title isn’t explicit enough, the message becomes clear when a man vacationing in Santa Cruz asks the people terrorising him and his family to identify themselves. “We are Americans,” they reply.
It wasn’t exactly a dream holiday to begin with. We aren’t told what possessed Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) to agree to return to the site of her childhood trauma; visiting the same Santa Cruz resort aged six, she strayed into a hall of mirrors and got the fright of her life. Now she has brought her goofy husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and their children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). Images of doubles and multiples proliferate from the opening credits, in which the camera pulls back from a rabbit in a cage to show an entire wall of nibbling bunnies. In the family’s holiday home, Adelaide watches a real spider crawl out from beneath a rubber one, and Jason wears a Chewbacca mask on top of his head, lending him the look of a pint-sized Janus.
On the beach, they meet up with their white and marginally more affluent friends, the Tylers: Josh (Tim Heidecker), Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and their twin daughters.
