The film is a more ambitious work than Peele’s ‘Get Out,’ but despite some extraordinary sequences, it’s also a lesser work.
Writer-director Jordan Peele’s debut feature “Get Out” was one of the most inventive horror movies in years, and so the expectations for his sophomore effort, “Us,” have been running sky-high. It too is a horror film with a light overlay of gallows humor, but it’s a more ambitious work than “Get Out.” Despite some extraordinary sequences, it’s also a lesser work.
The film opens in 1986 in an amusement park in the oceanside city of Santa Cruz, California. A young girl, Adelaide Wilson (Madeline Curry), wanders off from her parents and enters a seemingly deserted hall of mirrors where she encounters, to traumatizing effect, not only her own reflection but a doppelganger of herself.
Cut to the present day, and Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is living what appears to be a comfortably middle-class suburban life with her affable husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and two spunky children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). When Gabe proposes a summer vacation stayover in Santa Cruz, she balks at the bad memories but reluctantly goes along. Soon enough, bad stuff happens, leading to the film’s first true explosion of horror: One night, outside the Wilsons’ summer home, a family of red robe-wearing Wilson doppelgangers, clutching razor-sharp scissors, are silently massed in the driveway ready to attack.
As we soon see, the four actors are playing dual roles, themselves and their malevolent doubles. The home invasion is brutal, bloody, and unrelenting. Adelaide’s double, who speaks in hoarse, spasmodic, guttural tones, is especially menacing.
