It is certainly weirder, more frightening and more ambitious than his debut film
JORDAN PEELE'S writer-directorial debut, “Get Out”, turned a fairly well-known sketch comedian—one half of “Keenan and Peele”—into an Oscar-winning screenwriter and a universally acclaimed director. His follow-up, “Us”, may be even better. It is certainly weirder, more frightening and more ambitious, and it assembles so many startling concepts, themes and narrative twists that it is amazing that he had time to complete it in the two years since “Get Out” was released.
Perhaps it is his love of “The Twilight Zone” that is the key to his work. Both “Get Out” and “Us” begin with a classic science-fiction conceit reminiscent of Rod Serling’s original series. In “Get Out”, the conceit was: what if you were able to transfer someone’s consciousness from one body to another? “Us” asks: what if you were attacked by people who looked exactly like you? Anyone could make a film out of those scenarios, of course.
Again, any writer-director might have come up with this creepy concept for a supernatural home-invasion thriller, but the chances are that they would have relied on lurid gore and cheap “jump scares”, that is, sudden movements accompanied by a loud noise on the soundtrack. Mr Peele is an altogether more discriminating film-maker. He keeps deepening the characters, adding ideas and references, and taking the story to places you would never expect it to go.
The doppelgängers—“the tethered”—are grotesque caricatures of the family members: recognisably the same but demonically different. They are almost as pitiable as they are terrifying. The film’s most chilling sequence has Adelaide’s villainous replica delivering a strangled, croaking speech about her miserable upbringing, tears flowing down her face, while Adelaide sits opposite her, aghast.
But what does it all mean? Unlike “Get Out”, “Us” does not address race explicitly, even if it is still a statement of a kind, in today’s Hollywood, to present a group of black characters as a typical middle-class family. The film’s deeper concerns are unclear, but the title’s double meaning—“us” and “U.S.”—is confirmed when Adelaide asks the invaders who they are. “We are Americans,” her doppelgänger replies with a grin.
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