From writer/director Jordan Peele, Us is about a woman who, as a girl, got lost in a funhouse hall of mirrors on the boardwalk of Santa Cruz and saw something that she wasn’t meant to see. Now, the ghost of her past has come back for her and her family.
When Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and Gabe (Winston Duke) take their children to their vacation home, which turns out to be Adelaide’s childhood home, the only thing that seems to be amiss is the banal underlying tension of a family on vacation. But during a day on the beach with their friends who also own a summer home nearby, Adelaide’s son, Jason, wanders away for a few heartstopping minutes. When Adelaide finds him, it triggers long buried memories of when she wandered from her parents and got lost in a house of mirrors. She decides she can’t be in that house anymore; they decide to leave in the morning. Then, four people arrive at their doorstep who look exactly like them except for the sinister look in their eyes.
Other than seeing trailers back in 2019, I didn’t know anything about the movie going into it. The word that occurred to me while watching it was “escalation.” It went from a simple home invasion thriller to a Gothic tale about doppelgangers, to a supernatural horror story about human nature, control, and freedom. All this could have been a directionless mess, but under Peele’s careful storytelling and film making guidance, the story ratchets up in tension rather than descending into chaos. The story also hinges on Lupita Nyong’o’s performance as both our hero Adelaide and villain Red.
This is the second of Peele’s movies that I’ve seen. Best know for his comedy pairing with Keegan Michael Key on the sketch comedy show Key and Peele, Peele nevertheless is a great storyteller when it comes to horror. I’ve often said that horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin, employing similar tools to drastically different effects. So I was only momentarily surprised when his directorial debut movie was a horror movie.
If you’ve got Netflix, put Us on your watchlist and then avoid mirrors for the rest of the day.
The Chimerical Dark 