Us (

2019

)

I'm a sucker for a good first scene, as I mentioned in my review The Brain (1988), a good opening scene can get me downright thrilled, even for a second-rate movie. Us' opening scene is more than just good, it is a masterful performance on the part of director Jordan Peele. A little girl (probably around 6 or 7. Ever since I turned 30 kids have been divided into four categories, babies, little kids, big kids, and teens; she's definitely a little kid) wanders away from her parents at a boardwalk carnival and makes her way to a hall of mirrors on the beach. The scene is utterly mundane, full of sights and sounds that everyone has seen hundreds of times before both in real life and on-screen. There is nothing unfamiliar or alien here, and indeed nothing to fear (at least at first), but nonetheless the scene set me on edge from the very start. The sound design, the shot composition, the music, everything comes together to create a feeling of being a child, wandering through an unfamiliar environment. The audience is made to feel small and helpless, just like the character on-screen. It's so well done I could feel myself falling backward through time, not only remembering but reliving past fears and insecurities. By the time the little girl encounters a reflection that is not quite a reflection, I was primed and ready to be scared. A less confident director would throw out a jump scare there and then let the title drop but Peele prefers to leave us with the lingering feeling of dread. Just what happened that night when the girl wandered off? Who was that strange girl that looks identical to her? What is the significance of all this? We'll have to wait for answers, but it's central to the main story of the film. This opening scene was so well done that I was left basking in its glow for longer than I had any right to, indeed the film was halfway over before I had the chance to take stock of the movie and I realized that aside from the intro, there was very little worth praising in Us. Now, it's not the aggressive incompetence of The Brain (1988) post-intro scenes, it's more a functional mediocrity distorted by the filmmaker's arrogance and pretension.

The movie proper kicks in as and we are introduced to the Wilsons, a wealthy black family visiting their vacation home in Santa Cruz. The father/husband Gabe is a chubby, goofy guy who is probably one of the purest examples of the Horror Dad trope I've ever seen. He's played mostly for laughs, gets treated as the butt of almost all the gags, and when the spooky stuff starts to happen he denies for as long as possible that there is actually a problem. Despite all that though, he's a thoroughly charming figure, in a schlubby Homer Simpson sort of way. Then there's Zora and Wilson, the two kids who don't really have personalities so much as a shortlist of superficial traits (Zora likes track and her phone; Wilson wears a mask and like magic tricks). Finally, there's Adelaide, the mother/wife who is also the little girl from the film's opening all grown up and is the most interesting character of the bunch by far. Whatever it was that happened to her in the mirror maze, it evidently left some serious scars, because she's grown into an anxious, almost neurotic adult who is convinced that the little girl from her memories is out to get her. She's holding it together, but barely, and the restrained tension is evident in her every action. Lupita Nyong'o has already been praised excessively for her portrayal of Adelaide and her sinister doppelganger Red, so I won't bother to add my voice to the mix except to murmur a quiet agreement, lest my reputation as a contrarian suffers.

Their vacation is going well, aside from a couple of ominous signs, until night falls and a family of four stands in the Wilsons' driveway, silent and menacing. Adelaide immediately panics and wants to call the police, but Gabe is more level headed, even the worst psychos don't bring their kids along with them to their murders. He is quickly proven wrong when he asks the family to leave, first politely, then with a baseball bat in his hands. The intruder doesn't balk at the bat, and instead begin to attack, quickly cornering the Wilsons in their den. It's at this point that the Wilsons realize they are not under siege by any run-of-the-mill psychos, as each family member finds them staring down their own evil double. We'll learn later on that these are the tethered, a subterranean race of shadow people created by forces unknown as a means of controlling their surface counterparts. It's not just the Wilsons who are in trouble either, as we'll learn the whole world (or at least the whole country, more on that later) is now infested with them, all bent on two simple objectives: 1). Kill their above-ground counterpart and 2). Reenact the hands across America fundraiser.

The Wilsons evade their evil twins and escape, only to discover the extent of the tethered's attack on the surface and see that at least the surrounding environs have been totally depopulated of normal people. We enter into Dawn of the Dead (1978) territory here, which could be a fun interlude, but here only seems to drag on. Everything that happens in the film's second act is effectively filler, as it does not advance either the plot or the movie's sub-textual themes. Indeed, it's at this point that I began to feel all the goodwill I'd built up over the course of the superlative introduction drain out of me. Sure, there's a couple of good jokes here and there (best among them a dying woman begging her Amazon Alexa to call the police, to which the machine responds by playing “Fuck the Police” by NWA), but by and large this is cinematic dead air, and should have been cut down severely. I have to wonder why this was left in the final film at all, and it's here that I began to expect that perhaps Peele's ego was starting to interfere with his film-making.

At this point, I should mention that I am going to spoil the film's twist ending; hell I'm also going to spoil Peele's earlier Get Out (2017). So consider this you're last warning if you haven't seen either film and would like to go into them with eyes unclouded. As it turns out, Adelaide is actually the tethered clone of Red and not the other way around. When Red was a little girl, she wandered down into the house of mirrors just as Adelaide wandered up from the realm of the tethered. Adelaide grabbed her twin and left her handcuffed and alone in the world of the tethered, while she basked in the above-ground world. Red took this about as well as one would expect, and spent the intervening 30 years plotting an invasion of the surface world at the head of an army of scissor-toting, jumpsuit-clad tethered to get her revenge. It's a nice twist, and it seemed to take most of the audience by surprise (judging by conversations I overheard), but to me, it seemed fairly predictable. I'd guessed as much already during the doldrums that were the second act when I stopped to wonder why Red alone of all the tethered was capable of speech.

Peele is a promising horror movie filmmaker, who by all rights should blossom into a truly great one in short order. However, Peele's abilities have been, to some extent anyway, under-minded by the fact that he cannot get fair and honest criticism from professional film critics. His pretty good debut horror film Get Out (2017) was heralded as the rebirth of not only Kubrick but Hitchcock too for good measure. As a result, the problems of the first film have not only gone unaddressed in the followup but have metastasized into far bigger problems. There was, for instance, a tension between the political message of Get Out (2017) and much of the film's logic. Why for instance do the body snatchers have to use blacks? On a symbolic level, it makes sense, because the film is commenting on cultural appropriation and the way that white liberal idolizes black people without trying to understand them. However on a logical level, it's absurd. Surely some of the cabal would prefer to have shiny new white bodies instead of black, and it's not like the procedure wouldn't work any less effectively on a white man than a black. I find it hard to believe in a collection of wealthy white people, there's none who'd pull a Dr. Kirshner from The Thing with Two-Heads (1972) and recoil in horror at the prospect of spending the rest of his days in a black body; I don't care how many times he voted for Obama. The political-cultural message of Us is not only wholly separate from the actual events of the film, but it's also convoluted and self-contradictory. We can see the tethered in a number of ways, but the different interpretations either contradict each other or have unfortunate implications. My reading on leaving the theater was that this was a form of Trump Derangement Syndrome, as the film opened in 1986 (at the height of Reagan's popularity) before jumping ahead thirty years to the present day. In many liberal imaginations, the past 30 years have been a gradual climb towards equality and progressive values, and the results of the last presidential election served as a rude disturbance to that trend (this type of thinking is a natural result of poor history education). For such people, it must have seems like overnight, all the disgusting, subhuman mole people crawled out of their holes and crowned Trump as their mole king. Hence Red's bizarre comment that “We are Americans” begins to make sense (though crucially not in the actual logic of the film, because the Tethered presumably would belong to all nations across the world equally) as American conservatives are quick to declare themselves 'the real Americans.' It's an absurd view, but if Peele ever mocks those in this nation who see 50% of their countrymen as veritable C.H.U.D.s then I must have missed it.

Of course, the film is highly ambiguous and leaves itself open to multiple contradictory interpretations. The tethered could be read as a stand-in for the oppressed underclass, instead of MAGA red the jumpsuits could be pointing towards communism. It makes a certain degree of sense, as ever since the rise of the USSR the idea of a revolutionary vanguard has been central to the popular idea of communism (mostly because it allows liberal intellectuals a chance to imagine themselves leading the revolution, rather than the more likely scenario of digging their own graves while the revolutionaries get ready to shoot them). Here, that role is filled by the surface-dweller Red, who finds herself trapped in the underworld, and thrust into leadership by the fact that she is the only one with a functioning brain. This analogy falls apart promptly though because the tethered are not oppressed by those on the surface, hell nobody above-ground even knows that they exist. The film doesn't go into details about their creation, but it does explicitly state that the tethered were not created by anything human. You can hardly fault the surface dwellers for oppressing the tethered when they are ignorant of them, blameless in their creation, and not benefiting in any meaningful way from their subterranean existence. Hell, the film is so ambiguous that I've even seen it presented as an argument in favor of the 2nd amendment because the horde of scissor-wielding psychos could only be effective in a state with restrictive gun laws like California. The tethered attacks in Texas and Wisconsin must not have gotten very far before the jump-suit wearing attackers realized they had brought a bunch of knives to a gun-fight. It's a viable reading too, given the existence of Get Out (2017) confirms Peele is all too happy to take the piss out of American liberals. Indeed, There's enough leeway here that you can pretty much bend the plot any way you'd like, which makes for a fun analytical exercise, though ultimately a hollow one.

Then there is the humor. Ever since there has been horror there have been attempts to marry it to comedy, some successful like Dead Alive (1992) that are both thrilling and hilarious in turn, and some stinkers like Bride of Frankenstein (1935) whose humor is obnoxious and whose terror is nonexistent. Personally, I would be quite happy if filmmakers gave up altogether trying to create another Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) or Shaun of the Dead (2004) if it meant I didn't have to be subjected to yet another unfunny, horror in-name-only film. Get Out (2017) had a problem with the humor regularly undercutting the scares, but at least you could always be sure what was meant to be scary and what was meant to be funny. Us, suffers from a worse problem, in that things that are clearly meant to scare us instead provoke laughter, because of how we've been primed by the preceding jokes. When Red first speaks in her raspy, withered voice, it's supposed to send chills down our spines, but instead, my theater erupted in laughter. I can hardly blame them, it's a good impersonation of what someone who hasn't spoken in years must sound like, but it just comes across as so ludicrous and goofy that I can't help but feel like the lines are being delivered by a cartoon character.

Despite its obvious flaws, I can't help but fall for Us' considerable charms. Peele is not afraid to mine the distant past of the horror genre for half-forgotten tropes and ideas and then re-purposing them for his own end; a trait that is bound to endear to any weirdo who spends his spare time reviewing Cold War-era horror films. Hell, Get Out (2017) is probably the only mainstream horror film since 1975 that had a mesmerist as one of the bad guys! In Us, Peele takes inspiration from more influential sources, giving us an army of pod people straight from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) with an implied eldritch evil and shadowy underworld straight from Lovecraft. Add in camerawork that is uniformly slick and beautiful, and performance from a lead actress that is suitably unhinged (though alas her voice for her villainous doppelganger falls squarely in the territory of the unintentionally humorous). Sure, Us is by no means the masterpiece that it is being hailed as, but it's a damn fine movie, that makes me interested in an excited for his future work. I do worry, it's clearly a step backward from Get Out (2017) in most departments, and I worry that if Peele continues to believe his own hype he will continue to fail to improve. That would be a shame because while I may be hesitant to declare him the heir to Hitchcock/Kubrick/Spielberg/Insert famous director here, he gives every indication of someday being one of the great horror filmmakers.