Directed by: Jordan Peele
Starring: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex
Rated R, 116 minutes
The image of parallel lines dominates “Us.” The new horror-comedy thriller from Jordan Peele is full, almost to the point of distraction, with this geometric symbolism; the number 11 shows up repeatedly, as do long shadows, scars, twins, the Twin Towers, and even porta-potties, all posed side-by-side like a cinematic tessellation that gets more unnerving as the movie progresses.
It’s a fitting visual metaphor to use, given that the movie’s plot revolves around doppelgängers. A family’s vacation in southern California is interrupted by the arrival of their scissors-wielding demonic doubles—one for Mom, one for Dad, one for each of the two kids—leading to a terrifying night in which the family flees from their doppelgängers, then attacks them, then flees again. Only the mother of the family, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o, “12 Years a Slave”), seems to have any idea why they are suddenly in this kill-or-be-killed struggle against themselves; as a child, she once encountered her own doppelgänger in a beachside funhouse, a memory that haunts her but which holds the key to her family’s survival.
As was the case with his 2017 directorial debut “Get Out,” Peele’s central concept for “Us” involves a secondary world embedded within our own. In “Get Out,” that world was the Sunken Place, a purgatory for black men and women whose bodies have been snatched and whose souls are forced to watch from afar, in a kind of sleep paralysis, as rich white people take command of their physical forms. In “Us,” Peele gets more literal, creating a hidden world of pseudo-people just beneath our own, a place full of feral body doubles loosely mimicking the movements of their counterparts. The effect is creepier, although harder to decipher.
Take, for instance, the movie’s title. Simple and understated, “Us” refers literally to the family at the movie’s center, but it’s also easy to read the title as “U.S.,” and thus to see the movie as an extended political metaphor for the state of the country. Peele knows this reading is obvious, and invites the comparison in one of the movie’s tensest scenes, when the doppelgänger family sits down across from Adelaide’s family; Adelaide asks her double who they are, and her doppelgänger responds in a spastic, skeletal voice, “We’re Americans.”
The metaphor isn’t that simple, though. What are we supposed to make of these two worlds of “Us”? What are we supposed to make of the other repeated symbols throughout the movie—the rabbits, the lines of people holding hands, the red jumpsuits that all the doppelgängers wear? Is the film a commentary on the growing wealth gap and the way the rich look upon the poor as inhuman? Is the unsettling hand-holding imagery a rejection of “we just have to listen to each other” pleas for civility? Or is this a more personal story about womanhood and the rare solace afforded women in America? Is it a story about PTSD?
Of course, no single interpretation, no one tangible explanation, is correct; Peele is content to let his viewers project meaning onto the film’s striking images, through whatever lens makes sense for them. “Us” is a shapeshifter of a movie, its meaning dependent on whatever dissociations and self-contradictions a viewer brings to it. It will mean a hundred different things to a hundred different people.
Not to be confused for the sort of artsy filmmaker who can only offer philosophy without entertainment (see, for example, Darren Aronofsky’s rambling “mother!”), Peele is a director who can do both. He directs a cast, including several young or new actors, to performances that are simultaneously endearing and haunting; he writes jokes that land and scares that do more than startle; he knows how to drop a song into a scene at just the right moment to create a point of inflection. He is, above all, a director who pays attention to the details, to the effect of every single stylistic and technical choice he makes, which is why he can make a movie that’s immediate and engrossing, and yet totally baffling at the same time. “Us” is a bewildering movie precisely because Peele wants it to be so, because he wants us to sit in that feeling of bewilderment and ask ourselves why we feel it.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 4/5/19.