‘Us’ movie review — Jordan Peele avoids the sophomore slump

Us, Jordan Peele's follow up to his Oscar-winning debut Get Out, follows a family being hunted down by their terrifying doppelgängers.

30-second review: Lupita. N'yongo. While Us is successful in many ways — especially in its horror set pieces surrounding a horrifying home invasion — the central performance by the Oscar winner is the main reason the movie is a worthy follow-up to Get Out. He ups both the horror and the comedy, for better and worse. Though the plot and themes are muddier, Peele focuses on delivering an effective horror film — and that he did. 

Where to watch Us: Available to buy or rent on iTunes and Amazon.

Watch yourself. Full review after the jump ?

For people that complained the Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out wasn't scary enough, he heard you. While the laughs and biting political commentary that made Get Out such a sensation — and winning him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay — are still there, Peele's sophomore effort Us cranks the horror up as far as it can go.

The first half of the film is laced with unrelenting tension as Adelaide (Lupita N'yongo), her husband Gabe (Winston Duke), and their kids Zora (Shahidi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) are tormented by their scissor-wielding, red jumpsuit-wearing doppelgängers in their beach vacation house.

The experience is particularly unsettling for Adelaide who had an experience as a child (Madison Curry) where she was separated from her parents (Anna Diop and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) on a carnival-filled boardwalk to end up in a mirrored fun house where she encountered a girl that looked exactly like her.

Where Get Out used a premise similar to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives to explore race in America, Us uses home invasion movies as its template. It pulls from those movies all the way down to the fact that their tormenters are almost playing with them before finally accomplishing what they set out to do — kill their counterparts.

All the actors portray their doppelgängers to chilling effect, especially N'yongo who nails both the role of a terrified mother desperate to protect her family and her deliciously sinister twin who is hell-bent on some revenge and speaks in a malicious hoarse voice — she's the only doppelgänger that speaks.

The plot doesn't unravel as smoothly as Get Out, which is why the movie isn't as successful as a whole. The middle act, in particular, ends up stealing a lot of the momentum from the superb first third. It also doesn't hold up to as much scrutiny. Where Get Out tracks in nearly every beat — like a puzzle that you need to solve and that you can rewatch and find new clues that you might have missed — Us feels more like a maze that you have to wander around before finally solving. Don't think too much about the mechanics of the movie, it takes away from its charms.

Tonally, Us is darker, which makes the flashes of humor stick out. Much of the first act is focused solely on atmosphere and tension, so when the middle third comes around the humor deflates a lot of it. But it mostly works. That's thanks to Duke's performance — much of the film's comedy comes from his character's artificial bravado.

The allegory, though, and N'yongo's performance is what keeps the movie from going too far off the rails. The movie's title can be taken in more ways than one. And while the message is not quite as profound, the movie still completes the job of delivering it with impact.

Us works a lot better on its surface than it does when it's dissected. But as a horror movie, it completely works with its centerpiece home invasion sequence being a spectacular horror setpiece that will have you both covering your eyes and having trouble looking away. If anything, come for N'yongo's performance, which should put her on the track to a much deserved second Oscar nomination.

Edit: Shadow and Act has a terrific article theorizing on the meaning of the film. You can read it here. 

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Hey! I'm Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I'm also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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