Checked out Jordan Peele’s latest film Us. This is his follow-up to the very good to great Get Out. It’s also a horror/suspense film but more than “just” a horror film, though on a different social message level than Get Out. Though that might be open to interpretation itself.
So Us is basically about a family on vacation who run afoul of another family who want to hurt them. The other family is an unhinged version of themselves (all actors doing double duty as their insane doppelgangers). What else the movie is about gets way into spoilers and there’s a lot to be spoiled in this movie. I won’t be doing that. I will say there’s more to story than I expected and more than were spoiled in trailers.
I’ll just start by saying that this is a very assured piece of film making. Really has some great suspenseful and artistic scenes yet it never forgets that it is, at its core, a pretty creepy and sometimes very gory slasher-type suspense thriller. It’s pulpy as heck, has a lot of good laughs, and “yelling at the screen” moments. This is a very well produced movie that isn’t at all pretentious.
Which doesn’t mean it’s simple or that it doesn’t have something to say. The movie is very twisty and I think will be even better the second time around. Not necessarily due to any great twists but because the movie seeds in visual and intellectual ideas throughout. Being able to string those together knowing how the movie end means you’ll be watching a different movie the second time through.
My first reaction, however, walking out of this flick was an uncertainty that any of it really meant anything. Even now I’m not 100% sure that it all hangs together. But the more I thought about it – and the more reviews and analysis I’ve seen – have convinced me there’s some interesting, if initially obscure, things going on. I mean, it’s obvious that the film is saying SOMETHING…. but I wasn’t always sure that the something meant anything. It’s clear the movie thinks its saying something though.
One weird aspect is that the film somehow both over-explains and under-explains what’s really going on. There’s some hard-to understand (due to a raspy voice) expository dialog that half explains the weird and cryptic story… but that just leaves a dozen other questions open for debate. Some of these questions are big picture “what does it all mean” and a lot of the rest are just practical “well, how did THAT work then?” type questions. And those are legit questions… but I think getting hung up on them might not be the best way to appreciate the movie. I think literalists and people who want to do nothing but pick out plot holes will go crazy with this one. I think the movie is playing on a more metaphorical level (that appears literal)… which is why their insistence on explaining some of it in detail was a mistake.
But, hey, the first half of this movie is pretty good, the second half will probably hang on how literally you insist upon taking it. And how much thought you care to put into piecing what it all means together. Its a very good pulpy horror flick that does have some ideas and themes. Whether you care to explore them or just take the flick at a face value creepy flick is up to you. I liked it and like it more after thinking about it for a few hours.
Score: 86