Us
A realm composed of the descendants of the colonisers who displaced the indigenous populations, America is now a nation which has been conditioned to fear the other, to see them as somehow different and undeserving of the bounty of the promised land, with walls both physical and legal under construction to preserve the unbalanced state of the United States.
What, asks writer/director Jordan Peele asks in his follow up to the Oscar winning Get Out, if the supposed threat was not the other; what if the invader who arrives in the night and enters our house and threatens our family and takes what we feel is rightfully ours, was us, a dark reflection of want and need which would no longer settle for being denied their justified entitlement?
It was in 1986 that young Adelaide Thomas visited the Santa Carla Boardwalk, made famous across the world the following summer with the release of The Lost Boys, Adelaide’s mother observing the filming and suggesting her daughter should perhaps join the crowd as an extra, but while her parents enjoy the attractions Adelaide instead drifts from them and enters the hall of mirrors, but what she sees is not her reflection.
Thirty years later, Adelaide’s husband Gabe wishes to take their children Zora and Jason to the same beach; still troubled by the memory of that day decades before she is reticent but agrees to meet with their friends Kitty and Josh Tyler and their daughters on the proviso that they leave before dark, but a shadow follows the family home.
The creeping dread manifesting that night, four figures appear in the driveway of the Wilson’s holiday home, silent and menacing in red jumpsuits, doppelgängers of Adelaide, Gabe and their children who break in and take them hostage. Calling themselves the Tethered, Adelaide’s counterpart tells a familiar story of a girl who had everything and a girl who had nothing but the desire to have what she had denied.
Part home invasion horror and part commentary on the supposed integration of the United States with the “Hands Across America” charity event of May 1986 a part of the backstory and a focus for the Tethered’s desire to be seen and recognised, with Peele serving as an executive producer on the forthcoming revival of The Twilight Zone it feels as though Us is an audition for that role, a half-formed “what if” which never steps into the light to resolve itself into one thing or another.
The principal cast playing both their primaries and their doppelgängers, it is Black Panther‘s Lupita Nyong’o who is the focus as Adelaide and “Red,” spokesperson of the Tethered, the same but different and equally matched and determined as they try to protect their families, the Wilson clan more capable than Kitty (Mad to be Normal‘s Elisabeth Moss) and her family.
Peele’s sinister premise layered with images of folk horror – murals of foxes, raven badges, rabbit t-shirts – instead of developing towards a conclusion, either concrete or abstract, Us flounders with a pause for unnecessary exposition providing little enlightenment and an unfocused final act which is more a damp squib than an act of revolution.
Us is currently on general release
