Peele’s second outing as writer-director gives audiences exactly what they want by delivering what they least expect. Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival. Universal releases the film on Friday, March 22. Jordan Peele’s 2017 debut “Get Out” was a landmark in African-American storytelling, broke box-office records, and served as a representational wakeup call to the film industry — but it wouldn’t have carried so much weight if it weren’t also such a gratifying viewing experience. His sophomore effort, “Us,” proves that surprise hit wasn’t a fluke. Peele’s second outing as writer-director confronts the ridiculously high expectations of its predecessor by pivoting to a broader canvas of ideas about the nation’s fractured identity. In the process, it gives audiences exactly what they want by delivering what they least expect. As it turns out, the ultimate zeitgeist movie in 2019 harkens back more than 30 years. “Us” imports Reagan-era America to a mortifying contemporary context that revisits the past as a nightmare that won’t die. In the process, it unfolds as a satisfying dose of relentless, anxiety-inducing survival antics designed to keep viewers perpetually uneasy, and moves so quickly that they can only consider the deeper undercurrents after the credits roll. The vehicle for all of this is a brilliant home-invasion thriller laced with cultural reference points stretching back to the late ’80s, and a smorgasbord of first-rate visceral cinematic scares. Think “Funny Games” collided with Cronenbergian body horror and Hitchockian suspense, and you’re maybe halfway there. Before “Us” settles into its grounded first act, opening credits explain there are thousands of abandoned tunnels hiding under the country’s exterior; there’s also a fleeting commercial for Hands Across America that revisits that bizarre 1986 national fundraiser, when six million people formed a human chain to raise money for homelessness. The movie’s ability to forge its sinister premise in this phenomenon inspires the audience to read into every moment, but the relentless pace won’t let you catch your breath. The stunt attracted widespread celebrity approval, with no less than Michael Jackson taking a central role in its publicity. “Us” opens in the midst of that year, as a young black family explores a beachside carnival, and young Adelaide (Madison Curry) wanders off. It only takes a matter of minutes for Peele to land on the movie’s first astounding cultural vision, the sight of a disturbed black adolescent wearing an oversized “Thriller” t-shirt and gazing out at the stormy sea. Later, Adelaide discovers an abandoned hall of mirrors with a shimmering yellow sign beckoning visitors to “FIND YOURSELF.” She wanders in, and comes face to face with a child who looks exactly like her. Horror buffs may realize that Alexandre Aja’s “Mirrors” touched on similar doppelganger fears, but they’re merely a starting point here. “Us” deserves its best surprises to remain unspoiled, but even its first-act setup hardly reveals its final destination. As Peele leaves the story’s first abrupt twist unresolved, he cuts to the present-day, when Adelaide has grown to become a nurturing mother (Lupita Nyong’o, impressive as always) traveling to a Northern California beach house with her husband Gabe (a cheery Winston Duke) and their young kids Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). The script takes its time developing the family’s more endearing qualities. Jason unleashes his rascally energy as he bounds around the house in a Halloween mask, Gabe can’t stop obsessing with his low-rent boat, and Adelaide rolls her eyes. Add a laugh track and this may as well be a sitcom. But that’s temporary. When the family heads to the beach, hanging with their affluent neighbors Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), “Us” seems to be heading toward a class-based variation on “Get Out,” with a series of cringe-inducing conversations between two very different families. But at nightfall, Adelaide has just enough time to revisit her childhood fears before they literally return to haunt her: There’s a red-clad family unit that looks exactly like hers, standing outside. It doesn’t take long for these figures to take charge of the household, forcing the relatives to splinter in various directions as their growling reflections pursue them, brandishing golden scissors and vacant stares. Plenty of blood-spattered showdowns ensue, with ample payoff that keeps moving ahead, but even as this deranged setup takes flight, “Us” has a grander agenda ahead. Peele has somehow developed an uncanny ability to explore how past cultural events can take ominous new dimensions in the present: The leitmotif of faceless Americans joining hands in an endless show of empty solidarity is a provocative setup, but Peele’s script keep digging into its ramifications. “What are you?” Adelaide asks her double, and the answer comes in eerily straightforward fashion: “We’re Americans.” As the family escapes one grisly battle and heads to the next, Peele establishes that the run-for-your-life dynamic serves as only one piece of the larger apocalyptic tapestry he has in store. In the meantime, it presents a range of opportunities for the talented cast to engage in extraordinary dual performances. Nyong’o in particular makes for an incredible study in contrasts, giving a frightened monologue about her past trauma at one moment — and, as her monstrous opposite, unleashing cryptic threats in a gravelly whisper. It was obvious from “Get Out” that Peele has a knack for indelible imagery, which “Us” matches with visual sophistication to spare: Reflections, doorways, and high ceilings frame some of the most absorbing moments, which avoid the obvious jump scares (although they make a few appearances). Cinematographer Michael Gioulakis plays with light and shadow to menacing effect, while Michael Abels’ unnerving score builds to shrieking crescendos, some of which do push this jittery material over the top. But “Us” is not big on nuance in its quest to horrify and entertain at once. When the soundtrack shifts from “Good Vibrations” to “Fuck Tha Police” at a pivotal moment — to say nothing of an orchestral riff on “I Got 5 On It” — Peele shows an unapologetic willingness to stuff every possible signifier into the plot and let his audience figure out how it adds up. Having stretched this wily premise to nearly two hours, the full explanation for the forces at work can’t possibly satisfy as much as the suspense leading up to their arrival. That’s forgivable in a movie working overtime to provoke and disturb without toppling over from too much ambition. When the final twist arrives, savvy viewers will have figured it out a long time ago, but it’s gratifying to discover that anticipating the outcome doesn’t make it any less effective. When its sweeping climactic image arrives, “Us” makes it clear that sometimes the scariest truths are hiding in plain sight. Grade: A- “Us” premiered as the opening night film at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival. Universal releases it March 22. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.<doc-sep>At the beginning of “Us,” Jordan Peele’s latest assault on your nerves and expectations, we learn that thousands of miles of empty tunnels — abandoned train routes, mine shafts and the like — run beneath the continental United States. If you still haven’t shaken off the spell of “Get Out,” Peele’s wickedly sharp 2017 directing debut, you might be reminded of “the sunken place,” that surreal zone of physical and psychological paralysis that became a terrifying metaphor for black enslavement. There’s a different kind of sunken place in “Us,” but the less said about it the better, and not just because this movie cries out to be seen in as unspoiled a mindset as possible. The points of connection between “Us” and “Get Out” are worth acknowledging, though at the risk of overstating them. Once again, the director draws upon the sketch-comedy gifts he honed on “Key & Peele” to achieve an artful, ruthless balance of horror and hilarity. “Us” is a tour de force of comic tension and visceral release, a movie that weaponizes our chuckles against us and reminds us that laughing, screaming and thinking are not mutually exclusive pleasures. At the same time, Peele has no interest in exhausting the same bag of tricks. The twisted satire of racial animus that made “Get Out” such a conceptual triumph has no real equivalent here (it would hardly be as singular an achievement if it did). The fresh terrors that Peele inflicts on his protagonists — a black family of four on a less-than-idyllic vacation in sunny California — have nothing to do with the few white characters in their midst. The story’s most disturbing implication, succinctly stated by its title, is that we are always our own worst enemy, susceptible to an evil that comes from within. Advertisement This is a troubling if hardly original notion, but the genius of “Us” is that it explores and sustains the conceit in a way that is both amusing in its literal-mindedness and thrilling in its imaginative energy. It begins with a chilling prologue set in 1986, when a young girl (Madison Curry) visits a Santa Cruz boardwalk carnival and is left unattended by her parents. She wanders down to the beach and into a funhouse of mirrors, where she has an unexplained encounter that leaves her deeply shaken. ALSO: Jordan Peele reveals the secrets of ‘Us’ at South by Southwest » The story proper begins three decades later, when the fully grown Adelaide Wilson (now played by Lupita Nyong’o) heads back to Santa Cruz for a summer holiday with her family. She’s still reluctant to return to that fateful beach, but any lingering trauma remains hidden by a veil of suburban normalcy. Her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), is an affable goofball. Their daughter, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), is a moody adolescent and rising track star. Their young son, Jason (Evan Alex), is an odd duck and a bit of a loner, fond of playing creepy games and hiding behind a mask. The fun of this early stretch comes from watching the movie outline these characters (and set up future narrative payoffs with a few quick, incisive brushstrokes). It also comes from spotting the many cinematic references — a kid in a mask named Jason, a “Jaws” T-shirt on a crowded beach — from a filmmaker with an effortless command of the horror lexicon. By the time Peele unleashes his pièce de resistance, your mind may race, as mine did, toward home-invasion thrillers such as “Funny Games” and doppelgänger freakouts such as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” (The writer-director has claimed a classic episode of “The Twilight Zone” called “Mirror Image” as a key inspiration.) One night, the Wilsons are confronted by another family standing in the driveway of their vacation home, a family to whom they bear an unsettlingly perfect resemblance. Who are these strange, menacing doubles? Why are they wearing red coveralls and wielding very large, very sharp golden scissors? What exactly is Adelaide’s evil counterpart (the end credits name her “Red,” but I like to think of her as Badelaide) talking about when she speaks of “shadows” and “untethering”? Why does her halting, rasping delivery — one of the creepiest aspects of Nyong’o’s sensational performance — sound like the voice of someone whose lungs have been crushed underfoot, who hasn’t been able to breathe for years? Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Evan Alex and Shahadi Wright Joseph in a scene from the movie “Us.” (Claudette Barius / Universal Pictures) Advertisement Peele gets around to answering most of these questions, some more obliquely than others, and he gives this mind-bending scenario the moment-to-moment intensity and jolting humor of a George Romero-inspired nightmare. He also elaborates on, and refines, his thriller technique: If “Get Out” consisted of a few well-timed shocks en route to a Grand Guignol climax, then “Us” feels pure and relentless in its grisly B-movie mayhem. Watch the shadows skittering in the background of Peele’s beautiful widescreen images, the way he uses razor-sharp cutting and an elegantly swerving camera to keep the worst just out of view. (The picture was shot by Mike Gioulakis and edited by Nicholas Monsour.) Like “Get Out,” “Us” is an experience of extraordinary dread-soaked momentum, even if Peele is still learning to differentiate between his “A” jolts and his “B” jolts. There are one or two moments when the terror and the comedy don’t fuse so much as fight each other, as Peele (knowingly) pushes his characters’ panic beyond the limits of what we might call reasonable horror-movie stupidity. But beyond the jittery mechanics of attack and pursuit, what lingers is the unnerving intimacy of the whole situation, the terrible and mysterious sense of kinship that binds the Wilsons to their malevolent alter egos. The themes at play in this movie — the return of the repressed, the duality of the self, the loss of personal identity — are not particularly hard to grasp, but they are open to considerable interpretation. The closing twists, one of which is no less satisfying for being detectable a few minutes in advance, demand an immediate re-viewing. The all-American setting — a beachside carnival under the California sun, a reference to the 1986 Hands Across America campaign — might lead you to wonder if the movie’s title should be more accurately read as “U.S.” But if Peele is indicting a nation’s coddled middle-class complacency, he is also wise enough not to squeeze his vision into a strictly political reading. And in this he is indebted, more than anything, to the unerring skill and emotional expansiveness of his actors. Advertisement They include Elisabeth Moss, pocketing a few superbly chilling scenes as a friend of the Wilsons hovering on the sidelines of their nightmare. Duke, so winning as M’Baku in “Black Panther,” has fun playing the bumbling paternal doofus, while Wright Joseph and Alex establish a poignant bond as two bickering siblings brought together by the unthinkable. But the movie belongs rightly and effortlessly to Nyong’o, and she sustains every moment by distilling innumerable emotional layers — the unshakable resolve of a mother and wife, the stricken gaze of a trauma survivor, the lingering incomprehension of a lost child — into a performance for the scream-queen history books. All of which would be mesmerizing even if Nyong’o were not acting opposite a radically distinct version of herself, or so good at suggesting that the difference may not be so radical. There isn’t a moment when she doesn’t have “Us” in her grip. ------------ ‘Us’ Rating: R, for violence/terror, and language Advertisement Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes Playing: Opens March 22 in general release justin.chang@latimes.com | Twitter: @JustinCChang<doc-sep>
For all the genius of Jordan Peele’s 2017 debut, “Get Out” — a movie that oh-so-smartly reinforced its horror-movie skeleton with an adamantium-strong (and twice as sharp) racial-tension allegory — audiences seemed to have one critique in common: The movie wasn’t nearly scary enough. People aren’t likely to have the same complaint about “Us,” the genre-savvy writer-director’s terrifying — if somewhat less clearly double-edged — second feature, which comes loaded with nightmare-inducing images of tunnel-dwelling döppelgangers who’ve come to claim the privileged lives their aboveground counterparts have been enjoying all this time. Debuting to an enthusiastic reception at the SXSW Film Festival (keep in mind, those Austin audiences seem to love everything) mere weeks before Peele’s reboot of “The Twilight Zone” drops, “Us” arrives in a shroud of secrecy that definitely works to the film’s advantage. The less you know going in — and the less energy you spend thinking about it after the fact — the better the movie works, trading on some uncanny combination of Peele’s imagination and our own to suggest a horror infinitely larger and more insidious than the film is capable of representing. Do you ever get the sense that your actions are partly out of your control? Does it occasionally seem like some external force is driving your decisions? That disconcerting feeling may explain why Adelaide wanders off from her parents during a trip to the Santa Cruz boardwalk, straying from the amusement park proper to visit an eerie Vision Quest attraction along the beach by herself. But something happens while Adelaide is exploring the hall of mirrors: A storm rages, the power goes out, and she comes face to face with something more than her reflection. That was 1986. The encounter is so unsettling (for Adelaide … the horror hasn’t quite kicked in for audiences just yet) that she’s suppressed its memory for more than 30 years — which happens to be when the film picks up, in the present day. Adelaide (played by Lupita Nyong’o) is now in her 30s, married to Gabe (her “Black Panther” co-star Winston Duke, a source of welcome comic relief), with two relatively well-adjusted kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). The Wilsons. Though not quite as wealthy as good friends Josh and Kitty Tyler (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss), they are the picture of the ideal American family, heading back to Santa Cruz for their summer vacation. As in “Get Out,” we know to suspect that when things look too good to be true, they probably are, and yet, it would take a pretty twisted mind to anticipate what Peele has in store for us this time. There’s that word: Us. Within the realm of scary movies, döppelganger stories occupy an entire subgenre unto themselves — and they nearly all end with the same “twist,” which won’t surprise many here — though Peele is a clever enough social commentator to orchestrate an entire horror movie around that old adage, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Americans spend so much time worrying about “the other” — demonizing immigrants, unfamiliar races, or the all-powerful 1% — that we seldom think to look for what’s holding us back where we’re most likely to find it: in the mirror. Early in “Us,” youngest child Jason gazes out the front window and eerily announces, “There’s a family in our driveway.” Sure enough, there stand four people in silhouette: mother, father, daughter, and son. While Adelaide doesn’t hesitate to call the cops (another Peele signature, making his characters smarter than the dead-meat-walking idiots who typically populate horror movies), Gabe does the manly thing, all but thumping his chest as he steps outside to confront these unannounced visitors, who freak him out by refusing to acknowledge his macho display. The movie is constantly illustrating — and nearly as often inverting — the gender roles we play in a patriarchal society, as when daughter Zora takes the lead to become the family’s most effective defender at one point. But long before the police have a chance to arrive (they never get there, by the way, which is one more reason N.W.A’s “F— tha Police” feels like such a fitting addition to a soundtrack that otherwise relies mostly on Michael Abels’ nerve-twisting suspense work), those four uninvited guests find their way into the Wilsons’ living room, and wouldn’t you know, they look just like their hosts.