Us (2019) Director: Jordan Peele
“They look exactly like us. They think like us. They know where we are…”
★★★★★
The follow-up to Jordan Peele’s debut horror film Get Out (2017), Us stars Lupita N’yong’o, a Kenyan American actress who plays Adelaide Wilson, a woman whose family goes on vacation to Santa Cruz, CA when they are mysteriously attacked by a group of underground Doppelgängers –a pseudo-German word for people who look identical. This film plays on all manner of old Germanic lore of evil twins, and paranoia of shadowy mirror images as Adelaide recalls a moment in her childhood wherein she was grabbed by an identical copy of herself in a fun house mirror attraction at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk (the year was 1986). Now, later in life, these “tethered” doppelgängers are seeking to untether themselves and reclaim their rightful place above ground. In the film, the “tethered” were originally created in a human cloning experiment that failed so they were abandoned and left underground to wander by themselves, mimicking the actions of those above. In a twist at the end of the film, it is revealed that all those many years ago, the real Adelaide was kidnapped and attacked by her Doppelgänger who chained her to the floor, and ruined her vocal chords underground in a violent moment of choking, while her Doppelgänger escaped to life above. In the end, the true Adelaide is killed and the new Adelaide continues to live her life, though her son Jason is clearly skeptical that she is who she says she is.
Us is loosely based on a Twilight Zone episode called “Mirror Image” about an evil Doppelgänger who plagues a young woman (click here to read my review of the episode). It offers a dark social commentary on the nature of who is considered “us” versus “them” (notably, when the tethered first appear in the film, they identify themselves as “Americans”). This is especially apparent with all the overly jaded nostalgia for the 1980s –like the “Hands Across America” stunt, or the fact that the tethered look like Michael Jackson on his Thriller album. All of this plays out over a uniquely enticing score by Michael Abels (he also composed the score for Get Out). As we might expect from a film buff like Jordan Peele, allusions to classic cinema are rife throughout the film, as is allusion to Biblical scripture: “Therefore thus saith the Lord: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them'” Jeremiah 11:11. Peele intended for Us to have a social justice allegory, like a fable, or an educational story to make people better problems in our culture and not ignore prevalent issues like racism, however there are other themes of the “other,” collective forgetting, and duality worth exploring in the film. As the title beckons, who do we consider to be “us” and by proxy who are “them”?
The repeating number 11:11’s significance in Us easily resonated with me for spiritual reasons. Thanks for your review.