Film review: ‘Us’

Jordan Peele’s funny, scary follow-up to ‘Get Out.’|

After taking us to the sunken place in “Get Out,” Jordan Peele promised that his follow up would be more than just horror-adjacent. “Us” is indeed a full-blown horror film, and one that works beyond its genre.

The film begins with a standard trope - a young girl (Madison Curry) wearing a Michael Jackson “Thriller” T-shirt and holding a candy apple wanders away from her father on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. She passes a skeezy drifter holding a scrawled sign reading “Jeremiah 11:11.” (For those who have not memorized their Bible verses, that one goes, “Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.’”)

And the girl’s screams do go unheard when she enters the “Shaman’s Vision” hall of mirrors and meets a reflection that is both herself and not.

A quarter century or so later, that girl is Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o), a Tippi Hedren-esque troubled beauty, and she’s headed back to Santa Cruz on a family vacation. A quiet woman, she leaves lots of space for her boisterous husband, Gabe (Winston Duke). He wears Docksiders and buys the family a boat called the Craw Daddy, earning eye rolls from Adelaide and the kids, big sister Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and little brother Jason (Evan Alex).

It seems that Gabe is trying to keep up with his rich, heavy-drinking neighbors, Josh (Tim Heidecker) and Kitty (Elisabeth Moss), and their disaffected teen daughter twins.

Throughout the film, Peele mines rich, Hitchcockian territory (note those discomfiting seagulls on the beach, which isn’t so far from Bodega Bay) but “Us” most closely resembles Michael Haneke’s bourgeoisie vacation nightmare “Funny Games,” right down to the inappropriate use of a golf club.

But, as scary as Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt were in Haneke’s film, the Wilsons’ home invasion antagonists are even scarier because, as Jason says, “It’s us.” The family is beset by their own doppelgängers, who might best be called “the Tethered,” the soulless shadows of living people.

The Tethered wear red jumpsuits, tote large golden shears, and communicate in grunts and cries - except for Adelaide’s double, who manages some strangled phrases from deep in her throat (Nyong’o’s vocal performance is spectacular - and here we thought Bradley Cooper went all out in “A Star Is Born”). One crucial utterance addresses the question: Who are you? The reply is: “We’re Americans.”

One of the great pleasures of the film is being free to draw your own conclusions on what the Tethered represent before reading one of the many film school essays that are being furiously written at this very moment.

In a great sequence, Peele reels the camera 360 degrees to show all the frights scrambling around the house to pair off with their terrified human counterparts. The director is also very, very adept at making you laugh when you’re not stifling a scream. There is an uproarious needle drop on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and then a hilarious mishap with Ophelia, an Alexa-like voice-command system that does not function as intended.

Peele’s most important musical selection is the 1995 single “I Got 5 on It” by Luniz, which feels like just a car radio head bopper when it’s first heard in the film. Later on, however, a soaring orchestral remix plays that attenuates the beat to just two shrieks, like scissors slicing, snip snip.

The narrative twists are as delicious as the sound mix and Moss and Nyong’o give performances that will inform your nightmares for weeks - the latter had better get Oscar attention for her role as a fierce, conflicted, and fire poker-wielding family protector.

Beyond all squealing good fun, Peele leaves us with discomfiting, many-faceted questions about the Tethered: What is it that they want? And when is mine coming for me?

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