Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Great expectations
Jordan Peele’s much-anticipated follow-up to Get Out better than most but not as good as his first
Horror movies can fail for any number of reasons, but more often than not, it’s the mythos. Nature abhors a vacuum; human brains, however, restlessly spin in one: The more you explain to an audience, the more something becomes known and understood, the less scary that thing becomes. Thus, generally speaking, the best horror films are the ones that come without explanation. That’s one reason among a thousand I so greatly prefer Alien to any of the more recent Ridley Scott prequels.
The exception is when an idea is so perfect unto itself that an explanation can be explicable, even understood, and still retain its power. This was the case for Jordan Peele’s phenomenal debut feature, Get Out, which somehow managed to be funny, terrifying, and a powerful evocation of race in this country: In that case, the more we understood, the more perfectly the whole thing worked together and the more powerful it became.
Trouble is, it’s an extremely difficult trick to pull off, which is why Peele’s new film, which concerns a race of shadowy doppelgangers living underground, while still wildly entertaining, can’t work quite as seamlessly as its predecessor. Regardless of how this narrative hangs together, however, I’m happy to report Peele has done nothing here to suggest his debut was a lucky flash in the pan. This film continues his uncanny understanding of human interaction, and his flare for visual audaciousness.
We begin in 1986, at a California boardwalk amusement park in the evening, where a young girl named Adelaide (Madison Curry), is enjoying her birthday with her parents (Anna Diop and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Peele’s camera is continually at Adelaide’s level, looking up at the rides, and the flashing lights, the whirling
bodies and the frantic, neon-strobed energy that fills the place. She’s also watching her parents’ interaction, her father trying a bit too hard, her mother chastising him as being neglectful. When she slips away and ends up entering a strange exhibit (“VisionQuest”) by herself, it’s all too clear nothing good will come of it, which proves more than accurate.
In the present day, Adelaide (Lupita N’yongo) now grown up and married to the good-natured Gabe (Winston Duke), and mother to teenage Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and younger, slightly off-kilter Jason (Evan Alex), it would seem things have turned out exceptionally well for her. As we meet them, the family is arriving at their gorgeous summer home down the coast from San Francisco. She is still occasionally haunted by snippets of her past, and what happened to her that night at the boardwalk, but things seem to be every bit as bright and broad as her husband’s grin when he shows up later on at the house in a used motorboat of which he’s deeply proud.
Things still seem unsettling to her, however, especially when, against her better judgment, she agrees with Gabe to take the kids to the Santa Cruz beach, returning her, at last, to that fateful boardwalk from years ago. There, they meet their friends Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), and their twin daughters, revel in the sand and get back before dark. Shortly after they arrive, however, they are shocked to see a family that looks almost exactly like them creepily standing hand-inhand in red jumpsuits at the edge of their driveway. As the story unfolds, it’s clear they do not come peacefully.
It would seem, at first glance, if the talented Peele has painted himself into a bit of an artistic corner. By making another horror/comedy/metaphoric treatise, he’s opening himself up to the danger of direct comparison to his earlier success, much as M. Night Shyamalan was consigned to make a numbing succession of twist-ending follow-ups to The Sixth Sense. But he’s a cannier director and certainly a vastly superior writer than Shyamalan, and his control over the medium remains impeccable.
The film is laced with jarring visual moments — the opening credits incongruently appear over a close-up shot of a rabbit’s eye from just outside a cage, the camera slowly pulling back to reveal stacks and stacks of such cages, filled with other similarly confined bunnies; later, when the family first arrives at the beach, Peele switches to a striking overhead shot of the family making their way across the sand, which is textured with a series of undulations, almost like the texture of the ocean itself — which have the effect of throwing your expectations off-kilter, a spooky amusement park ride with unexpected flourishes and crescendos.
He’s also still able to swing deftly between comedy and terror at a breathless pace (though not quite as effectively as his first film, it must be said). In one scene, as Adelaide is finally telling her husband the story of that terrifying night as a child, Gabe keeps zinging one-liners at her, unable to conceive of the horror she’s attempting to describe. Even as the shadow-family’s pursuit becomes more horrifying, there are still small, idiosyncratic moments that act as finger snaps to the trance he’s put you in. (Gabe’s oft-sputtering boat factors hugely in the family’s survival, it turns out, but not before it almost kills him in the process.) Peele also still keeps his sly sense of humor at hand — in one of the film’s opening shots, there’s a knowing wink to C.H.U.D., another, far less accomplished, film about an underground evil race.
In the last act, where we get a fuller explanation of just what is going on — as with Get Out, Peele enjoys the Kafka-esque act of transforming metaphor into reality, and then back again — it becomes a good deal less realistically plausible, but by then, it’s clear that he’s after something other than strict realism. He’s setting us up for a bracing, last moment coup de grâce, as it were, which, even if it does tell us a bit too much, just about makes it worth it.