Jordan Peele’s new film is a hall of mirrors
Ultimately, Jordan Peele’s story of creepy doppelgangers is one to forget — even if it’s from a filmmaker to remember,
After the success of his 2017 horror debut Get Out, there was significant pressure on director Jordan Peele. In the two years since then he’s produced Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman, signed on to create a reboot of 1950s sci-fi classic The Twilight Zone and has returned to direct his second film, Us.
Amid much hype, critics have acclaimed the film and it enjoyed one of the biggest box-office weekend openings in US history last week. Peele seems to have cemented his place as one of the smartest, most innovative new directors of the horror genre.
However, if you remove the film from its clouds of ecstatic appreciation and breathless commentary, the truth is that Us is a very well-executed and aesthetically pleasing piece of horror that isn’t really about all that much, leading to its over-appreciation as being about everything. There’s nothing easier to project on than a pretty-looking blank slate.
Get Out aimed its barbs at the easily identifiable horrors of race relations. Us aims its arrows at a far more nebulous target — the dark secrets and fears of the psyche.
The film begins in the ’80s, when a young girl named Adelaide has a dark encounter with a doppelganger in a hall of mirrors at a seaside funfair. It’s not clear what happens but it’s obvious that the incident has a deep effect on the girl — and has her parents worried about her.
Cut to several years later and Adelaide is grown up, married and the mother of two children, on her way with her family back to the seaside town of her childhood trauma,
where she and her husband have bought a holiday home. Why she would want to return to the scene of the crime is unclear.
Everything seems to be going well until Adelaide and her family are accosted by a gang of zombiefied doppelgangers intent on murder and mayhem.
Dressed in red and wielding scissors, these eerie doubles are not playing around but, because this is a Jordan Peele film, there will be jokes — and some of them are quite good, too. But jokes can’t hide a very flimsy premise that leads ultimately nowhere and doesn’t seem to justify the film’s almost two hours as the doubles take over the town and the world at large.
Peele’s filmmaking skills have reached a noticeable new level since his debut, and Lupita Nyong’o’s performance as adult Adelaide and her creepy doppelganger is truly astounding. She’s ably complemented by Elisabeth Moss as a neighbour and her corresponding evil twin.
However, the film, by dedicating itself to a general horror and not wanting to be too specific about anything, quickly becomes tiresome, dull and disappointingly lacking in any real interest or engagement. The attempt to wrap everything up through a final confrontation between Adelaide and her double just makes things more murky, and portentous imagery referencing the ’80s charity drive Hands Across America doesn’t help things.
Ultimately Us is a bit of a pretty, wellcarried-out, well-acted mess of a film that doesn’t live up to its hype or deliver on its weighty expectations. Peele is certainly a filmmaker to watch, but this is not really a film to remember.