It may only be March, but this is already one of my top 10 favorite films of 2019.
Jordan Peele's first outing, Get Out, was an amazing -- and amazingly ballsy -- horror-comedy that dove deep into our anxious cultural veins regarding race relations. Its relatively simple narrative and streamlined ideas had been finely tuned, much like a scalpel, cutting our tenuous strings of "woke" white liberalism in a scathing, direct, and endlessly entertaining film. But, in his second outing, Peele seems to be even more earnest if less direct, making a sweeping indictment of American duality when it comes to race, poverty, and the evil inside all of us.
There's not much to the story itself: a family of four goes on a vacation to Santa Cruz (which means "holy cross" and implies a salvific place or means of sacrifice), where they encounter their doppelgangers. What starts as a home invasion story, though, quickly becomes a race through our conscious mind -- rather, a double conscious mind -- to find the truth of our past and the reality of our identities in the present. Carrying the weight of this task is Lupita Nyong'o, whose impossibly nuanced performance as the mother Adelaide Wilson and her nameless doppelganger steals the movie.
Everybody in the cast plays their own doppelganger, and the movie flawlessly features their impeccable double performances. Winston Duke plays the primary comic relief as Gabe, the husband/father, who uses a sort of deepened "thug" voice to try and scare off the doppelgangers. The two children are no less impressive as Zora and Jason, though Zora's creepy double is the stuff of nightmares. Most interesting, however, is that the problem of evil twins is not isolated to the Wilson family. Earlier in the film we see hints of death and doubling, but we don't fully see the scope of the problem until the Wilson's friends (Elizabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker) are suddenly, viscerally butchered by their own evil twins.
Apart from the obvious craft of the film proper -- especially the haunting score by Michael Abels and excellent soundtrack choices -- the film piles on multiple layers of increasingly complex significance, making Us a consummate work of art much like mother! and Suspiria, the very best of modern existential horror. I'm still reeling from the multiplicity of levels on which this film operates, so much so that it's difficult to know where to start unpacking.
On a purely psychological level, the film plays off psychoanalytic theories of the uncanny and of our doubles (time to revisit Freud and Jung) while developing its own complications to Du Bois's double consciousness. I suppose to talk about this, we'll use Adelaide as the case study, since the film hinges on her identity. The opening sequence takes place in 1986, and a young Adelaide is visiting the family vacay spot in Santa Cruz. Wandering away from her parents, she enters a fun house and in its maze of mirrors encounters her double. After the experience, she's quiet and distant, disturbing her parents while clearly absorbing everything she can from her surroundings. During the film's modern-day climax, when Adelaide finally murders her double, we (and possible she herself, we're not sure) learn through flashbacks that during their encounter, the evil double had actually kidnapped the real Adelaide and taken her place.
That means that, during the whole movie, the Adelaide we've seen and respected and fallen in love with is really the evil doppelganger. It had been hinted at earlier, in her uncanny awareness that the doubles were inherently dangerous and in the slow breakdown of her speech -- the doubles cannot speak but communicate with gutteral grunts and clicks -- but we are forced to reconsider her identity. Should be be horrified that one of the evil doubles "passed" as normal for so long? Or is this rather a triumph of nurture over nature, teaching us that identity can and does change, and that, perhaps given the proper opportunities, we are all capable of love, family, bravery, and sacrifice? Take a look at the double (the "real" Adelaide), who is the sole Other capable of speech (albeit childlike and belabored), whose primary purpose has been to launch this assault on the daylit world. Clearly the true evil doubles are as capable as change as "normal" folks are when oppressed, forced underground, and given no opportunities to really live. Perhaps her actions are revenge for her forced slavery below ground.
Speaking of which, the film doesn't just work by "tethering" us to our doubles, or even us to our families. We're told the doubles -- the "Tethered" -- are soulless, which predetermines our fear and loathing of them. They live underground, in apparently abandoned tunnels that stretch across the entire continent that have no known purpose. We might do well to read the American Underground as a literalization of an Underground Railroad -- the opening text of the film hints at "subways" and the like -- and a potential means to freedom for our intensely divided society. The often-repeated song "Itsy Bitsy Spider" hints at its own connection to the Tethered, as a new report suggests they have arrived in our daylit world by climbing up the sewers. We would also do well to read the Underground as an allegorical home for the oppressed in our culture; this parallel will force us to conceptualize our own positioning in daylight as one of privilege, of precarious chance.
But the privilege doesn't end there. It would seem the goal of the Tethered is to murder their oppressive doubles -- more than once the consideration of slavery is forced, as we see the doubles acting out pathetic shadow-actions, mirroring their above-ground counterparts -- and stretch across the continent holding hands in a long, unbroken line. This is a blistering throwback to the 1986 fad "Hands Across America," the popular experiment to bring awareness and show solidarity with the poor and homeless that became celebrity fodder and failed to raise the money it pledged. Telling that it was Reagan's America, Regan who posed for the event while his administration stripped billions in funding for poverty assistance and welfare. In this way, creator Jordan Peele tethers 1986 Reagan to 2019 Trump, showing how our country is still deeply divided and has done nothing to help the crisis.
Of course, it makes sense that the Tethered would want to do this. If the comparatively articulate Adelaide is their leader, one of the last things she would have remembered before being taken were the advertisements and hype for Hands Across America. Consider, too, the Michael Jackson "Thriller" t-shirt she's wearing, and compare it to the red outfit and single glove worn by all Tethered folks. Consider the bright red candied apple she was carrying around on the beach (which she never got to actually eat), dripping with sticky red goo hinting at the carnage to come, but also suggesting the candy of Halloween (masks, costumes, doubling) and the forbidden fruit and sins of self-knowledge she'll unleash. These are the many levels at which Peele is working, and it's the stuff of philosophical genius.
The film is also aesthetically pure, and Peele controls his story and concepts as smoothly as his art. He encourages his actors to give amazing performances, and allows their movement work especially to shine. His fluid cinematography and deliberate pacing don't let the ideas come too quickly or bluntly. He piles on the references and concepts including mythic world-building, politics and society, past and present, identity and consciousness, and -- my favorite -- his own love of cinema. The references to '80s-era movies fly, including C.H.U.D., The Lost Boys, Jaws, The Goonies, A Nightmare on Elm Street, the visual look of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. But none more so than references to Funny Games (1997, so I guess not era-appropriate, but still palpably present) and The Shining.
Finally, because I was so frustrated by the film's repeat references to Jeremiah 11:11 -- which, by the way, has a purely visual flair for the mirror image -- I have to include the quote for you:
"Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them."
Remember that the God of the Old Testament was often a dick. But it's interesting that Peele would add a religious element to his cultural condemnation of American race relations, especially a Bible quote that he never reveals. Disturbing enough, suggesting the doubles are God's curse, we might also consider their origins. It's revealed that the doubles are actually clones of the surface populace, abandoned by their creators because souls could not be copied (or controlled). We know by the end, of course, that everyone is capable of a soul if nurtured, and in the chilling final moments we see Adelaide (who we know to be her own double) and Jason looking at each other with the same realization. Her son has learned from her and will continue to do so; what role, if any, will her identity play in his development? You might just be your own evil twin. Is that a good thing?
Who knows? Jordan Peele allows us (Us; U.S.? The parallels are everywhere!) to make up our own minds. Rather, he invites us to just entertain the ideas, and not come to any conclusion. Because nothing is as clear-cut as horror movies so often make it out to be.
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