***** outta *****

5 outta 5

Writer & director Jordan Peele of the Academy Award winning Get Out has created another winner with his latest film, Us. Here Peele amps up the horror and throws in a lot more blood splatter and carnage that creates an even more disturbing experience. It’s a great piece of worldbuilding that reveals more twisted layers, upending expectations constantly and continually ratcheting up the tension and featuring multiple dual performances by some very skilled actors. Happily, the movie keeps things zippy and lively and when the really weird stuff hits, it totally earns it. This is a movie that ends unexpectedly but perfectly.

Adelaide (Luptia Nyong’o) is on a cottage getaway with her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Evan (Jason Wilson). While enduring the chatter of their neighbours, Kitty (Elizabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), Adelaide is disturbed by their vacationing spot as she was deeply traumatized by a bad experience in that area as a kid when she was separated from her family. One night, Adelaide and her family are accosted by four people in red jumpsuits and when they break into the house, the family realizes the people are their exact doppelgangers but twisted and murderous. Only Adelaide’s double, Red (also Nyong’o), can speak and with her croaking voice she tells a tale of horror and revenge that she and her brood will enact upon Adelaide. Now the family fights for survival against themselves in one long night that keeps getting stranger.

Peele starts the movie off with an incredibly unnerving sequence in a creepy mid-80s fair of kid Adelaide (Madison Curry) being separated from her inattentive father and discovering something that terrifies her. Adelaide is the movie’s central character as the night’s crisis is framed through her point of view that was shattered from her childhood trauma. Nyong’o is great as a woman who is trying to keep a brave face to a world that scares her but when it comes time for her to be an action heroine, she steps up awesomely. It’s not just a great hero performance, her villain performance as the doppelganger Red is even better. Just hearing her speak is terrifying as she gasps out her words in a guttural choke, ever so painfully trying to get each word out. Red’s life has driven her quite mad and she has focused all of her rage on Adelaide. There are some big, crazy ideas she talks about and it’s totally riveting.

The body movement of Red and her killer brood is another way of expressing their characters. The way they move has a strange, staccato rhythm that looks very off-putting. The evil version of Evan hops around like a frog while the evil version of Zora has a crazy smile and the evil version of Gabe is a hulking monster. They don’t seem human at all which is made all the crazier when Red says “We are Americans”. Since they’re mostly silent, the performances of the doubles are made scary simply due to body language, looking crazy and grunts. Where they come from and how they came to be is slowly revealed and what they did before arriving to terrorize Adelaide’s family is inventively insane. The movie’s template is based around the home invasion siege film and Peele delivers that part excellently so when it twists into a different type of movie, it’s unexpected.

What is so great about Us is how it slowly unfolds, revealing a larger amount of insanity happening outside of their home. The movie starts really small and intimate but it gets bigger. Peele also amps up the gore and splatter which has a visceral impact. The evil duplicates are mostly armed with a pair of scissors and it works in a really nasty slasher movie way. Moss and Heidecker have an introductory scene where they come off as a perfectly vapid couple and this contrasts greatly when the are caught up in the unfolding madness. Moss in particular gets to do some very weird, disturbing stuff which she is great at.

This is a heavy, dark movie but Peele still finds time to get to know the family at the start and throw in some banter. Duke is very likable as the somewhat dopey father and his excitement at buying a rickety old speedboat is hilarious. There are some great subversions of expectations like when Duke uses a flare gun to fend off his attacker; from watching movies one would expect the flare to shoot right through the bad guy but it just sort of limply flops on the ground. There are some random darkly funny bits too like a home computer assistant that botches a call for help but the jokes never undercut the drama. The movie looks awesome with a lot of slow, menacing camera movement and deep shadows. Once Us gets going, there are more layers to the crazy night revealed, taking the movie from one genre into another.

Us is a fantastic piece of horror filmmaking. It delivers a lot of twists in an already twisted story that keeps the audience compelled as things get bigger and more ambitious. Through it all, the off-kilter performances of the evil duplicates are compelling and nasty. It gets bonkers and you can’t look away.