Us (2019) Directed by Jordan Peele
5B (wildly uneven movie; largely incoherent)I
A black middle-class family of four go on vacation. In the mother's case, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) is less enthusiastic about the destination than the rest of her family because she fears she will have to relive memories of a long ago incident when she was a child that traumatized her. Before her fears can be confronted, though, she and her brood are soon attacked by very angry and very violent replicas of themselves. As it turns out other families are facing a similar fate, and nobody knows what is going on. Who are these
doppelgangers and where do they come from? And what does this have to do with Adelaide's scary childhood incident? Good luck figuring it out.
Us is not so much a bad movie as a rough draft of a movie that could be pretty good if the script was altered to provide sensible answers to a host of questions. Such is not the case. The "threat" comes with insufficient back story and never does get fully explained. So incoherence is a major problem in this movie, but certainly not the only one. The movie never does establish a tone. It does not seem to know whether it wants to be a comedy or a horror movie with the result that it doesn't achieve either goal. While Peele faced a similar challenge in
Get Out, he found the right balance; here, he doesn't. In the end, the narrative seems inconsequential, and the horror is well directed technically but never really convincing dramatically. The movie seems like an academic exercise with no real bite of any kind. As far as social statements go, again, who knows? Whereas
Get Out brilliantly filtered the pervasiveness of US white racism through the lens of traditional horror movie tropes, this one doesn't seem anywhere near as sure of its message (which could be more banal than profound anyway). In reality, it's hard to figure out what Peele intended to accomplish. If
Us were an essay, I wouldn't give it a grade. I would just mark it "incomplete."
