“Us” Film Analysis

Basic Synopsis

Accompanied by her husband, son and daughter, Adelaide Wilson returns to the beachfront home where she grew up as a child. Haunted by a traumatic experience from the past, Adelaide grows increasingly concerned that something bad is going to happen. Her worst fears soon become a reality when four masked strangers descend upon the house, forcing the Wilsons into a fight for survival. When the masks come off, the family is horrified to learn that each attacker takes the appearance of one of them.

Film Trailer

In-depth Analysis

Peele’s opening is up there with the nightmare classics. After titles that assert there are thousands of miles of tunnels under the U.S., many of which “have no known purpose at all,” we’re in a beachside Santa Cruz amusement park in 1986, where a little girl wanders away while her father is distracted by a game of Whac-a-Mole. (What better metaphor for macho futility?) Gothic convention compels the girl to enter a fun house on the beach with a sign reading vision quest: find yourself. In the hall of mirrors, she nervously whistles “Itsy Bitsy Spider” — and then hears someone whistling it back. What appears to be her mirror image is actually … well, that’s the question. The credit sequence that follows is diabolically brilliant: The camera rests on a white rabbit, then slowly pulls back to reveal a cage and then a vast wall of cages, each with its own leporine specimen. Michael Abels’s blend of The Omen–like Latin chants and polyphonic Afro-rhythms is so infectious you don’t even realize that by tapping your feet you’re helping to conjure the devil. It possesses you, this music.

The first scenes lose the pulse, though, and the film never really recovers. In the present, the reasonably prosperous Wilson family goes to Santa Cruz for a vacation, its arrival broken by flashbacks to ’86 and the aftermath of the little girl’s trip to the fun house, when she’s mute, apparently in shock. The connection is Adelaide Wilson, who was once that little girl and is now a jittery mom played by Lupita Nyong’o. Adelaide is nervous about going back to the beach, which is easy to understand — but then why is she there in the first place? Peele’s writing is blah and perfunctory, especially when Adelaide’s husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), shows up with a powerboat he bought in a vain attempt to keep up with the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker) and their much fancier house and athletic blonde daughters. The Wilson kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), are more cerebral, but we don’t get to know them before the so-called “us” arrive.

Us centers on the appearance of the Wilsons’ exact doubles in the family’s driveway, which might lead you to expect semi-farcical scenes in which the identical Not-Wilsons take their look-alikes’ places or cause at least momentary (potentially deadly) confusion. But apart from Adelaide’s double, the invaders have little in the way of personality — only pairs of scissors they aim to sink into their counterparts’ throats. Peele and his cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, show their relish for the genre in the attacks, in how the doubles seem to rise up from the ground (you don’t see how they got there) to envelop and then puncture their victims. But I almost wrote “zombie attacks”: Although it’s packed with mythically scary images, much of the movie plays like just another walking-dead splatterfest. Peele saves the big reveals for the end, when they’re effective but too late. In the ways that matter, the attackers are “them” and not “us.”

This is the sort of movie that fans will rewatch to appreciate the fillips, the purposeful echoes, the bits of foreshadowing, and the performances. Moss has little screen time, but she shows her genius as her character’s murderous double. Watch her savor the act of putting on lip gloss: Her eyes turn dreamy, and her smile spreads so wide it looks as if it will swallow her face. This is zombie Kabuki. Nyong’o hits extraordinary notes. When she’s the double, her voice is the whistle of someone whose throat has been cut, with a gap between the start of a word in the diaphragm and its finish in the head. It’s like a rush of acrid air from a tomb, further chilled by eyes like boiled eggs, fixed on nothing in this world. The terrestrial Adelaide is more subtly scary; Nyong’o builds extra beats into the performance, lurches and ellipses that keep you from identifying with her too closely. Something’s off — but what?

When the movie ends, you can rearrange the pieces in your head and appreciate the breadth of what Peele set out to achieve. Social scientists and pundits speak of human society in terms of gaps — in wages, in education, in quality of life. It’s Peele’s ingenious notion that the under- and over classes are not estranged but “tethered” in ways that those at the bottom perceive as mockery and theft but that the privileged can’t see — and can perhaps feel only at the instant those scissors slash their jugulars. As in Get Out, that privilege breeds dissociation, one of the ripest subjects for a genre that brings to roaring life the revenge of the repressed.

Personal Opinion of the Film

This second film by director Jordan Peele is an interesting take on the family vacation disaster. By focusing on issues such as race, also seen in his initial debut, “Get Out”, we are presented with several relevant discussions. These include the wage gap, death between races and the differences in family stereotypes between races. Through metaphors, and symbol, these messages are transcribed throughout the plot and created a seamless work of art with deep meaning.