MOVIE REVIEW: US

On its first viewing, the first 45 minutes of Jordan Peele“s US might leave some questioning what form the movie will take. In one of a handful of viral tweets about the movie, Peele said of both his directorial debut and (then) upcoming second film “Get Out is a documentary. Us is a horror movie,”“ but even after the villains of the movie show up on screen, the tone is more comedic than scary, and in fact the film never does give off that gut-wrenching, uncomfortable kind of vibe we“ve come to associate with movies that scare us. Instead, the fear in US is psychological, but Peele still puts more energy into layering his metaphors than creating a conventional horror atmosphere. In that way, the movie has a lot in common with GET OUT. In others, not so much.

Like GET OUT, the last 20 minutes of US takes the movie in an unexpected direction, but in a much bigger way. In a lot of ways, the beginning of the story, which takes place at a Santa Cruz beach in 1986 ( and which is made intentionally vague until the end of the actual movie) is a reflection of GET OUT, with the protagonist, who was raised up to pre-pubescence in an underground version of the now famous Sunken Place, swapping places with her surface doppelganger and escaping her torment. Other reviews will break down the symbolism of the movie better than I can here, but what I will say now and probably a few more times throughout this review: this movie is its own breed of cinema.

As I said, things reached a different level at the movie“s end: when the movie“s hero, played by Lupita N“yongo, went underground to retrieve her kidnapped son. In this sequence, Peele reuses the mostly static camera of GET OUT“s climax to capture a brutal and emotionally ambiguous fight scene in an underground facility of military-style beds, a drab classroom, and hallways that have more inÂ common with shopping malls than either of the previously mentioned spaces. Here, the self-borrowing feels more like a director establishing a style than one who has run out of ideas. These are shots that feel as much like a Stanley Kubrick film as they do security footage, like somebody’s watching the heroes of these movies descend then ascend into freedom, or ascend then descend into the belly of the beast. Whether anybody actually is, and whether the malignant force that created The Tethered is aligned with The Armitages from GET OUT, is a question for future movies to answer. For now we just have Adelaide“s eyes on the promotional material for US as a hint at how these movies may be connected.

No work should be praised for only trying to do something different, as plenty do without putting nearly as much effort into the execution as they do the original idea. As a reviewer who normally covers comics, I can point to much of Grant Morrison“s early work at Vertigo as an example of this. Peele didn“t just take an idea and throw it into his movie, though. He knew that wouldn“t be enough. Instead, the themes, metaphors and cinematography of US are all polished in a way you don“t see a lot with somebody whose only done two movies. Like The Tethered, Peele has been preparing a long time for this.

I“ve never given anything a perfect score on this site, and while there might be works in the future I feel deserve the rating, I doubt manyÂ

will deserve it as much as US.“ This move goes places visually, thematically, and emotionally that just haven“t been done before. It“s a testament to what can happen when Hollywood allows the voices of a particular community to tell more than a handful of stories, rehashed with different actors and by different directors. I don“t doubt there are aspiring Black directors out there who have the potential to one day do what this movie did or more, but Jordan Peele couldn“t even do what this movie did until he did it. See, he didn“t just give us a visually unique science fiction story, an emotionally confusing narrative that balances comedy and fear in its own way, or an honest

depiction of a middle-class Black family before throwing a wrench into the whole thing, he created something in its own class, that we can probably assume now is not even close to all he is capable of.

[yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]