US

How does a comedian who’s second directorial film become the most anticipated original horror film in history?

When that first film happens to be Get Out, Jordan Peele’s award winning and wildly popular horror film… that’s how.

Get Out wasn’t just a good film it was a great one and instantly catapulted Peele to auteur status and from the abandoned underground sewer ways of the dreamy Santa Cruz beach town, Us continues that horrific take on social commentary, however, unlike Get Out, Us is a good film but not a great one.

The story begins when little Adelaide Wilson wanders off into “ a fun house” on the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk and by chance happens to stumble through a hallway of mirrors, with one of those reflections not being herself but another girl that looks exactly like her.

The event is traumatizing for the girl, who 30 plus years later (Lupita Nyong’o) returns to the seaside town as a married mother with two kids, living an upper-middle class life style vacationing at their second home.

But something isn’t right. She feels a sense of impending doom and rightfully so because that little girl she saw in the fun house all those years ago is now grown up too with her own family, living in the underground tunnels among neighbors and communities just like the ones above.

As the story unfolds we come to find that these are the ‘tethered’ or clone like people, identically same to the ones above. A science project gone wrong that somehow mates with the same people they’re tethered with above as well as produced the same off spring and experiences.

However, their story and experience are marked by the polar opposite of their tethered, filled with a life of only pain, suffering, and heart-ache so they have come to take their place on the surface and kill their privileged tethered in the process.

This all occurs nationwide as millions are massacred by their doppelgängers with the goal of fulfilling a 1986 movement of creating the hands across America where at one point and one time, from coast to coast everyone is holding hands creating a chain across the states (these people have goals they stick to).

Essentially it’s an apocalyptic type of film as we watch our characters, the Wilson family try to survive and kill their shadowy tethered in the process.

Honestly the story asks a lot in suspension of disbelief but true to the Peele style its all about social commentary and it does a fine job in regards to that aspect, pointing out the absurdities of privileged families and their troubles of keeping up with the Jones’ and having bad WIFI connection at their second homes.  Juxtaposed with their tethered who live in destitute, pain, and are forced to eat rabbit meat everyday so you kind of get their beef… no pun intended.

For all the  haves in this world there’s just as many or more have not’s.

But the most telling reveal that Peele has to offer, somehow, someway beneath all the carnage of throat slits and stabbing with giant gold scissors is his take on the age old subject of nature vs. nurture.

Are we born to do the things that we’re meant to do? Is fate dictated or learned?

It’s a fascinated debate as is the film for the questions and thoughts in provokes in the viewer after the final credits start to roll and you begin to really think about the movie….Us.