This Is America: Jordan Peele’s Us Tackles a Fractured Country

This review contains mild spoilers for Us. 

After the massive commercial success and cultural heft of 2017’s Get Out, expectations for Us, Jordan Peele’s follow-up, are sky high. While the racial themes in Get Out were front and center, Peele has set his targets much wider with US, a film rich with meaning that begs for multiple viewings just to be able to process everything Peele is throwing out there. In many ways, Us is Peele’s more difficult follow-up to the relatively straight-forward Get Out — a dense next act that will reward viewers digging for deeper subtext, while likely dividing audiences simply looking for a scary time at the movies.

Us is nearly impossible to dive into without delving into spoilers, but we will skirt around the basic story elements here and save the spoilers for a future piece. Us opens with a young child named Adelaide and her family out on a boardwalk stroll in the 80s. Between games of Whack-A-Mole, Adelaide eventually wanders off into a house of mirrors, where she comes upon a young girl who looks exactly like her. After her family searches frantically for her, Adelaide eventually returns to them, but the eerie experience has dramatically affected her.

Years later, an adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), her husband Gabe (Winston Duke), and their children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) are visiting the home that has been in Adelaide’s family since she was a child, but something is amiss. Adelaide seems wary of the trip, and outright refuses to go near the water. On their first night there, Jason notices a group dressed in red robes outside the property, which kicks off a deadly series of events as Adelaide and her family confront the intruders.

The besieged family quickly come to realize that the four intruders are mirror images of themselves, but refracted in strange ways. They move in an animal-like manner, often only grunting and communicating via hand signals, except for Adelaide’s double (described only as Red in the credits), who speaks in a very disturbing whisper-croak. We learn that the doubles are part of a much larger group known as The Tethered, identical copies of people who have been confined to live deep underground, and who are now determined to stake their revenge on a society that has neglected them for far too long.

The first half of Us is a white-knuckle ride. Peele takes a while to get to the horror elements, but even the very funny road trip scenes (led by Winston Duke’s hilarious dad joke routines) have an edge to them, since we know something is coming. Throughout the film, Peele does a great job of playing and subverting the audience’s expectations. A master student of classic horror, Peele ricochets between tones here, knowing that laughter and terror are often flip-sides of the very same coin.

The action scenes are riveting, as Adelaide and her family square off with their mirror-selves in unnerving ways. What initially seems like a one-off incident in a set location opens up a whole new world of dread when the family seeks refuge at a couple’s (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker) nearby home, only to realize that they are not the only ones under attack.

Us, much like the ink blot images that were used in the early marketing materials for the film, can be viewed in a number of different ways. There is a clear allegory here about income and societal inequality, with the surface dwellers blissfully unaware of those literally struggling beneath the surface. One can also view Us as a meditation on American politics — turn the film’s title into all-caps and replace those red jumpers with red hats, and the notion of people who look just like us and can’t be reasoned with suddenly swarming the country is the ultimate fear for many Americans.

Jordan Peele seems to be trying to say a number of things about the state of the country with this film, and the ways in which people can delude themselves, attempting to repress or destroy parts of themselves to the eventual detriment of everyone. This is not just subtext — when Adelaide asks Red what they are, she creaks out “We are Americans,” really hammering home what Peele is trying to say about the current discourse in the US.

While thinking of Us as simply a metaphor for America’s political system is a useful way to navigate through the film, Peele throws out so many signals and thematic references that it gets difficult to really focus on what he’s trying to say with this film. Is Us about the darkness lurking in the hearts of all of us? A mediation on trauma and PTSD, and how that manifests itself in the mind and body of survivors? An anti-Capitalist screed? A condemnation of our treatment of the homeless? (Hands Across America, an 80’s initiative to combat homelessness, plays a pivotal role here.) In many ways, Us is all of those things (and much more) which makes it a sort of Rorschach test for the audience — we’ll each see and respond to different things in Us, which will either thrill or frustrate audiences in equal measure.

With so much going on, tying all the threads together is a nearly impossible task, and the final act loses a bit of steam as the underlying mystery at the heart of the film is quickly explained away in one large expository dump. That explanation ends up raising more questions than it answers, and like with most horror films, the extra backstory makes the film inherently less scary. The sudden appearance of violent doppelgängers is such an inherently creepy idea (one that has become its own horror trope over the years) that any rational explanation is going to fall short of our expectations. The existence of the doubles is scary enough — we don’t really need to know why they’re there.

All of this analysis that the film prompts shouldn’t take away from the fact that Us is a truly frightening horror film, that also manages to be very funny. Peele creates a masterfully unnerving tone throughout, with Winston Duke landing some great lines while trying to figure out what sort of horrible predicament his family has fallen into. Lupita Nyong’o really carries the entire film with her incredible dual performances, from the white-hot intensity of Adelaide to her creepy, spider-like performance as Red . The performances from the children are also riveting, especially as their doubles, which deliver some of the creepiest moments in the entire film. Us also looks amazing, with disturbing (and often beautiful) imagery that will stick with you long after the complicated plot mechanisms have fallen from memory. Perhaps most importantly, Us is also a rare horror film that focuses almost exclusively on a black family, something rarely seen in mainstream horror circles.

Us has a lot to live up to, and the film mostly succeeds, despite some issues with the final act. Instead of playing it safe, Peele has delivered a dense and thought-provoking thriller that never makes it clear who we should be rooting for. That ambiguity might frustrate some audiences, but will surely reward multiple viewings and fire up online discussions about the film. Shortly after the premiere, the hallway of the theatre was full with strangers discussing the film, trying to unravel its various plot and thematic elements. With this film, Jordan Peele has found a small way to bring “us” together after all.

Us is in theatres now.