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Review: Jordan Peele’s “Us” Is a Colossal Cinematic Achievement

By Richard Brody

The success of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, “ Get Out ,” bought him time, he said, in a recent interview with Le Monde —for his new film, “Us,” he had twice as many shoot days. The expanded time frame allowed him to produce a work of expanded ambition: “Us” bounces back and forth between 1986 and the present day, and its action, compared to “Get Out,” has a vast range—geographical, dramatic, and intellectual. The movie’s imaginative spectrum is enormous, four-dimensionally so: it delves deep into a literal underground world that lends the hallucinatory concept of the “sunken place” from “Get Out” a physical embodiment. And it captures the transformative, radical power of a political conscience, of an idea long held in secret, as it ripens and develops over decades’ worth of time. “Us” is nothing short of a colossal achievement.

Structured like a home-invasion drama, “Us” is a horror film—though saying so is like offering a reminder that “The Godfather” is a gangster film or that “2001: A Space Odyssey” is science fiction. Genre is irrelevant to the merits of a film, whether its conventions are followed or defied; what matters is that Peele cites the tropes and precedents of horror in order to deeply root his film in the terrain of pop culture—and then to pull up those roots. “Us” is a film that places itself within pop culture for diagnostic—and even self-diagnostic—purposes; its subject is, in large measure, cultural consciousness and its counterpart, the cultural unconscious. The crucial element of horror is political and moral—the realities that metaphorical fantasies evoke.

Peele reaches deep into the symbolic DNA of pop culture to discover a hidden, implicit history that he brings to the fore, at a moment of growing recognition that the deeds of the past still rage with silent and devastating force in the present time. After a title card notes the presence of a vast hidden network of tunnels (as for abandoned railways and mines) beneath American soil, the action begins with a bit of pop archeology: a shot of an old-fashioned tube TV set, on which a commercial is playing for “Hands Across America,” a 1986 philanthropic fund-raising event that involved an effort to create a human chain from coast to coast. (The announcer’s voice-over says, “Six million people will tether themselves together to fight hunger in America.”)

At that time, a young girl named Adelaide (though her name isn’t heard until much later in the film, when she’s an adult) is visiting a Santa Cruz beach with her squabbling parents. The child (Madison Curry) wanders off, enters a beachside haunted-house attraction, and, there, walking through a hall of mirrors reminiscent of the one in Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai,” sees not her reflection but her physical double. After the incident, her parents find her traumatized, but just what happened isn’t clear to them. In the present day, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is married to Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke), and they have two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), a teen-ager, and Jason (Evan Alex), who seems to be about eight. The Wilsons are prosperous—they’re heading to a summer house by a lake, where Gabe buys a speedboat (albeit a beat-up, run-down one) on a whim. It’s not clear what they do for a living; Adelaide used to dance but gave it up. What is clear is that she now has an aversion to the beach because of the haunted house, which is still there, in a slightly different guise. Her memories and flashbacks suggest that the trauma from whatever happened in the house has haunted her for her whole life.

The Wilsons are black, a fact that, as depicted, has little overt effect on their lives. Avoiding the stereotypes of black Americans in movies, Peele instead knowingly depicts them as a stereotype of a financially successful, socially stable, and cinematically average American family. It’s as though they naturally and unintentionally use what Boots Riley’s film, “Sorry to Bother You,” would call their “white voice,” the voice of white-dominated corporate prosperity. (There’s even a wink back to “Get Out,” regarding the Wilsons’ utterly untroubled confidence in the police.) Their summer companions are a white (and wealthier) family, the Tylers, Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), and their twin daughters, Becca (Cali Sheldon) and Lindsey (Noelle Sheldon).

Back at their summer house that night, Adelaide experiences premonitions—she tells Gabe that she feels that her double is out there somewhere. “My whole life I’ve felt as if she’s still coming for me,” she says, and, on this night, she feels as if “she’s getting closer.” Moments later, Jason sees another family standing outside the house; it turns out to be four doubles of the Wilson family, distinguished by their matching red jumpsuits (reminiscent of prison uniforms) and tan sandals, their static posture—holding hands side by side, in the manner of Hands Across America—and their silence. The doubles soon burst into the house, facing off against the Wilsons while Adelaide’s double (named, in the credits, Red)—the only one of the four doppelgängers to speak—states, in a hoarse and halting voice, her demands.

No less than “Get Out,” “Us” is a work of directorial virtuosity, in which Peele invests every moment, every twist, every diabolically conceived and gleefully invoked detail with graphic, psychological resonance and controlled tone, in performance and gesture. Here, as in “Get Out,” Peele employs point-of-view shots to put audience members in the position of the characters, to conjure subjective and fragmentary experience that reverberates with the metaphysical eeriness of their suddenly doubled world. (Recurring nods to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” suggest a mysterious transformation of the natural order.) Exactly as the title promises (and as the drama delivers, when Jason identifies the intruders, saying, “It’s us”), the movie turns the screen into a funhouse mirror in which the distortions prove to be truer representations of the state of things—in the world of its viewers—than more familiar, realistic depictions.

A distinctively American vision is planted throughout the action of “Us,” with an explicit and monitory allusion to the notion of national destiny. As a child, Adelaide sees, at the beach, a silent beachcomber-prophet with a sign that reads “Jeremiah 11:11.” In that chapter, God grants people land on the condition that they keep their covenant with Him, but when they revert to “the sins of their ancestors,” they face divine retribution: “Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.’ ” When Adelaide asks the family’s doubles “What are you people?,” the wording of the question (not “who” but “what”) is less offensive than it is literally ontological: Are they alive or dead? Are they zombies or robots or creatures from space or figments of their imagination? Red’s answer is “We’re Americans.” (Even the title, “Us,” doubles as “U.S.”)

“Us” is intensely suspenseful (it would be sinful to spoil its twists or even to hint at its scares) and moderately gory—yet the bloodshed rigorously serves the drama. It’s never there to gross out viewers or to test their threshold of shock or disgust. (And I’m squeamish.) In particular, the explicit violence provides a serious view of life-threatening dangers that compel bourgeois characters to get their hands dirty with the act of killing—it shows what they’re up against and what they have to face, and to do, in an effort to save themselves. Yet “Us” also offers that safety, that salvation, with bitter irony. (It brings to mind Florence Reece’s pro-union song “ Which Side Are You On? ”) It’s a movie that, true to its genre, is plotted with hair-trigger mechanisms that tweak suspense with surprises—intellectual ones along with dramatic and sensory ones.

With its foretold emphasis on tunnels, “Us” proves to be something like Peele’s version of “ Notes from Underground ,” complete with its fiery arias of torment from those whose voices otherwise go unheard. (There’s a relevant wink along the way at Samuel Fuller’s jangling masterwork “ Shock Corridor .”) The term that describes the link between the Wilsons and their doubles is called “tethering”—and that word, in its many grammatical forms, recurs throughout the film (not least, in repeated allusions to Hands Across America). The nature of bonds—social bonds, voluntary and involuntary connections of some people to others—is at the heart of the movie, the desire for solidarity with some, the intended or oblivious dissociation from others.

The movie’s many pop-culture references—whether kids wearing T-shirts for “Thriller” and “Jaws” or the presence of “Good Vibrations” and “Fuck tha Police” on the soundtrack—are no mere decorations. Peele’s radical vision of inequality, of the haves and the have-nots, those who are in and those who are out, is reflected brightly and brilliantly in his view of pop culture, current and classic (including riffs on romantic melodrama and on the notion of emotional expression as a luxury in itself). Mass media is presented in “Us” as a rich people’s culture, if not in the immediate origins of its artists, then in the production, distribution, marketing, platforming, and lawyering of the work—in the very notion of its valuable and ubiquitous legacy. (In the Le Monde interview, Peele cited the soundtrack as another principal benefit of his higher budget.)

“Us” highlights the unwitting complicity of even apparently well-meaning and conscientious people in an unjust order that masquerades as natural and immutable but is, in fact, the product of malevolent designs that leave some languishing in the perma-shadows. (Designed by whom? The movie doesn’t name names, but it winks and nods and nudges in a general direction that runs from the sea to the lake.) It dramatizes this world, but with a twist—one that (avoiding spoilers) risks overturning conventional values and sympathies with ecstatic fervor. Suffice it to say that “Us” reserves empathy for its unwitting villains while gleefully deriding their comfortably normal state of obliviousness—and the ordinary absurdities of the world at large.

The movie’s exquisite perceptiveness and its alluring details are part of a vision that ranges between the outrageously sardonic and the grandly tragic. It renders the movie, for all its suspense, violence, and moral outrage, as much of a joy to recall, moment by moment, as it is to watch. Zora, after wielding an improvised weapon in a desperate, defensive rage, wiggles her arm in fatigue, as if she’d just completed a household chore. Gabe, challenging the doppelgängers with a metal baseball bat, adopts a stereotypical black-dialect voice as if, by doing so, he could make himself more menacing. Jason, suspicious of his own double (named Pluto), crafts a chess-like strategy leading to results and images of anguished grandeur. There are all kinds of magnificently world-built elements that only make sense in the light of big, late reveals, such as a strange and bloody preview, on the Santa Cruz beach, of the Wilson family’s doubles, and Adelaide’s early success as a dancer (and her double’s ability to use it against her).

This world-building has a stark thematic simplicity that both belies and inspires immense complexity. “Us” is a movie that defies the jigsaw-fit, quasi-academic interpretation that pervades recent criticism. As much as the movie offers a metaphorical vision of the enormities of social and political life, it also offers implications of an inner world, a projection of Peele-iana that maps his personal vision onto that of the world at large—and that, in turn, calls upon viewers to receive that world as intensely and consciously and imaginatively as he tries to do. The results of doing so, he suggests, are intrinsically political, even revolutionary.

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“Get Out”: Jordan Peele’s Radical Cinematic Vision of the World Through a Black Man’s Eyes

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‘Us’ Review: Jordan Peele’s Creepy Latest Turns a Funhouse Mirror on Us

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‘Us’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Jordan peele narrates a sequence from his film..

“I’m Jordan Peele. I’m the writer, producer, and director of the movie “Us.’” “There’s a family in our driveway.” “So here we have the scene where the tethered family arrives at the Wilson house for the first time. Jason, of course, says “there’s a family in our driveway.” A line designed, giddily, to attempt to be an iconic line, like “they’re here” from the “Poltergeist” movie and sort of help congeal this sense of an Amblin-esque predicament with a black family in the center of it.” - [heavy breathing] “What?” “Zora, give me your phone.” “I’m not on it.” “Zora!” “This is the point in the movie where I want the terror to really kick into a new gear for the audience. One of the techniques that I utilized to get that terror was that all of a sudden we go into real time. The movie before this has been going from some time dashes here and there. When we get into this moment where the four family members are standing holding hands outside, then we go into this sort of fluid — we use a lot of the Steadicam with very few edits. Really trying to subliminally signal to the audience that this sort of relentless, real time event has begun and is taking place.” “Wait, wait, wait, just one sec — Gabe.” “So we see Gabe leave. He goes out. He’s the dad, he’s got to deal with it. This is kind of like — probably pulled from my own anxieties of being a father and realizing, yeah, you got to man up sometimes.” “Hi. Can I help you?” “One of the things in this scene that really inspired me was the scene in “Halloween” where Michael Myers has the ghost sheet over him. And no matter how many questions he’s asked, he just doesn’t respond. The less response you get, the more impending and physical, I think, the threat gets. Probably after the second time someone doesn’t respond, you know one of you’s got to go down. [laughing] “A’ight, I asked you nice. Now I need y’all to get off my property.” “One of the pieces of this scene that works really well is we’ve got Winston to this spot where he’s code switching. You know, he goes back to some of his roots, as it were, to try and intimidate this mysterious family out there. That maybe if sort of reasoning with them doesn’t work, a good old fashioned low register, throwing some bass into his voice, coming out with a little swagger and a bat might work.” “O.K., let’s call the cops.” “Winston is just remarkable in this scene, and the audience really I think is in this tug of war between feeling the tension ratcheting up and the fear of what’s to come and the little bit of a comic relief of watching this kind of goofy dad who’s in over his head.” “Gabe.” “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right.” “Gabe!” “I got this.”

By Manohla Dargis

March 20, 2019

Jordan Peele’s new horror movie, “Us,” is an expansive philosophical hall of mirrors. Like his 2017 hit, “Get Out,” this daring fun-until-it’s-not shocker starts from the genre’s central premise that everyday life is a wellspring of terrors. In “Get Out,” a young black man meets a group of white people who buy — at auction — younger, healthier black bodies. What makes “Get Out” so powerful is how Peele marshals a classic tale of unwilling bodily possession into a resonant, unsettling metaphor for the sweep of black and white relations in the United States — the U.S., or us.

“Us” is more ambitious than “Get Out,” and in some ways more unsettling. Once again, Peele is exploring existential terrors and the theme of possession, this time through the eerie form of the monstrous doppelgänger. The figure of the troublesome other — of Jekyll and Hyde, of the conscious and unconscious — ripples through the story of an ordinary family, the Wilsons, stalked by murderous doubles. These shadows look like the Wilsons but are frighteningly different, with fixed stares and guttural, animalistic vocalizations. Dressed in matching red coveralls and wielding large scissors (the better to slice and dice), they are funhouse-mirror visions turned nightmares.

The evil twin is a rich, durable motif, and it winds through “Us” from start to finish, beginning with a flashback to 1986 at a Santa Cruz, Calif., amusement park. There, a young girl (the expressive Madison Curry) and her parents are leisurely wandering the park. The girl is itsy-bitsy (the camera sticks close to her so that everything looms), and she and her parents maintain a chilly, near-geometric distance from one another. She’s clutching a perfect candied apple, a portentous splash of red and a witty emblem both of Halloween and Edenic forbidden fruit. Movies are journeys into knowledge, and what the girl knows is part of the simmering mystery.

The Wilsons, a family of four headed by Adelaide (a dazzling Lupita Nyong’o) and Gabe (Winston Duke), enter many years later, introduced with an aerial sweep of greenery. The bird’s-eye view (or god’s-eye, given the movie’s metaphysical reach) evokes the opener of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” a film Peele references throughout. A true cinephile, Peele scatters “Us” with nods and allusions to old-school 1970s and ’80s movies including “Goonies,” “Jaws,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” (One disturbing scene suggests that he’s also a fan of Michael Haneke.) But “The Shining” — another story of a grotesquely haunted family — serves as his most obvious guiding star, narratively and visually.

[Read about Lupita Nyong’o and her work on the movie.]

Peele likes to mix tones and moods, and as he did in “Get Out,” he uses broad humor both for delay and deflection. There’s a cryptic opener and an equally enigmatic credit sequence, but soon the Wilsons are laughing at their vacation home. It’s a breather that Peele uses for light jokes and intimacy (Duke’s amiable performance provides levity and warmth) while he scatters narrative bread crumbs. There’s a beach trip with another family, this one headed by Kitty (a fantastic Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), who have teenage twin girls (cue “The Shining”). At last, the movie jumps to kinetic life with the appearance of the Wilsons’ doubles, who descend in a brutal home invasion.

The assault is a master class of precision-timed scares filled with light shivers and deeper, reverberant frights. Working within the house’s tight, angled spaces — soon filled with fluid camerawork and bodies moving to dramatically different beats — Peele turns this domestic space into a double of the funhouse that loomed in the amusement park. After much scrambling and shrieking, the Wilsons and their weird twins face off in the living room, mirroring one another. Adelaide’s shadow, Red (the actors play their doubles), takes charge and splits up the Wilsons, ordering her husband, daughter and son to take charge of their terrified others while she remains with Adelaide.

[ Read Jason Zinoman’s essay on why this is the golden age of grown-up horror. ]

A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors. She gives each a specific walk and sharply opposite gestures and voices (maternally silky vs. monstrously raspy). Adelaide, who studied ballet, moves gracefully and, when need be, rapidly (she racks up miles); Red moves as if keeping time to a metronome, with the staccato, mechanical step and head turns of an automaton. Both have ramrod posture and large unblinking eyes. Red’s mouth is a monstrous abyss.

The confrontation between Adelaide and Red testifies to Peele’s strength with actors — here, he makes the most of Nyong’o’s dueling turns — but, once Red starts explaining things, it also telegraphs the story’s weakness. “Us” is Peele’s second movie, but as his ideas pile up — and the doubles and their terrors expand — it starts to feel like his second and third combined. One of the pleasures of “Get Out” was its conceptual and narrative elegance, a streamlining that makes it feel shorter than its one hour 44 minutes. “Us” runs a little longer, but its surfeit of stuff — its cinephilia, bunnies of doom, sharp political detours and less-successful mythmaking — can make it feel unproductively cluttered.

Peele’s boldest, most exciting and shaky conceptual move in “Us” is to yoke the American present with the past, first by invoking the 1986 super-event Hands Across America. A very ’80s charity drive (one of its organizers helped create the ’85 benefit hit “We Are the World” ), it had Americans holding hands from coast to coast, making a human chain meant to fight hunger and homelessness. President Reagan held hands in front of the White House even while his administration was criticized for cutting billions for programs to help the homeless.

In “Us,” the appearance of unity — in a nation, in a person — doesn’t last long before being ripped away like one of the movie’s masks. Peele piles on (and tears off) the masks and the metaphors, tethers the past to the present and draws a line between the Reagan and Trump presidencies, suggesting that we were, and remain, one nation profoundly divisible. He also busies up his story with too many details, explanations and cutaways. Peele’s problem isn’t that he’s ambitious; he is, blissfully. But he also feels like an artist who has been waiting a very long time to say a great deal, and here he steps on, and muddles, his material, including in a fight that dilutes even Nyong’o’s best efforts.

Early on, Peele drops in some text about the existence of abandoned tunnels, mines and subways in the United States. I flashed on Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad,” which literalizes the network of safe houses and routes used by enslaved black Americans, turning it into a fantastical subterranean passageway to freedom. In “Us,” Peele uses the metaphor of the divided self to explore what lies beneath contemporary America, its double consciousness, its identity, sins and terrors. The results are messy, brilliant, sobering, even bleak — the final scene is a gut punch delivered with a queasy smile — but Jordan Peele isn’t here just to play.

Us Rated R for horror violence, featuring scissors and a pesky boat motor. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes.

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Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Will Haunt You

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s scary as hell, and that’s just for starters. But Us , the new mesmerizing mindbender from writer-director-producer Jordan Peele , also carries the weight of expectation. Get Out , Peele’s smashing debut from 2017, was a brilliantly caustic satire of race division in America that won Peele an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (he’s the first African-American to triumph in that category) and became a phenom with critics and audiences. How can Peele top that? Short answer: he can’t and doesn’t. In interviews , Peele insists that Us is a straight-up horror show. Not really. Leave it to Peele to blaze a trail by putting a black family smack in the middle of a commercial thriller-diller. That’s more than a novelty, it’s a quiet revolution. And Peele’s hints at the larger conspiracies of race, class and social violence festering inside the American dream resonate darkly. Ding Peele all you want for taking on more than he can comfortably handle, but this 40-year-old from New York who started as one half of the sketch-comedy team of Key & Peele is now shaping up as a world-class filmmaker. Flaws and all, Us has the power to haunt your waking dreams. You won’t be able to stop talking about it.

Related: Jordan Peele on the Cover of Rolling Stone

Critics, in mortal fear of the spoiler police, need to shut the fuck up. Or at least tread carefully as Peele introduces the Wilson family of sunny California. Mom Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), dad Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two kids — Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) — are on vacation in Santa Cruz. Gabe has an unspoken competition with his friends the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), a white couple with twin daughters given to conspicuous consumption. Everyone is up for a fun time, especially dad (the excellent Duke — looking much like Peele — gets laughs in the unlikeliest places). But Adelaide is not feeling it. In a chilling prologue, set in 1986, we see Adelaide as a child getting majorly freaked out by a trip to a beachside funhouse containing a hall of mirrors. Now the grown Adelaide is back on the same beach where she was traumatized as a child, and she’s taking her own children along. You can cut the foreboding with a knife — or a pair of gold scissors.

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Scissors figure prominently when the Wilsons are confronted in their driveway by unexpected visitors. Since the scene is included in the film’s trailer, I’m not giving away anything to note that these home invaders — clad in red — are exact doubles of the four Wilsons. And the scissors these zombie-like doppelgängers carry are meant to slit throats. “What the hell are you?” asks Gabe. The answer is croaked out by Adelaide’s evil twin (the only double who speaks) in a voice that induces shudders: “We’re Americans.”

The political implications of that genuinely creepy setup are tantalizing, as are the film’s allusions to Hands Across America — the 1986 event in which a human chain of millions was formed to help alleviate poverty and hunger — and the thousands of miles of empty tunnels that run under the continental United States, including the Underground Railroad that symbolizes African enslavement. Is Peele referencing the Sunken Place of the Trump era in which the new gospel preaches fear of the other? If so, the theme remains frustratingly undeveloped. Yet Peele, the supreme cinema stylist, is on a roll. The violence is unnerving as the doubles set out to untether themselves from their human counterparts. By necessity,the Wilsons become a family that kills together. Even the Tylers get invaded. Kudos to Moss, who takes a small role and runs with it. The scene in which her character’s wild-eyed double smears on lip gloss is an unforgettable blend of mirth and menace.

Still, the acting honors in Us go to Nyong’o, who is actually playing two roles, one as protective mother and another as predator. She is superb as both. And what she does with her voice as Adelaide’s double is impossible to shake. Nyong’o, already an Oscar winner for Twelve Years a Slave , should be in the running again for delivering one of the great performances in horror movie history, right up there with Sissy Spacek in Carrie and Jack Nicholson in The Shining .

Peele, an unapologetic horror fanatic, nods to those films and dozens more in Us , including Invasion of the Body Snatchers , Jaws and Michael Jackson’s Thriller . Yet his style is completely his own, as assured as it is ambitious. With the help of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, up to his It Follows mischief, and a score by Get Out composer Michael Abels that is built to shatter your nerves, the action never lets up. The Beach Boys anthem “Good Vibrations” is featured in the mix, as is “I Got 5 On It” by the hip-hop duo Luniz. You’ll never be able to hear those songs again in the same way.

SXSW 2019: Jordan Peele's 'Us' Is Terrifying

The first time: jordan peele, 'immaculate': sydney sweeney's catholic horror movie is pure nunsense.

There are times when Us plays like an extended and exceptional episode of The Twilight Zone , the 1950’s TV series revived next month on CBS All Access and hosted by Peele in Rod Serling mode. But Peele can’t stop himself from reaching higher and cutting deeper. The twisty road he takes us on opens itself to many interpretations. There are times when the film grips us with such hallucinatory terror that you may think it’s another of Adelaide’s PTSD-induced nightmares. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a ghastly reflection of the way we live now. Peele uses a Biblical quote from Jeremiah 11:11 that suggests even God has turned his back on us. What is never in doubt is that Peele is using the scare genre to show us a world tragically untethered to its own humanity, its empathy, its soul. If that’s not a horror film for its time, I don’t know what is.

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Film Review: Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’

Comedian-turned-horror-maestro Jordan Peele veers farther into the dark recesses of America's collective id, implicating us as our own worst enemies.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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For all the genius of Jordan Peele ’s 2017 debut, “Get Out” — a movie that oh-so-smartly reinforced its horror-movie skeleton with an adamantium-strong (and twice as sharp) racial-tension allegory — audiences seemed to have one critique in common: The movie wasn’t nearly scary enough. People aren’t likely to have the same complaint about “Us,” the genre-savvy writer-director’s terrifying — if somewhat less clearly double-edged — second feature, which comes loaded with nightmare-inducing images of tunnel-dwelling döppelgangers who’ve come to claim the privileged lives their aboveground counterparts have been enjoying all this time.

Debuting to an enthusiastic reception at the SXSW Film Festival (keep in mind, those Austin audiences seem to love everything) mere weeks before Peele’s reboot of “The Twilight Zone” drops, “Us” arrives in a shroud of secrecy that definitely works to the film’s advantage. The less you know going in — and the less energy you spend thinking about it after the fact — the better the movie works, trading on some uncanny combination of Peele’s imagination and our own to suggest a horror infinitely larger and more insidious than the film is capable of representing.

Do you ever get the sense that your actions are partly out of your control? Does it occasionally seem like some external force is driving your decisions? That disconcerting feeling may explain why Adelaide wanders off from her parents during a trip to the Santa Cruz boardwalk, straying from the amusement park proper to visit an eerie Vision Quest attraction along the beach by herself. But something happens while Adelaide is exploring the hall of mirrors: A storm rages, the power goes out, and she comes face to face with something more than her reflection.

That was 1986. The encounter is so unsettling (for Adelaide … the horror hasn’t quite kicked in for audiences just yet) that she’s suppressed its memory for more than 30 years — which happens to be when the film picks up, in the present day. Adelaide (played by Lupita Nyong’o) is now in her 30s, married to Gabe (her “Black Panther” co-star Winston Duke, a source of welcome comic relief), with two relatively well-adjusted kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). The Wilsons. Though not quite as wealthy as good friends Josh and Kitty Tyler (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss), they are the picture of the ideal American family, heading back to Santa Cruz for their summer vacation.

As in “Get Out,” we know to suspect that when things look too good to be true, they probably are, and yet, it would take a pretty twisted mind to anticipate what Peele has in store for us this time. There’s that word: Us. Within the realm of scary movies, döppelganger stories occupy an entire subgenre unto themselves — and they nearly all end with the same “twist,” which won’t surprise many here — though Peele is a clever enough social commentator to orchestrate an entire horror movie around that old adage, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Americans spend so much time worrying about “the other” — demonizing immigrants, unfamiliar races, or the all-powerful 1% — that we seldom think to look for what’s holding us back where we’re most likely to find it: in the mirror.

Early in “Us,” youngest child Jason gazes out the front window and eerily announces, “There’s a family in our driveway.” Sure enough, there stand four people in silhouette: mother, father, daughter, and son. While Adelaide doesn’t hesitate to call the cops (another Peele signature, making his characters smarter than the dead-meat-walking idiots who typically populate horror movies), Gabe does the manly thing, all but thumping his chest as he steps outside to confront these unannounced visitors, who freak him out by refusing to acknowledge his macho display. The movie is constantly illustrating — and nearly as often inverting — the gender roles we play in a patriarchal society, as when daughter Zora takes the lead to become the family’s most effective defender at one point.

But long before the police have a chance to arrive (they never get there, by the way, which is one more reason N.W.A’s “F— tha Police” feels like such a fitting addition to a soundtrack that otherwise relies mostly on Michael Abels’ nerve-twisting suspense work), those four uninvited guests find their way into the Wilsons’ living room, and wouldn’t you know, they look just like their hosts. The press notes refer to these almost zombie-like home invaders, dressed in red and all but incapable of human speech, as “the Tethered,” although “twins” is the closest the characters come to naming them.

Peele doesn’t explain much about these mysterious visitors, letting our worst fears run wild as the intruders hover menacingly around the family, dressed in heavy-duty red coveralls. Only Nyong’o’s döppelganger can speak, and even then, her words come out strained, as if she’s never had reason to talk before — and perhaps she hasn’t, as the Tethered seem to communicate primarily via sign language and guttural animal noises. One thing is certain: They do not come in peace, though Peele draws out these early uncertain scenes, taking advantage of the ambiguity for the threat to unfold in our subconscious.

That’s a brave move on his part, since it assumes that Americans all share enough of the same anxieties — and/or pop-culture reference points — that Peele can identify and exploit our collective dread. And perhaps we do: What could be more upsetting than being faced with primitive, apparently resentful versions of ourselves looking to take possession of our homes and hurt our families? But too many of Peele’s concepts don’t quite come across, like the suggestion that the Tethered have been manipulating us all along, or the implication that they can anticipate our defenses because they are us.

We never really see that last idea in action. In fact, although the Tethered seem to have been far more successful killing everyone else in the country, they are no match for the Wilsons, who fight back with fireplace pokers, golf clubs, and other blunt objects. And then there’s the whole matter of the third act, in which “Us” attempts to explain its master plan, taking us beneath the surface to reveal what may as well be an elaborate metaphor for the id — the primitive place where our impulses and unconscious aspects of our thinking (which could well be our worst enemy) lurk. Like the “sunken place” Peele invented for “Get Out,” this sinister domain offers a visual allegory for the darker aspects of our own socialization — which, if the film were more successful in its final stretch, would force us to confront the monsters within each of us.

Reviewed at SXSW Film Festival (opener), March 8, 2019. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 116 MIN.

Production: A Universal Pictures release, presented in association with Perfect World Pictures, of a Monkeypaw production. Producers: Jordan Peele, Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, Ian Cooper. Executive producers: Daniel Lupi, Beatriz Sequeira.
Crew: Director, writer: Jordan Peele. Camera (color, widescreen): Mike Gioulakis. Editor: Nicholas Monsour. Music: Michael Abels.
With: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss , Tim Heidecker, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Evan Alex, Shahadi Wright-Joseph, Madison Curry, Cali Sheldon.

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Us Doesn’t Live Up to Get Out , But It Shows the Promise of Jordan Peele

Once you get over the disappointment that Jordan Peele’s second feature , Us , isn’t as trim or impish in its satire as his marvelous debut, Get Out , you can settle back and salute what it is: the most inspiring kind of miss. It’s what you want an artist of Peele’s sensibility and stature to attempt — to broaden his canvas, deepen his psychological insight, and add new cinematic tools to his kit. However clunky and repetitive, Us continues to demonstrate Peele’s understanding that great horror requires metaphors that are insanely great, that might have come to him in dreams of falling into a “sunken place” or, in this film, into a parallel subterranean world denuded of all material pleasures. Imagine Alice’s White Rabbit down and out and eaten away by deprivation. Imagine that it’s a white lab rabbit. Imagine a fusion of Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, and James Baldwin — plus arterial spray. So much here to love.

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.

If you’ve seen the trailer , you know 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.

But to give Peele’s vision its due, you’d need the skills of an artist-animator like Hayao Miyazaki, for whom the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds is porous and those rabbits could take human form — and vice versa. As a horror buff, I hate to admit it, but Peele’s attachment to creaky genre tropes is already starting to hold him back. The good news is that he’s more than halfway to creating his own syntax, his own means for illuminating the sunken places of the world. I have a feeling there will be miraculous excavations to come.

*This article appears in the March 18, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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Us is Jordan Peele’s thrilling, blood-curdling allegory about a self-destructing America

Our ugliest history is coming for us.

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Share All sharing options for: Us is Jordan Peele’s thrilling, blood-curdling allegory about a self-destructing America

Jordan Peele’s Us, its title signals, is not a movie from which we as viewers can be detached. It demands from the start that we recognize an uncomfortable fact: Out in the audience, we’re part of the story.

And it’s a movie about doubles and doppelgängers, so of course the title is pulling double allegorical duty. Peele is a walking pop culture encyclopedia, especially horror and science fiction (he’s hosting and producing CBS’s Twilight Zone reboot , which premieres on April 1). So there’s no way he named his Get Out follow-up without self-conscious reference to Them! , the 1954 sci-fi film in which a nest of giant irradiated ants threatens Americans from tunnels beneath New Mexico, a recompense (a voiceover at the end tells us) for the hubris of the atomic age.

The title also obviously signals that this movie is about us — first-person plural, audience and filmmakers alike — but with some additional specificity: US = United States. As one of the characters rasps once the film cranks into gear, “We are Americans.” Us is a movie about America.

Rife with symbols and encroaching apocalyptic dread, Us is a big, ambitious fable about how a society develops willful amnesia, then tears itself to pieces. Like last year’s Hereditary and the upcoming The Lodge , it’s horror cosplaying as family drama. But unlike those movies, Us ’s target isn’t intimate; it’s a whole nation that doesn’t want to remember the less savory parts of history.

It also works best if you don’t try to pick it apart too much and stitch together a coherent mythology. Us is likely to frustrate people who crave plot points that can be coherently explained and mapped explicitly, directly onto the real world. In this way, it feels less expertly crafted than Get Out , though also more ripe for rewatching, considering from new angles; your mileage may vary. And what people see reflected in the film may say less about the film than it does about themselves. (It’s no accident that some posters for the film feature inkblot imagery to clearly mimic a Rorschach test.)

But no matter who’s watching, the movie is richly entertaining and unnerving. Us is more intuitive than explicatory, more visceral than diagrammatic; it’s horrific in a way that hangs onto your gut when it’s all over.

Us turns a family trip to the beach into nightmare

Humans seem to find copies of themselves terrifying. Traditionally, seeing your doppelgänger means death is nigh ; in some cultures and times, twins have been considered so unlucky that one in a pair is killed after birth.

So it’s quite frightening when, at the beginning of the film, young Adelaide (Madison Curry) — a child visiting a boardwalk amusement park on the Santa Cruz beach with her bickering parents in 1986 — wanders away into a funhouse and, in the hall of mirrors, is confronted by her own self. Not a reflection of herself. A copy of herself.

In the present day, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is on vacation with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), at the family’s beach house near Santa Cruz. Gabe suggests they go to the beach to meet up with their friends Josh (Tim Heidecker) and Kitty (Elisabeth Moss), who cordially despise one another in between raising their twin teenaged daughters (Cali Sheldon and Noelle Sheldon).

Adelaide looks stricken at Gabe’s suggestion, but eventually agrees to go, though only warily. While they’re on the beach, Jason briefly wanders away, scaring Adelaide half to death. But soon, all’s well, and the family returns that evening to wind down and get some sleep.

And then, they see four figures at the end of their driveway, holding hands, standing motionless. They won’t go away. When, all at once, they converge on the house, the family discovers to their horror that these aren’t mysterious strangers — they’re the family’s doppelgängers, their exact doubles, except twisted, angry, and out for blood.

Us focuses on the broader social context of its horror

It’s a chilling premise that keeps expanding outwards, challenging what we think we know about the world of the film. Drawing on tropes from home invasion horror, monster movies, supernatural thrillers, and eerie social chillers, Us slowly builds the case that our greatest enemies are our shadow selves, the parts of us that we like to keep hidden.

But Us is less fixated on the individual psyche, more on the broader cultural and social implications of this idea, and how it’s shaped the way we talk, think, and act on matters of race and class in America. The family is hounded by their own doubles because of long-forgotten events they did not personally set in motion. America’s efforts to forget this history has led the country toward this apocalypse of its own creation.

This metaphor, by my lights, escapes being a little too obvious very narrowly. Peele largely manages to skirt potential clumsiness with the deft directorial hand (and punctuations of humor) so evident in Get Out . The film’s beats feel deliberate and solid, not ponderous. Anything could change at any second. Nobody is safe.

The doubles arrive, and they’re not playing around.

Each actor has the especially difficult task of playing themselves as well as their own, twisted double — even the children — and their vacillations from frightened to wounded to deranged are the source of most of the film’s horror; there’s nothing scarier than a demonic grin on a young girl’s face. Everyone is uniformly terrific, but Nyong’o’s performance as the film’s narrative and moral center is virtuosically creepy and heartbreaking, like she’s swapping out souls between — or even during — takes.

The cast’s considered, meticulous adaptability to their dual roles fits with the rest of the film’s own eye for detail. Everything we see on screen seems intended for us to note and consider, from the VHS tapes on the shelf next to a TV in 1986 ( Goonies , C.H.U.D. ) to the logos on the kids’ T-shirts ( Jaws , Hands Across America , Michael Jackson’s Thriller ).

The funhouse into which young Adelaide ventures is called “Shaman Vision Quest,” with a cartoonish Native American figure draped over the name, but by the time the family revisits the beach decades later, it’s been changed to “Merlin’s Enchanted Forest,” with no remainder of its racist past. A recurring reference to the 1986 anti-poverty Hands Across America campaign (which raised $34 million, but only actually distributed about $15 million, less than half, to the poor) becomes more and more significant as the film goes on. And an early shot slowly pulls back on cages of rabbits, stacked on top of one another; a sea of white rabbits is punctuated by a couple of brown and black ones. That’s no accident.

None of this is accidental. In Us , everything matters.

Us warns that a destruction of biblical proportions is coming, and it started inside our own souls

Of all of Peele’s deliberate choices, the doubling motif is the most important. It furnishes the impetus for the plot, but it shows up in other ways. A man shows up on the boardwalk in both 1986 and the present day holding a cardboard sign, on which is written, in crayon, “Jeremiah 11:11” — “Therefore, thus says the Lord, Behold, I am bringing disaster upon them that they cannot escape. Though they cry to me, I will not listen to them.”

The verse’s significance is more clear if you look at it in context, just as the movie only makes full sense with knowledge of America’s history-phobic culture: We prefer to forget the parts of our history that make us uncomfortable. In Jeremiah 11, God is speaking to the prophet Jeremiah about the covenant he made with the forefathers of the people of Israel when he brought them out of slavery in Egypt. The nation, God says to Jeremiah, has “turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers.”

Later in the passage, Jeremiah realizes the people are plotting against him, because they don’t want to hear this message. The nation has forgotten God and its history, and God has decided to give it over to destruction.

That’s an obvious warning for people who’ve forgotten their country’s history of oppression and bloodshed. What Us suggests is that, if we are headed for destruction, the destroyers won’t be invaders from the outside — the “other.” They will be, well, us.

Obviously, there’s no clear doubling theme in the verse itself (though God repeats the same warnings several times, almost verbatim, in the chapter). But Peele got a little lucky with the reference: 11:11 is, itself, a double of doubles. To make sure we get it, he repeats it on an alarm clock screen just before things start to go very wrong in the movie. And there are other doubles all over the movie: window reflections, twins, mirror images, and, of course, the doppelgängers themselves.

The key notion in Us is that our shadow selves, our reverse negatives, are not separate entities from ourselves — we are simply our own aggressors. A nation of people who prefer to erase their misdeeds rather than acknowledging and rectifying them becomes, quite literally, a house divided . It’s going to fall.

Which is why Peele’s callback to Them! , a 65-year-old product of an era feverishly obsessed with the follies of the atomic age and a lurking Cold War menace abroad, is so important. There are clear parallels — both films are about underground tunnels in which lurk dangers, created by humans, that will someday explode to cause our doom. But Them! , from its title, fingers the danger as something other than humans (and in the movie, giant ants). Humans created the danger, but it comes from creatures wholly unlike ourselves.

But in Us , Peele brings the critique closer to home. The fault for our destruction isn’t that of foreign agents. The poison lurks in our own souls.

Us opens in theaters on March 21.

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Writer-director Jordan Peele has created another marvelous new American horror story.

Us is a very, very strange film. But that’s OK because it wouldn’t be a Jordan Peele joint if there wasn’t a little risk involved. Peele has proven that he’s not a one-hit-wonder with this truly terrifying, poignant look at one American family that goes through hell at the hands of maniacal doppelgangers. The strangeness of the narrative stays grounded with excellent character development, especially with Lupita Nyong’o’s Adelaide. Winston Duke’s Gabe adds some much-needed humor to lighten the tense and bloody mood, and the kids also have plenty to contribute. The impactful use of music and dazzling cinematography elevates Us above your average horror-thriller. Peele has created another marvelous new American horror story.

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Screen Rant

Us review: jordan peele returns with another terrific horror movie, us manages to be funny, freaky, and thrilling all at once, and marks another step forward in peele's evolving sense of storytelling and craftsmanship..

Jordan Peele caught many people off-guard with his directorial debut on 2017's Get Out . The acclaimed horror-thriller was a big hit that went on to snag an Oscar for Peele's screenplay and firmly established the former Key & Peele comedian as a filmmaker on the rise. As such, moviegoers are a little more prepared for Peele's second movie Us , knowing now that the writer-director is a horror aficinado with someting to say (even if he's not necessarily commenting on racism in America, this time around). Still, even his biggest supporters may not be entirely ready for the twisted concoction that Peele's asssembled for his sophomore feature. Us manages to be funny, freaky, and thrilling all at once, and marks another step forward in Peele's evolving sense of storytelling and craftsmanship.

Naturally, there are parallels between Get Out and Us , like the way that they both start out with characters going on what promises to be a fairly normal trip - even after a foreboding prologue that lets us know that all is not right in this world. In Us ' case, that means a summer vacation to the Wilson family beach house, with husband Gabe and wife Adelaide ( Black Panther costars Winston Duke and Lupita Nyong'o) leading their children Jason (Evan Alex) and Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) along the way. The movie's first act does an excellent job of building up tension in the process, while at the same time laying the foundation for the story developments to come in ways both subtle and overtly threatening. And that's alll before the trouble really hits the fan and the Wilsons look out in their driveway one night to see (bizarre as it seems) doppelgängers of themselves... ones that definitely do not come in peace.

From the very beginning, Us serves to showcase Peele's improvements as a director since his debut on Get Out . The sound editing in the film's prologue alone is richly detailed and specific, as are the subjective camera angles that Peele and his DP Mike Gioulakis ( It Follows , Split ) use to make something as inocuous as a boardwalk carnival appear ominous and dangerous onscreen. These early scenes in particular further illustrate how much better Peele has gotten at using silence and a lack of music to create suspense since he began directing, as does his later usage of Get Out composer Michael Abels' score (which, like his prior work, is fueled by spooky chorus singing and unsettling orchestral compositions). Peele doesn't drop the ball when the movie becomes more action-driven either and succeeds in crafting some genuinely exciting set pieces here, while at the same time carrying over the visual motifs introduced in Us ' first third (reflections, mirror images, doubles, and so on).

Meanwhile, Peele's script here is as carefully structured as his screenplay for Get Out and finds ways to organically weave humor into the mix throughout the story, in ways that befit the movie's generally off-kilter tone. It helps that the main cast is strong across the board and make their characters feel like fully-rounded individuals, both before and after their doubles (aka. The Tethered) show up. Speaking of which: Nyong'o is the standout here in the dual roles of Adelaide and her doppelgänger "Red", which allow the Oscar-winner to flex her acting muscles in surprising and engaging ways. At the same time, she's able to generate real sympathy for both characters and give them distinct personalities, despite the fact that (obviously) they are dark reflections of one another. Duke is also pretty great in the film, especially since his role as the loveably adorkable dad Gabe is worlds apart from his breakout performance as the Wakandan warrior M'Baku.

The one element of Us that might prove to be relatively divisive is the film's central metaphor - or, more specifically, whether it has one. Peele, in another move that signals his continuing maturation as a storyteller, ultimately ties everything together here in a way that makes it clear that there's a deeper parable behind the larger narrative, but leaves room for audiences to interpret it as they will. As such, there are certainly different yet equally valid ways to read into Us , based on the film's themes about trauma, privilege, fractured social identities, and, of course, what it even means to battle your "other self". In that regard, the movie really works as a spiritual descendant of the original Twilight Zone (a series that, fittingly, Peele will revive in April) and skips over spoon-feeding its messages to audiences, in an effort to encourage them to consider the darkness that simmers beneath the surface of our society (quite literally, in the Us universe).

While Peele could've easily rested on his laurels with his sophomore feature and tried to simply recreate what he did so well on Get Out , he instead chose to challenge himself as a filmmaker and tackle a thought-provoking horror allegory that might be even more layered than his breakout effort. Suffice it to say, Us is a must-see for cinephiles and is sure to generate lots of interesting post-screenings discussions about what the film's saying and the symbolism baked into the narrative (not to mention, its clever use of '90s pop songs). For everyone else, Us is just like Get Out in the way that it wants to entertain and make audiences laugh and scream (sometimes within the same scene), while also serving up social commentary without feeling like a sermon. In short: Jordan Peele the director is not only here to stay, he's also just getting started.

Us is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 116 minutes long and is rated R for violence/terror, and language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

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Us Review: Jordan Peele Delivers Ambitious Horror Movie

Jordan Peele's second film, Us, is more horrific and ambitious than Get Out and one of the most evocative horror movies in memory.

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Sophomore efforts can be difficult for filmmakers who hit it out of the park the first time. And Jordan Peele did not just bat a home run when he wrote and directed Get Out —the pop culture-seizing and box office-smashing horror film that netted Peele a screenplay Oscar and the attention of every type of moviegoer, from genre to prestige—he hit it into a quarter billion-dollar orbit. Whereas other directors in similar situations would go on to resist trying to expand on the themes of their first effort, Peele uses them as a foundation for something far grander and more audacious in Us .

Keeping his promise that the next film would not technically be about race in America, Peele instead has crafted a horror movie that’s an allegory for life in the U.S. It’s also one that is defiantly more horrific, in the genre sense, than anything in the satirical Get Out , while likewise being more viscerally evocative. Uniting with cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, who’s been the DP on some of the most visibly dazzling chillers of recent years, including It Follows , Peele crescendoes his intimate family drama into a stealth 116-minute epic that might be the most beautiful-looking horror movie of this decade, as well as perhaps the most top heavy. With money to burn after an Oscar win, Peele is scaling lofty heights, and heading toward an altitude that many fans will not necessarily expect. But with moments as fearsome as Lupita Nyong’o standing in high-morning light on a boardwalk engulfed by fire, Peele’s reach is very long, indeed, even if the grasp remains slightly longer.

With a premise that could’ve easily been trimmed down to fit an old Twilight Zone ( a horror project Peele is also involved in ), Us is initially quite personable in scope. Embracing the type of supernatural magical realism that’s become a staple of this era, Us follows the affable Wilson family as they meet their darker selves. A comfortably affluent nuclear unit Adelaide and Gabe Wilson (Nyong’o and Winston Duke) are returning to their annual vacation home at a lake alongside their adolescent daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and younger son Jason (Evan Alex). They’re also content there, even if Gabe can barely hide his envy of their slightly better-off friends, the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker).

Still, Adelaide carries a secret she tells no one, even her husband. When she was a young girl, she entered a decrepit hall of mirrors in a seedy amusement park on the Santa Cruz beach. All her life, she’s feared ever going back, but when Gabe is insistent they do (he has to brag to the Tylers about a new boat he bought), her son Jason is beckoned to the same rundown mirrors. That night four shadowy figures follow the Wilsons home: literal doppelgangers of themselves, clad in red jumpsuits reminiscent of prison attire, and each carrying razor-sharp scissors. They’re not here to cut paper.

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To say more would be a spoiler, but what is not is that the film’s vast ideas, from the familial to the national, are grounded in the easygoing naturalism of the Wilsons, most especially its matriarchal head. Nyong’o, one of the decade’s breakout stars who has long struggled with being offered complex leading roles in wide Hollywood releases, embodies not one, but two marvelous parts in Us . As Adelaide, Nyong’o depicts a mother forced to be the center of a family fraying at all ends, even as she constantly looks ready to unravel herself well before the ominous figures attempt to break into her house. Additionally, more than any of the other doubles here, Nyong’o’s fractured reflection of Adelaide is a deceptively layered monster. A quiet creature of physically devastating effect, Nyong’o’s literally dueling performances become a high-wire act that centers the film’s focus even when its gaze becomes vaguely unwieldy during the finale.

Winston Duke is also a tremendous asset to the film. Prior to its SXSW opening night screening , Peele joked audiences will have to stop referring to the Trinbagonian-American actor as Black Panther ’s “M’Baku,” and he isn’t exaggerating since Wilson makes an excellent doppelganger of Peele himself. Like a beefier version of the writer-director, his mild-mannered and nerdy exterior belies the innocuous insulation of the Wilsons; he’s too complacent in his contentedness to see what’s below or around him. He also proves to be the source for much of Us ’ humor. More textured than comic relief (that would be Heidecker’s role), Gabe nevertheless offers a release valve when next to Nyong’o’s fever-pitch.

And the rest of the film attempts to match that boil. Indulging in a greater genre aesthetic than Get Out , Us plays with the type of mythical storybook-like logic of many of the horror films Peele grew up watching in the ‘80s. Peele still wears his influences on its sleeves—the opening shot includes a VHS copy of C.H.U.D. , and in the scene where Jason wanders off on a beach, his shirt not-so-subtly features the visage of a great white shark. However, the film also features a greater sophistication in its inspirations, particularly of a 1970s paranoia variety, which underscores a desire to suggest macroaggressions on a historic, allegorical scale.

This approach ultimately does somewhat clash with its more traditional horror movie and home invasion story beats, particularly in the third act. A climactic exposition dump that attempts to present a rational explanation for its dreamlike metaphor becomes a bridge between islands that never needed to connect. It is easy to wonder if certain concessions were made for budgetary reasons, and some audiences will likely be divided by the film’s structure. While broadly about income inequality, class, and a myriad of other issues, the movie supplants much of Peele’s previous playfulness with an earnestness that dominates until the loaded final scene.

Yet these minor reservations will fade away quickly over time, as Us is a magnificent achievement that will reward diligent rewatching and debate for years to come. A massive effort that far exceeds its humble home invasion conceit, Peele’s sophomore effort holds as many secrets as the families it follows on both sides of the looking glass. Like the radiance of a sunrise striking fire on a crummy boardwalk’s white sand, the glow of the film’s vision outshines any of the debris it leaves in its wake.

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

Us (II) (2019)

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Review: Jordan Peele’s Us Is Dazzling to Look At. But What Is It Trying to Say?

W riter-director Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out was a brash and intriguing debut, a picture that wrestled with the notion of whether or not America can ever be a post-racial society: Vital and spooky, it refused to hand over easy answers. With the ambitious home-invasion horror chiller Us, Peele goes even deeper into the conflicted territory of class and race and privilege; he also ponders the traits that make us most human. But this time, he’s got so many ideas he can barely corral them, let alone connect them. He overthinks himself into a corner, and we’re stuck there with him.

Lupita Nyong’o stars as Adelaide, who has overcome a traumatic childhood experience and now has a family of her own, including husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and two kids: graceful, well-adjusted Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and the slightly more awkward Jason (Evan Alex), who wears a wolfman mask pushed up on his head as a kind of security blanket. We meet the comfortably middle-class Wilson family as they’re heading off on vacation to Santa Cruz, the site of Adelaide’s childhood ordeal. On their first night away, they look out and see a family of four, mute and stony echoes of themselves, standing in the driveway. From there, Peele unspools a story of “shadow” people, long forced to live underground but now streaming to the Earth’s surface to claim, violently, what they feel is rightfully theirs.

The effectiveness of Us may depend on how little you know about it going in, so the spoiler-averse may wish to stop reading here. But it’s impossible to address any of the movie’s larger ideas without giving away key plot points: Before long, that shadow family has infiltrated the house, and now that we can get a good look, we see that each of them is a not-quite-right replica of a Wilson, dressed in a red jumpsuit and wielding a pair of menacing-looking shears. At one point a terrified Adelaide asks the other mother, a twin of herself but with vacant, crazy eyes and a demented smile, “What are you people?” “We are Americans,” the lookalike responds, in a whispery growl.

That’s a bright, neon-lit Author’s Message if ever there was one, though the idea of using a group of sunlight-deprived semi-zombies as a metaphorical element in a parable about class complacency isn’t necessarily a bad one. Are you and your family doing great? Do you live in a nice place, drive an expensive car, and have plenty of food for everyone to eat? Be grateful for it. But be aware that there are others who, through no fault of their own, don’t live at the same comfort level—or are, in fact, barely surviving. (The Wilsons also have close friends, Josh and Kitty, played by Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss, who have more money and nicer stuff than they do, a source of irritation for Gabe in particular, and another of the movie’s threads about class consciousness in America.) But Peele doesn’t always lay out his ideas clearly. Us isn’t always fun to watch; there are stretches where it’s plodding and dour. He’s overly fond of heavy-duty references, including Biblical ones: A creepy dude holds a sign that reads Jeremiah 11:11. (If you don’t know it outright, it’s the one that goes, “Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.”) The mood of Us is sometimes chilling, but even then, you’re not always sure what, exactly, is chilling you. Maybe it’s just the feeling of being trapped in an over-air-conditioned lecture hall, because there’s a strain of preachiness running through the whole thing.

One thing that’s unquestionable: Peele is a dazzling visual stylist. (Peele’s cinematographer is Mike Gioulakis, who also shot David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, as well as M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass .) The movie’s opening, which details young Adelaide’s nightmare—it takes place in a ghoulish hall of mirrors on the Santa Cruz boardwalk—is a mini-horror masterpiece by itself, an evocation of the outright weirdness of childhood rather than its wonder: As the girl wanders away from her parents, in an almost trancelike state, she clutches a candied apple so shiny it’s like blood-red crystal ball—and puts us in a trance, too.

Yet the rest of Us is laden with metaphors, and they pile up so quickly that not even Peele can keep up with them. The movie repeatedly references Hands Across America, a 1986 benefit event in which some 6.5 million people joined hands along a route mapped out across the contiguous United States. (Many participants had donated $10 to reserve a space in the chain; the money was donated to local charities dedicated to fighting hunger and ending poverty.) In Us, the shadow people form a similar chain. But it’s hard to know what Peele is trying to say with that image. Are the semi-zombies of Us just less fortunate versions of us? Are they actually us and we don’t know it? Is their clumsy anger somehow superior to thought and reason? After all, it has unified them, while we aboveground humans are more divided than ever.

How, in the end, are we supposed to feel about these shadow people, for so long deprived of basic human rights—including daylight—that they have become murderous clones? Sometimes great movies are ambiguous, but ambiguity resulting from unclear thinking makes nothing great. It’s one thing for a movie to humble you by leaving you unsure about yourself and your place in the world; it’s another for it to leave you wondering what, exactly, a filmmaker is trying to use his formidable verbal and visual vocabulary to say.

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Us review: Jordan Peele makes seeing double singularly terrifying

Jordan Peele’s 2017 thriller Get Out turned one half of sketch comedy duo Key & Peele into one of Hollywood’s hottest filmmakers, earning the first-time director an Academy Award and prompting the inevitable question of how anyone could follow up on a success on that level. So it’s with no small amount of anticipation — and high expectations — that Peele’s latest film, simply titled Us , arrives in theaters.

Although it doesn’t pack the psychological punch that Get Out did, Us confirms that Peele’s phenomenally successful debut was no fluke — and that the praise he’s been given is indeed well deserved.

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Written, produced, and directed by Peele, Us follows a family whose beach vacation is interrupted one night by a vicious group of home invaders. The terror of the encounter is amplified by the discovery that the assailants are twisted versions of each member of the family — and they’re forced to fend off their murderous counterparts if they have any hope of surviving the night.

Get Out initially showed Peele’s talent at not only casting the right actors, but drawing performances out of them that are full of surprises. His skill at assembling and utilizing a talented cast shines again in Us , which reunites Black Panther actors Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke as Adelaide and Gabe Wilson, a married couple on vacation with their son Jason and daughter Zora, played by Evan Alex and Shahadi Wright Joseph, respectively.

All four of the primary cast members bring an impressive level of depth to characters that could have easily slipped into typically forgettable victim roles, pausing when they should be running, or screaming when they should be hiding. They’re a smart bunch, even when they make head-shakingly bad decisions that put them in peril, and their chemistry as a family unit goes a long way toward creating an emotional investment in their fates.

Portraying both the victim and the villain in a story is a tall order for any actor, but the cast of Us makes it look effortless.

The performances of the four leads as the Winston family members are impressive on their own, but Us reaches even higher by having the four actors also play their psychopathic duplicates.

Portraying both the victim and the villain in a story is a tall order for any actor, but the cast of Us makes it look effortless, adding depth to both roles where appropriate and selling the audience on both the terrorized family’s strength of will and their mirror images’ remorseless, unpredictable deadly intent. Nyong’o in particular is fascinating to watch, and she goes above and beyond simple good and evil representation by giving each character their own, unique way of walking, talking, and carrying themselves.

The extra effort that Nyong’o and her castmates put into their two-part performances pays off with some genuinely disturbing juxtapositions of the characters and their twins, who are eerily similar on the surface despite being completely different in every other way.

Not everything about Us is a paired set, though — particularly when it comes to the film’s similarities (or lack thereof) with Get Out .

Although Us confirms that Peele’s knack for horror wasn’t a one-trick act, those expecting a film that mines the same fright material as Get Out won’t find much in common with that film.

Where Get Out relied heavily on psychological terrors and a creeping sense of dread in a relatively bloodless — right up until its third act, at least — mind-bending scary story, Us is a more straightforward horror film. The eerie mystery of the doppelgangers’ existence is secondary to the blunt terror of their home invasion and pursuit of the Wilson family, and there’s little question about exactly what kind of film Us really is.

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To Peele’s credit as a writer, he does an admirable job of streamlining the narrative to move past the story’s big questions in relatively quick, semi-satisfying ways, but his focus on making the film a more straightforward experience than Get Out could still leave some audiences wanting more answers when it comes to the more complicated plot points he introduces. Us is a slasher movie first and foremost, after all, even if it does have some narrative (and socially relevant) layers to unpack for audiences interested in going down that road.

It’s not likely to receive the level of critical acclaim as its predecessor, but Us still manages to carve out an impressive niche for itself in the horror genre. Subversive, scary, and fantastically well acted, Us is the sort of film that can be enjoyed on one level as an entertaining, satisfying slasher film, while also offering something for audiences who want more than just a family being terrorized by a group of psychotic killers. What it occasionally lacks in satisfying answers, it more than makes up for in ambition and cinematic execution, thanks to the film’s talented cast and filmmaker.

Us probably won’t bring Peele another Academy Award, but if the film’s intent is to be the sort of movie that sticks with you long after the credits roll, and that fuels a nightmare or two, it’s already a winner.

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As was the case with Bundy, Netflix is convinced that a multipronged examination of Dahmer could lead to a better understanding of his psychology and motivations, teaching viewers warning signs or expanding our capacity for empathy. Or maybe they recognize that people are addicted to unspeakable tragedies and will do anything they can to maximize viewers’ compulsion for true crime? Attempting to satisfy on all accounts, The Dahmer Tapes oscillates uneasily between character study, social commentary, and pure shock value, landing somewhere in between all three. In Dahmer's own words

Amsterdam could have been forgiven for being a lot of things, but dull is not one of them. The new film from writer-director David O. Russell boasts one of the most impressive ensemble casts of the year and is photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki, one of Hollywood’s premier cinematographers. Beyond that, its kooky premise and even wackier cast of characters open the door for Amsterdam to be the kind of screwball murder mystery that O. Russell, at the very least, seems uniquely well-equipped to make.

Instead, Amsterdam is a disaster of the highest order. It’s a film made up of so many disparate, incongruent parts that it becomes clear very early on in its 134-minute runtime that no one involved — O. Russell most of all — really knew what it is they were making. It is a misfire of epic proportions, a comedic conspiracy thriller that is written like a haphazard screwball comedy but paced like a meandering detective drama. Every element seems to be at odds with another, resulting in a film that is rarely funny but consistently irritating.

Forests can be scary. Love can be even scarier. Combine the two and throw in a few wild twists for good measure, and you get Significant Other, a uniquely terrifying thriller about a couple whose romantic hike in the woods takes an unexpected turn when they begin to suspect they might not be alone in the wilds.

Written and directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, Significant Other casts Maika Monroe (It Follows) and Jake Lacy (The White Lotus) as Ruth and Harry, respectively, a young couple who head off into the forests of the Pacific Northwest for some hiking and camping. Harry intends to propose to Ruth, but the pair's adventure takes a deadly turn when they discover something sinister in the woods.

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Movie Review: Us (2019)

Floyd Smith III
Movie Reviews
--> March 22, 2019

Fans of Jordan Peele’s incomparable societal critique “ Get Out ” can rejoice as the horror-auteur swings for the fences in his newest horror-thriller Us , and for the most part, hits it straight out of the park. Piggybacking off of the inquisitive, yet cynical, tone of his directorial debut, Us follows the Wilson family as they attempt to blow off some steam with a family road trip following the death of the children’s grandmother.

Heading this family is the ideally cast Winston Duke (“ Black Panther ”) as the father Gabriel, who not only handles a great deal of the films comedic relief but serves as the most easily relatable protagonist of the film considering the quirks of the rest of the family. Next to him is the timid, yet strict wife and mother Adelaide (Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o, “ 12 Years a Slave ”). Adelaide acts as the driving force for the film’s supernatural arc, introduced to viewers when she is a child who experiences a traumatic event that has lasting effects even relatively far into her motherhood. Her children, Zora and Jason (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex, respectively), are accustomed to their mother’s outbursts and tenderness, but still question the validity of her concerns.

The first act of Us portrays a thoroughly heartwarming introduction to this modern family, each character of course dons some of not only the horror genre’s typical character tropes but of family films in general such as the daughter being a bit of a smart-ass and the son being labeled “weird” just because he likes to make sandcastles and play hide and seek. Peele offers a decent dose of nuance to the audience, however, most emphatically in the interactions between Adelaide and her son Jason. The two seem to have a lot of the same isolating tendencies along with feelings of being misjudged. Even rolling over into the second act, Peele’s pacing is exacting as we’re given time to feel like a member of this family. This fun and relaxed immersion can easily cause one to forget it’s a horror film they’re watching . . .

But of course this is a misdirection by Peele, who gathers the audience’s comfort and curiosity before laying down a heavy dose of surrealism and twists that would make even “The Twilight Zone” a bit jealous. I use this reference not only because it is a show that Peele is currently resurrecting, but also because it’s what he has labeled an inspiration for the film’s narrative (I’ll let you all discover what episode on your own). Soon a quartet of people who look a lot like the Wilsons invade the home throwing the proceedings into abject tumult. It’s also around the end of this second act, the audience learns of the potential depth of the film’s plot and that there are in fact grander implications than the film’s jokes, jump scares and general creepiness would suggest.

Rather than spoon feed the audience the message like his previous film, in the last act he gives the audience a little more wiggle room to discern and unravel the societal perspective themselves. Beyond the dopplegangers and the apparent chaos they’ve unleashed on the family, lie concerns about introspection and social turmoil, the liabilities of human processing, and the overall lack of reflection and sensitivity in modern culture. Upon reflection, these communal breakdowns are nearly as horrific as the goings-ons at the Wilson’s lake house.

With Us , Jordan Peele has refreshingly delivered not only a bonafide frightener, but also a movie that presses his audience to dig deeper to not only dissect the many layers of a torn societal structure but also the many layers of ourselves. And though Us doesn’t quite reach the heights attained by “Get Out,” its message certainly does and it’s one that may stick around for a much longer time.

Tagged: home invasion , mask , relationships , supernatural , twins

A journalist and alumni of the Film Theory & Criticism graduate program at Central Michigan University; Floyd Smith III is a cinephile whose written for multiple publications including moviepilot and RadioOne and has a background in news writing for the independent publication The North Wind. Studying film since his time as an undergrad, he began officially reviewing films and reporting on entertainment in 2014. Smith joined CMC in January of 2016 and enjoys films of the science fiction, comic book, and horror genres.

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‘The First Omen’ intensely depicts the madness that brought us baby Damien

Chilling prequel to 1976 horror classic is blessed with a heroine, nell tiger free, who’s greatness incarnate..

A nun in training (Nell Tiger Free) arrives in Rome to begin working in an orphanage in “The First Omen.”

20th Century Studios

Just two weeks after the release of “Immaculate,” with Sydney Sweeney playing a young American nun-in-training who travels to Italy and learns her new home holds unspeakable horrors, here comes “The First Omen,” with Nell Tiger Free playing a young American nun-in-training who travels to Italy and learns her new home holds unspeakable horrors.

Both films deal with themes of spirituality and faith and body horror; both films feature religious leaders engaging in deeply twisted and blasphemous and horrific practices. I admired much of “Immaculate” but found its final act forced and manipulative. “The First Omen,” while equally demented, concludes on just the right note, especially for those of us who remember the Richard Donner’s 1976 horror classic “The Omen,” which would merit serious consideration as the scariest religious-themed film of the 1970s were it not for the GOAT, and I speak of course of “The Exorcist.”

Directed with an intense, fever-dream style by Akasha Stevenson (who wrote the screenplay with Tim Smith and Keith Thomas), featuring an electric performance by Nell Tiger Free and stellar work from a supporting cast led by Sônia Braga and Bill Nighy (talk about adding some cinema cred!), “The First Omen” takes us right to the doorstep of the 1976 film in chillingly effective fashion. It’s the Damien origin story we never knew we needed.

“The First Omen” is set in the Rome of 1971, which is awash in political and social protests, with the Roman Catholic Church finding itself becoming increasingly irrelevant to large numbers of young people. Free, the English actress known for her work on the TV series “Game of Thrones” (as Myrcella Baratheon) and “Servant” (as the nanny, Leanne Grayson), delivers next-level, star-power work as Margaret, an American novice sent to Rome to work in an orphanage during her novitiate.

Her mentor, Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), suggests that perhaps Margaret can help the Church reconnect with people of her generation. Mostly, though, Margaret will be teaching the girls in the orphanage (she grew up an orphan in America and thus feels a connection to the children) and learning from the likes of Sister Silvia (Sônia Braga), the abbess at the orphanage who initially comes across as kindly and caring.

Sônia Braga plays an abbess who seems kindly and caring, at least at first.

But this one of those cavernous institutions where you often hear screams off in the distance, and when you peer into a room and catch a glimpse of something mysterious and perhaps nefarious in the offing, someone will rush up and abruptly shut the door in your face. Also, good luck sleeping at night, what with the wind rustling and the sounds of eerie whispering and is that SOMEONE STANDING RIGHT THERE IN THE SHADOWS?!?!

With cinematographer Aaron Morton and the production design team making great use of the Rome locale, “The First Omen” wastes little time in plunging Margaret into a number of experiences that are clearly outside of the novitiate playbook. She joins her rebellious roommate Luz (Maria Caballero) for a night of clubbing, drinking alcohol and flirting with a young man for the first time in her life, and she establishes a connection with the troubled adolescent orphan girl Carlita (Nicole Sorace), despite the hierarchy’s warnings to steer clear of Carlita.

Then there’s Ralph Ineson’s Father Brennan (a character who appeared in the original film), a defrocked and seemingly paranoid priest who warns Margaret of a wide-ranging conspiracy in the church that sounds absolutely bonkers — but is it? (“The First Omen” pays homage to the original film in other ways as well, e.g., a very public and shocking suicide.) As the story begins to traffic in “Rosemary’s Baby” territory, director Stevenson peppers the action with a number of jump-scares, and we’re inundated with some of the most haunting and grotesque artwork and photos in recent memory.

Defrocked Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) makes bizarre claims of a church conspiracy.

0th Century Studios

We know this is the story of how Damien came to be — how he was conceived and how he was born, at which point he was handed over to the American diplomat Robert Thorn and his wife, Katherine. (This is not a spoiler; it’s the beginning of “The Omen.”) Some of the visuals in “The First Omen” are so warped and disturbing you have to resist the temptation to look away from the screen, even as you’re acknowledging the absolute outlandish nature of this story.

In a horror film that takes such big swings, the performance of the Final Girl is everything. She’s experiencing all this madness along with us, and we have to believe her reactions. As Margaret, Nell Tiger Free delivers work bursting with physicality and expressiveness. It’s one of the most impressive performances in any film, regardless of genre, so far this year.

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The launching pad for Bertrand Bonello ’s new picture “The Beast” (“La Bete”) is a 1903 short story by Henry James called “The Beast in the Jungle.” Seen by some James scholars as an autobiographical expression of rue for a life of inaction, it treats the case of John Marcher, who confides in his acquaintance May Bartram that he lives in fear of an unnamable catastrophe that could upend his life, and the life of anyone close to him. She claims to get what he’s talking about.

“‘You mean you feel how my obsession — poor old thing — may correspond to some possible reality?’

‘To some possible reality.’

‘Then you will watch with me?’”

And so May does. And Marcher’s fear translates into a passivity that compels him to hold May at arm’s length for the rest of his life. At the end of the story, he mourns a love he never allowed himself to have and understands that the catastrophe was his own fear.

In Bonello’s film, the fear belongs to the popular Parisian concert pianist Gabrielle Monnier ( Lea Seydoux ), who, around the time of the great 1910 flood of France’s City of Lights, confesses this fear to Louis ( George MacKay ), a young Englishman with whom she soon begins a tentative liaison. But the trouble they encounter has nothing to do with Gabrielle’s reticence to enter into a romantic relationship with Louis—although that does exist.

Bonello’s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He’s here to tell us to be afraid—be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far. A vision of three (actually four) nightmare times, all of them in the same vexed world.

The cataclysms that fall upon Gabrielle—played by a superbly controlled and often heartbreaking Lea Seydoux—aren’t spiritual or conceptual (well, of course, at first, they are), they’re “real,” or Real. They’re corporeal/physical, or simulations of the corporeal physical. And they’re unavoidable. Boy oh boy can you not stop what’s coming. Close that browser window, rewind that video, press mute on the sound system, reset the house alarm, none of it will do you any good. Not even an alteration in the fabric of reality itself—and this seems to occur at least a half dozen times in the picture—will stave off horror. The beast isn’t in the jungle, it’s in the house, and it’s in the air we can only barely breathe when the movie gets to 2044. It is in us; it is us.

Sounds cheerful, right? Well, what can I tell you? Bonello has a way of throwing us into an enhanced vision of the degrading noise of contemporary life that’s all the more engaging for being so even-handed and deliberate. I mentioned three timelines that are actually four—the movie is framed, kind of, by a green-screen session in which Seydoux, possibly playing Gabrielle, possibly playing herself, is coached through paces for a scene in which she actually apprehends “the beast” and lets out a blood-curdling scream. The image degenerates into a gorgeous abstract mural of pixels. Digitization is here both a source of ravishing sights and sounds and an Excedrin headache of aural and visual glitch. The movie then bounces through three time periods: 1910, 2044—where Gabrielle’s character seeks to abolish her reincarnation torment through a “DNA purge”—and most terrifyingly, 2014, wherein “Gabby” is housesitting in L.A. and targeted by the angry incel version of MacKay’s Louis—Louis Lewansky, who’s 30 and never been with a woman despite his “magnificence,” and who’s now getting ready to avenge himself.

Dolls are a recurring motif here—there are old-fashioned ones made for fans of the pianist Gabby, and unhelpful talking doll in the Hollywood house, and a walking, talking A.I. helper (played by Guslagie Malanda , as impressive here in a relatively small role as she was in the lead of 2022’s “ Saint Omer ”). An electrical fire figures in the 1910 sequence; a malware attack on a laptop is one of the insane blowups in the 2014 scenario. There are bits and pieces here that feel Lynchian, especially in the Los Angeles scenes, during which Gabrielle is fascinated/repulsed by a TV singing contest show that feels like it might have sprung full blown from the creator of “Twin Peaks.” Then there’s the fact that the love song recurring throughout shows up at the very end, sung in its original version by, well Roy Orbison. But unlike Lynch, Bonello has a decidedly un-obscure point to make. Mainly about how the pursuit of the authentic in life is invariably thwarted by roadblocks of humanity’s own making. (Although one supposes that the eighth episode of the 2018 “Twin Peaks” season treated that theme in a relatively unambiguous way.)

“There must be beautiful things in this chaos,” Gabrielle tries to reassure the movie’s scariest version of Louis at one point. Bonello, and this movie’s, greatest dread is that someday a terrible order will emerge, one that will make whatever beauty remains disappear.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Monkey Man review – Dev Patel goes wild in ultraviolent Mumbai revenge flick

Patel exacts wildly OTT vengeance in the neon-lit city in this stylish and exciting action thriller, which doubles as a boisterous satire of Modi-esque nationalism

D ev Patel brings the gonzo chaos for this very impressive writing-directing feature debut, with Jordan Peele on board as a producer; it’s a wildly over-the-top revenge action thriller on the teeming but uncliched streets of Mumbai – doubling as a boisterous satire of Modi-esque nationalism. As the lead performer, Patel shows us some pretty serious martial arts chops, kickboxing and thumping seven shades of ordure out of the punchbag, and then the bad guys – and periodically pausing, of course, attractively dropletted with sweat, to let us get an eyeful of those sculpted abs. And he also gives us a gloriously old fashioned men’s room punch-up, with the flimsy wooden dividing walls of the lavatory cubicles going over like dominos and each washroom mirror smashed to its constituent molecules.

Patel plays a guy calling himself “Bobby”, a fake name taken ominously from a brand of bleach; as a kid, he lived in the forest with his adored single mum, who held him spellbound with tales of Lord Hanuman, the monkey deity. A greedy property developer passing himself off as a spiritual guru (in league with a populist rightwing politician) wanted this forest and brought tragedy into the kid’s life, with the help of a hateful, corrupt police chief (Sikander Kher). Now Bobby is driven by a need for payback, infiltrating the criminal organisation, biding his time, and earning cash on the side as a monkey-masked fighter at bare-knuckle bouts run by a leering master of ceremonies played by Sharlto Copley; he is dreaming of the time when he will rain down terrible vengeance.

Patel clearly thinks that his movie looks like John Wick; hence a rather self-conscious pre-emptive line about that well known Keanu Reeves franchise in the script. But that’s not precisely the resemblance; given Patel’s need to avenge a dead parent, his personal growth “wilderness” experiences at the hands of socially marginalised but wise people, and his bloody and ultraviolent attack in the neon-lit city – Monkey Man looks more like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives crossed with The Lion King. And Patel turns it into a very exciting and stylish movie. His previous acting work didn’t obviously point to a kickass action career, although his performance in The Green Knight might have given us a hint. He’s evolved.

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Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny on the nightmarish ‘Civil War’: ‘No nation is immune’

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“Civil War” is a purpose-built powder keg of controversial talking points and hot-button ideas. In the near-future world depicted in the film, California and Texas align to take up arms against a fascist, corrupt third-term president who has disbanded the FBI and turned the military against U.S. civilians.

The movie joins other evocative dystopian portraits by Alex Garland, whose previous work as writer-director includes “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” as well as the screenplays to “28 Days Later,” “Never Let Me Go” and “Dredd.” Garland’s latest is also a tender, emotionally complex look at legacy and what we leave behind, driven by the performances of Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny as two photojournalists, a veteran and a novice, trying to process all that they see in a climate that has become deeply skeptical of the press.

“Civil War” had its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film and TV Festival last month in Austin, Texas, just a few blocks from the state Capitol building. As the movie ended and the destabilized audience recomposed itself, Garland and cast members Dunst, Spaeny and Brazilian actor Wagner Moura, who plays another reporter, took to the stage for a Q&A.

It speaks to the knife-edge the movie exists on that, when the SXSW premiere played in two separate theaters, a specific moment in the film elicited triumphant cheers in one crowd and stunned silence in the other.

Attempting to process the film’s anxiety-inducing sound design and disorienting sense of intense, imminent danger will be difficult for anyone, so the idea of immediately standing in front of an audience and coherently speaking about it seems near impossible.

Someone noted that it was Spaeny’s first time seeing the film. With a mix of quiet concern and shocked incredulity, Dunst asked, “Why would you do that to yourself?”

In the film, a group of journalists make their way from New York to Washington, D.C., hoping to get what will likely be the last interview with a besieged president on the brink of being violently deposed. Photographer Lee (Dunst) and her reporting partner Joel (Moura) have reluctantly agreed to give a ride to an aging New York Times correspondent, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), when they also take on Jessie (Spaeny), an aspiring, camera-clad shooter.

Their journey takes on an increasingly hallucinatory quality as they travel through a broken America, repeatedly encountering situations where it is unclear who is fighting against who and why. It all builds to a staggering battle sequence in Washington and the White House. Along the way, Lee seems less and less sure of why she is doing this work, while young Jessie is drawn closer to the flame of danger.

It’s only a week or so after the Austin premiere when Dunst and Spaeny join The Times on a video call, with Dunst at her home in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley and Spaeny visiting family in Springfield, Mo.

After they both take a moment to admire the brown vintage jacket Spaeny is wearing, Spaeny recalls what it was like seeing the film for the first time.

“I felt really shaken,” she says. “It’s very immersive. It’s a film that sort of grabs you and never lets you go until the very end. There’s no real room to breathe.”

Recognizing the potentially divisive nature of “Civil War,” Spaeny adds, “There are a lot of purposes for film, but I think one of the great things about film is that we can sort of process our deep fears and emotions through cinema. And I think that’s what this film did. And I hope people can work through their thoughts and feelings through this movie.”

Garland finished the script in 2020, ahead of the violent events of Jan. 6, 2021, in the United States and Jan. 8, 2023, in Brazil, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — incidents of political unrest that would have seemed obvious inspirations for the story, had they not come after it was written. As unfolding news in the real world uncomfortably mirrored developments in the script, it’s easy to wonder whether the film ever began to feel like a live grenade waiting to go off.

“The implied question is: Is this wise or not wise?” says Garland on a recent Zoom from England. “And I do not know the answer to that. I do feel that there is a responsibility that exists when you put something into a public space. That responsibility absolutely does exist. So for example, if this did not feel like an antiwar film, if it had all the same subject matter, but was in some ways slightly celebratory, I could imagine that being problematic.”

Volume from either side of the political divide can potentially drown out other points of view, Garland says. “I think on balance, I am more concerned at the moment with conversation being silenced than I am with it being had. The voices that are making loud, insistent assertions — to me, acquiescing to that feels more dangerous. I could be wrong, but that’s my gut feeling.”

Two women speak in the bleachers of an arena.

Garland’s father, Nicholas Garland, worked as a political cartoonist in England, and so Garland’s childhood was surrounded by journalists. (Both he and his brother have foreign correspondents as their godfathers.) So telling the story of an America torn apart through the eyes of a group of journalists made sense.

If the onscreen dynamic between Lee and Jessie forms the emotional core of the movie, a comparable bond seems to have grown between Dunst and Spaeny. Dunst , 41, has been working since the age of 3, making her film debut at 6 years old. Spaeny, 25, previously worked with Garland on the 2020 television series “Devs” and won the Volpi Cup for best actress at last year’s Venice Film Festival for her depiction of Priscilla Presley in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla. ”

Spaeny got that role after Dunst recommended her to Coppola, having met on “Civil War.” Dunst has a relationship with Coppola that goes back some 25 years, having previously worked together on “The Virgin Suicides,” “Marie Antoinette” and “The Beguiled.”

“There are certain actors you work with and you just feel free and present and on the same page of how you approach things, and I immediately felt that with Cailee,” says Dunst. “The camera, the crew goes away and you’re really in something with somebody. And that’s the most magical feeling on set. Cailee was such a present actress, and there was so much going on with her. We really looked at each other and responded to each other. And that doesn’t always happen.”

All of which made Spaeny seem particularly well-suited for entry into the exclusive club of actors working with Coppola. “Sofia is somebody who captures the most intimate moments,” says Dunst. “And I know that Cailee and what she expresses is subtle but full, full of whatever’s inside her. She can say a lot without saying much, which is a lot of what Sofia likes to capture in her films.”

In her window of the video call, Spaeny is visibly taken aback by all that from Dunst, who she describes as “one of my heroes,” adding, “That was really special to hear.”

Dunst diffuses the moment by adopting an exaggerated Valley girl sing-song, “I basically fell in love with Cailee and I was like, ‘She’s the best, you need to work with her.’” Switching back to her natural voice, Dunst adds, of her recommendation to Coppola, “It was so deserving. I just said what I felt.”

“Well, you sort of changed my life by doing that,” said Spaeny, “so thanks.”

A press photographer sits on the ground as soldiers march by with a detainee.

For his part, director Garland says any extratextual relationship between Dunst and Spaeny was a fortuitous byproduct and not by design.

“First and foremost, those two are terrific actors,” he says. “And there’s something very simple about that. However, Kirsten, as we know, has grown up in this zone and in this world, and she carries all that lived experience with her. And that’s a journey Cailee is starting. So there is a kind of correlation. The people in that industry, in that space, are under strange pressures, very intense pressures that can lead them to become jaded unless they find a way to negotiate it.”

Since much of the story is about journalists on a road trip to Washington, so too did the four main actors spend a lot of their time together in a car. It gave Moura a chance to see the relationship between Spaeny and Dunst develop up-close.

“I think that’s the heart of the movie, the relationship between Lee and Jessie,” says Moura during a phone call from Los Angeles. “And I think that Kirsten took the role of having Cailee under her wing in a very nice, beautiful way. Off-camera, too, it was all very gracious and nice. In spite of that, it was a very hard shoot. Every day we were dealing with violent and horrible things, but the dynamic between us, the actors, was great.”

For Spaeny, the strength of the connection that formed with Dunst was unexpected.

“A lot of the times I meet other actors, especially actors who have been working in the industry for a while, they have a sort of wall up,” says Spaeny. “Kirsten doesn’t have that. She wears her heart on her sleeve and it makes you feel like you can be your 100% self around her. It’s like, how am I going to do this scene with this person? And I knew that we would always figure it out.”

“It kind of happened naturally, don’t you think?” responds Dunst. “We didn’t really need to force anything in that way. And it’s written in the script, that’s the journey of these two, me recognizing myself within [Jessie], but also: Don’t do this because you’re going to become something that is not easy to handle in life. Those parallels are not how I feel about acting. Those parallels aren’t at all how I feel I would talk to Cailee about being an actress or something. But it wasn’t something I was thinking about while we were making it because it’s kind of corny to think about in that way. Like, ‘I’m the mentor and you are the mentee.’ It’s so much deeper than that.”

Dunst mentions she did make one addition to an early scene with Spaeny — “This is some of my woo-woo stuff that I do,” Dunst says — suggesting that as an undercurrent to the scene, they imagine that Lee was Jessie’s long-lost mother.

“I like to think of things a little bit more unconscious,” Dunst says. “I never while making the film was like, ‘You’re little me.’ Because Cailee’s her own woman.”

“I felt protected by you outside of the movie, outside of our characters,” says Spaeny. “That felt genuine. But it didn’t feel like an actory thing. It just felt like, ‘Hey, we get each other. I see you, you see me,’ and we didn’t need to talk about it. The best stuff comes through the stuff you don’t talk about.”

Though “Civil War” seems built to jump from the entertainment pages to the editorial section, providing fodder for various perspectives across the political spectrum, Garland and his collaborators intend it first and foremost to get people out of their entrenched ideological positions and back to a place of listening and sharing ideas.

“I said to someone way back when I was first doing this, ‘I want to do a film where journalists are the heroes,’ and they said, ‘Are you crazy? Everybody hates journalists,’” says Garland. “It actually really jolted me. Journalism is 100% required. A free, fair press is an absolute necessity. It’s like saying, ‘I hate doctors.’ What are you going to do without them? And at the same time I was interested in why is journalism not trusted in the way it used to be?”

To that end Garland was careful in how he depicted the journalists at work. “One of the things I tried to do was show journalists as reporters, intentionally keeping bias out of their reporting. They even have a conversation about it at one point, like, our job is to record this and send it back, in order to make other people ask questions. And then the film is echoing that by functioning like a reporter.”

A photojournalist stands in the White House.

The relationship between the characters played by Dunst and Spaeny feels like the essence of what Garland was trying to explore against the larger canvas of the movie’s politically-charged events. At a time of deep division, connecting has become more vital than ever.

“This is a movie about anti-polarization and that’s not just happening in our country, but all over the world,” says Spaeny. “If we can start having conversations, if we start listening, there is a version of this where we don’t end up in a position where this is possible.”

With a sense of both curiosity and deference, as if she doesn’t want to be the one giving the last word, Spaeny asks, “Kirsten, what do you think?”

“It’s a warning of what happens when you don’t treat people with humanity, stop listening to each other,” says Dunst. “At the end of the day we’re all people with families and different religions and a democracy and that is something that we should be very respectful of.”

Being released into the pressure-cooker atmosphere of an election cycle makes the film feel all the more vital and necessary. “This film, it’s hard to talk about because you want it to really help open up conversations — r eal conversations,” Dunst stresses. “It’s like, what are the consequences? The plausibility of a modern civil war unfolding in America is pretty f—ing scary and it shows you no nation is immune to war. So get your s— together.”

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‘The First Omen’ Review: The Devil Is In The Details In Gory Nun’s Story Prequel To 1976 Original

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The past few months have been quite ripe for the devil, incarnating with the box office disappointment reboot The Exorcist: Believer ; the clever and fresh Late Night With The Devil , which imagines a network talk show being possessed by Satan; and Immaculate (which offered tickets for $6.66 in a box office promotion this week), with Sydney Sweeney as a nun caught up in a demonized immaculate conception Now comes First Omen , which shares some similarity with the latter in that it centers on a novitiate targeted for pregnancy and caught up in dark and mysterious circumstances surrounding several pregnancies in the Roman orphanage where she goes before becoming a nun.

Margaret ( Nell Tiger Free ) is at the center of this particular universe, an American woman, once an orphan herself, who comes to Italy to begin her service to God but gets caught up in circumstances that will eventually explain just how — and why — Damien would emerge. In many ways this film, directed by Arkasha Stevenson, who also co-wrote the script, is even less a horror film for most of its running time and more of a kind of ’70s-style psychological paranoid thriller, and with no small debt to Roman Polanski’s 1968 Rosemary’s Baby.

Margaret also takes a liking to Carlita (Nicole Sorace), a teen orphan with whom she personally identifies. Ralph Ineson , a fine actor, turns up as Father Brennan, a character in the 1976 original, who is ex-communicated and trying to warn Margaret of some weird circumstances and dangerous goings-on in the place.

Among the rest of the cast, Bill Nighy , as always, is a standout, playing the powerful Cardinal Lawrence who at one time was the priest at the orphanage. Veteran Brazilian star Sonia Braga plays the suffer-no-fools Sister Silva, the Abbess of the orphanage, and adds her special brand of fire to the proceedings. The Rome locations are welcome, and while Mark Korven’s score certainly doesn’t top Jerry Goldsmith’s Oscar-winning 1976 original, it does tip its hat and echoes it in parts, even to the use of Goldsmith’s haunting Oscar-nominated song “Ave Satani.”

Although this is a well-worn genre, and the Omen franchise is nearing a half-century old now, the Italian setting and an excellent cast make this all worthwhile for fans looking to see how it all began, even if the nun-in-distress subgenre is getting to be fairly predictable. The First Omen isn’t for the squeamish, and it builds to its obvious crescendo just like you might expect, but still it is well-crafted enough to be an intriguing entry into the series that had no where else to go but, uh, backwards. Whether the First Omen is also finally the last Omen, time — and box office — will tell.

Producers are David S. Goyer and Keith Levine.

Title: The First Omen Distributor: 20th Century Films/Walt Disney Studios Release date: April 5, 2024 Director: Arkasha Stevenson Screenwriter: Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas; story by Ben Jacoby Cast: Nell Tiger Free, Bill Nighy, Ralph Ineson, Sonia Braga, Maria Caballero, Nicole Sorace, Tawfeek Barhom Rating: R Running time: 2 hr 0 min

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