READERS' CHOICE #39: US (2019)

THRILL SCALE 1-10

8

HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE?

Yes, but only once, in the theatre when it was released

BEST SEQUENCE

The home invasion and the first meeting between the Wilson family and their Tethered counterparts

BEST LINE

"There's a family in our driveway"

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE

93%

ROTTEN TOMATOES CRITICS CONSENSUS

"With Jordan Peele's second inventive, ambitious horror film, we have seen how to beat the sophomore jinx, and it is Us."

IMDB SYNOPSIS

"A family's serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgängers appear and begin to terrorize them."

DIRECTOR

Jordan Peele

MAIN CAST

Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Evan Alex, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker

THOUGHTS

• It's a delicate balance making a horror comedy which is equally effective in both genres. If you emphasize the humour over the horror, especially in the scary moments, you risk undercutting the thrills; if you skimp on the jokes, then what jokes there are will be incongruous at best and absolute mood killers at worst
• Perhaps it's partly due to this high degree of difficulty that there are, by my assessment anyway, no true horror comedies on the official AFI list. There are quite a few on the readers' list, though, including Jordan Peele's first movie, Get Out. This is probably as good a time as any to mention that the readers' list was finalized before the release of Peele's third movie, Nope, but I was also pretty underwhelmed by Nope. I might give it a rewatch eventually, but I wouldn't consider it to be at the same level as Us or Get Out
• I don't want to talk about Get Out too much more, since I'll be talking about it on its own much much later, but when I saw Us in the theatre I remember liking it just a little bit more than Get Out, although I'm not sure if that opinion holds true upon rewatch. I do think, however, that Us hits that absolute sweet spot between horror and comedy with a foot firmly planted in both camps. When they happen, the jokes land, and they're inserted with a sense of tone and timing that don't take away from the scary stuff. My favourite joke in the movie, by the way, is probably "Ophelia, call the police"
• Home invasions are almost always a potent setup for a scary movie, and Us has the added impact of the home invasion being perpetrated by the sinister doppelgängers of the protagonists. One of my favourite scary movie tropes is when a character sees someone watching them through a window, and the lighting and shadows of the "family in our driveway" scene add to the eeriness. If we want to get philosophical about it, perhaps this concept is scary because it demonstrates how permeable one's home and shelter can be, even if (at first) it's just being permeated by eyesight
• I'd bet that the whole cast had a lot of fun playing both of their characters, but Lupita Nyong'o is next level, with her strong performance as Adelaide and her terrifyingly unnerving performance as Red. The way she physically embodies Red is tremendously creepy, and the voice is just perfect
• Also, the scenes set in the house of mirrors are very effective
• While the "home invasion by doppelgängers" premise is already pretty strong by itself, I admire how ambitious the ending gets with its backstory and internal logic, even if much of it doesn't entirely hold up to scrutiny. We've already seen lots of home invasion thrillers. We haven't seen many movies about subterranean clones rising up to kill their above-ground counterparts in order to form a human chain across America. But hey, maybe this is already a whole subgenre and I've just been watching the wrong movies 
• And finally, speaking of which, this may be a better known fact that I'm aware of, or the movie might have made this point more clearly than I realize, but just in case, I think it's worth mentioning that the Hands Across America campaign was a real event that happened on May 25th, 1986. So, for the movie's purposes, it's pretty important to note that the movie begins with young Adelaide seeing a commercial for Hands Across America right before heading to the beach with her parents

Up Next: The oldest movie on the Readers' Choice list, by a fair margin at that, and one of the few that I haven't seen before. The Warriors, from 1979