Critics reviews

Peele channels the Steven Spielberg of the early 1980s, the Spielberg who hired Tobe Hooper to make Poltergeist edgy, but then interfered to ensure it remained family friendly. In Us, Spielberg—as a concept, as a theme, and now as a memory—constrains Peele’s vision the same way Spielberg constrained Hooper.

“Us” is not as beloved as “Get Out” — at least for now — partly because the expectations for Peele’s sophomore effort were so high, but also because “Get Out” was an easier film to dissect. “Us” offers no easy answers, but indicts us all.

To me, for instance, one of the film’s most affecting themes was the idea of impostor’s guilt, especially in relation to class. And I’m wondering what work is done when we are responding to the ideas presented on screen in very visceral, bodily ways, whether laughing or screaming.

Us is the first Big Ol' American Movie in a good while that seems alive with spontaneous thought and reflection rather than hashtag cues.

Black social fears are not alleviated through the teasing and mockery seen in Us; only clueless viewers would think so, and they turn out to be the audience most susceptible to Peele’s race-based conceits.

Peele unleashes a bevy of conceptual ideas about race, class, and American-ness that are only difficult to grasp if the viewer is not really looking. Us is supremely confident filmmaking, a thrill ride shot through with existential urgency.

For the first half of Us, Peele brilliantly keeps all plates spinning, both sustaining often unbearable levels of tension and advancing discomfiting ideas. . . . When Us stops focusing on the psychic toll of double consciousness—that is, after we discover the scope of the evil-clone invasion—the film slackens.

In Us, that not-so-distant past is prologue, and the echoing image of paper dolls, hand in hand, becomes a major motif and a potent symbol of spatial, generational, and national trauma.

Peele's imagery carries a wealth of associations; the movie doesn't encourage the sort of straight-ahead reading that Get Out did. This ambiguity is something of a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, Us isn't a funny, cathartic crowd-pleaser like Peele's debut. . . . On the other, it achieves an insidious, lingering effect that's rarer in the horror genre.

The Tethered themselves tell the Wilsons “We’re Americans,” making the central metaphor as blunt as possible. But whether director Jordan Peele intended this or not, his story is not just one of America, but how America’s history, its systems, its government, corrupts the denizens of even other nations, underground or otherwise.

Alfred Hitchcock is the presiding artistic influence. When you analyze Us visually, you see mirroring across vertical and horizontal axes, manipulations of depth and surface, parallels and forks, layers and scrims and slices.

It’s a little too high on its own supply for all the math to add up, to the film’s detriment.