Us, the new horror film from director Jordan Peele, was the #1 movie at the American box office this past weekend, grossing $71 million, a healthy, stupendous number. The reactions, on the other hand, aren’t everything many might have hoped for from the maker of Get Out. CinemaScore, the popular audience poll on mainstream movies, says moviegoers gave it an average of B, which is decent, unless we’re talking about Jordan Peele, who has been hyped well beyond this level of excitement by the entertainment industry. The critics give you a few clues on why the CinemaScore was underwhelming: almost all the reviews agree that Us is both more ambitious than Get Out and also a mixed bag. The reviews below vary in levels of approval, and some are even at odds with themselves, undecided on whether they personally think the movie truly works.
The perfect place to start is with Richard Brody of the New Yorker because he was one of the earliest champions of Get Out, and was also one of the first critics, possibly the very first, to identify Peele as an auteur-in-the-making (Brody has compared Peele to Luis Buñuel). Contrary to the consensus, he was overwhelmed:
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.
K. Austin Collins’ assessment at Vanity Fair is more measured and better reflects the tone that can be found at MUBI’s Critics Reviews section:
Us is so fixated on saying something that it undercuts how effectively it sells its ideas simply by virtue of pinpointing our cultural anxieties. This is a movie that already has the right stuff; handsome, suggestive images, such as a shot of the family being trailed by their own shadows on the beach, speak volumes. So does its concept, slimmed down a little. Black middle-class family achieves relative prosperity, acquires class status, and is direly at risk of losing it to none other than the unluckily undernourished, uneducated selves they left behind? Done. Game over. There’s Us in a nutshell—if you peel back the importance a little. The joy of it, what makes the film a severe accomplishment, is that it can be a fun ride no matter how overstuffed. But only if, ignoring the film’s prompts to mean more, you let it.
Ina Diane Archer of Film Comment elides spoilers as best she could while setting up the premise:
We first encounter the family cruising through the mountains, blasting old-school rap (“I Got 5 on It”), heading to Santa Cruz for an annual beach vacation. Howard University grad dad Gabe (Winston Duke)—whose glasses make him look like director Jordan Peele, and who is much more of a teddy bear here than as the intimidating M’Baku in Black Panther—is behind the wheel, surrounded by mother Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), irritable teenager Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and slightly weird but sweetly vulnerable son, Jason (Evan Alex). The Wilsons arrive and meet up with friends and boozy neighbors Josh and Kitty Tyler (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss) and their mean-girl twin teens and, though the Tylers’ new boat opens up a friendly economic rivalry, all signs indicate clear sailing ahead. Adelaide, however, has been haunted by a series of foreboding premonitions, which are soon validated. Later that evening, the power fails, and a family of eerie doppelgängers, clad in red coveralls, suddenly appears at the Wilsons’ vacation house.
Archer, a horror expert herself, continues by noting some of the influences she spotted:
For horror aficionados, the golf club used as a weapon might bring to mind Michael Haneke’s disturbing Funny Games, and a shot of black gloves may evoke a giallo predator. Scissors, a prominent motif in the film’s advertising campaign, are a tried-and-true emblem of the genre (and another nod to doubling). Despite the allusions, the film is Peele’s own—intricately woven, thoughtfully layered, and terrifyingly fun to watch. God—as evoked in Jeremiah 11:11, quoted in the movie—is in the details.
One of the film’s most talked about ideas references a Reagan-era publicity campaign, which Manohla Dargis analyzes for the New York Times:
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.
Regardless of whether one thinks the movie succeeds or is an interesting failure, Lupita Nyong’o’s performance is earning hosannas across the board. Amy Taubin, writing for Artforum, describes in detail how Nyong’o enhances the movie:
Some films demand a second viewing, particularly when something that is revealed at the very end makes you rethink everything that led to the denouement. The second time around you appreciate the subtlety of details you failed to notice or misunderstood. This is absolutely the case for Jordan Peele’s Us, and particularly for Lupita Nyong’o’s performance. Peele’s script and direction are very smart and often inspired—I’m not going to get into a more or less comparison with his 2017 debut feature Get Out—but make no mistake, Nyong’o, who can be at once precise and volcanic, holds the film together and takes it to another level of emotional complexity and power. And Peele, making the most of Nyong’o’s gifts, frames her face, as it metamorphoses in an instant from terrified to terrifying, in one close-up after another as the mayhem mounts.
MORE TO WATCH, MORE TO READ
- A review by Beatrice Loayza, published here on the Notebook.
- Simran Hans’ interview with Peele for Sight & Sound.
- Peele provided audio commentary on a 3-minute clip of the film for the New York Times’ Anatomy of a Scene series.
- A 52-minute Slate Spoiler Specials podcast conversation featuring Dana Stevens and K. Austin Collins.
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The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation. It is written by James Kang, who works on MUBI’s critics reviews section, a large database of movie reviews that seeks smart writing.