Us (2019, Jordan Peele) (Patreon)

60/100

[Major, movie-ruining spoilers. Enjoy, Waz!]

The rare film that could be significantly improved by removing a single line of dialogue. Just two words, in fact: "We're Americans." In context, that reply to Adelaide's question is nonsensical; it functions solely as an Author's Message, which would be kinda irritating even if said Message were remotely coherent. But I frankly have no idea what Peele thinks he's saying with this labored metaphor, or why he's generally inclined to confuse matters via needless over-explanation. (Get Out seemed to me just as thematically muddled; at least this time I'm not alone.) The Tethered as America's underclass works reasonably well, perhaps especially when rendered somewhat race-neutral (a clarifying inaccuracy), but that interpretation requires seeing Adelaide—the original one—as... what, exactly? The equivalent of Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places, fighting to regain her privileged status by rallying the dispossessed? That inevitably undermines any broader sense of outrage—it's like trying to call attention to poor prison conditions via a story about the escape plan of someone who was wrongfully convicted. Not satisfying, but neither is a less sociopolitical reading about human beings' lifelong battle with our atavistic shadow selves. Peele makes the Tethered (excepting Red, who's not actually one of them) so inhuman that they don't function well as distorted mirror images—they're more like camouflage-zombies that take on the physical form of their prey in order to disorient.

All of that's Ed, I still largely enjoyed Us, because it's creepy as fuck on a moment-to-moment basis. Divorced from any reflection about its meaning, the premise is inherently disturbing, and Peele does a fine job of exploiting its uncanny aspects (including such elegant touches as that overhead shot at the beach with the family visually dwarfed by its lengthy shadows). He also continues to elicit superb performances, in a variety of different registers; here, Nyong'o  gets to act largely with her eyes, à la Kaluuya, as Adelaide, then does a magnificent, expressionistic job of making Red at once legitimately terrifying and heartbreakingly piteous, with the latter quality retroactively doubled at the end (but only if you ignore US = U.S.). Even as a pure genre exercise, though, the film intermittently bugged me. Certain aspects seem arbitrary for the sake of narrative convenience (i.e. why does the Tethered Moss-Heidecker family immediately slaughter its own doubles, but toy with we-think-it's-Adelaide long enough for her to be rescued? If it's because they recognize/sense that she's one of them, why threaten her at all?), and I'm just plain weary of ironic needle drops accompanying scenes of violence. Adding inadvertent-voice-command jokes doesn't make that trope any less moldy.