Rarely do I find myself in agreement with mainstream critics when it comes to horror films, but Us truly is one of the greatest and scariest horror films ever made. If you combine the sleazy grit of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the dark artistry of The Shining, you are getting close to how well-crafted and terrifying this film is. I had reservations about director Jordan Peele’s ability to make a scary movie that isn’t just an excuse to shove a social message down my throat, but the man weaves social commentary seamlessly and subtly into the horror.
Happy April Fool’s Day. Sorry to anyone that reads this after today.
So, yeah, pretty much the opposite of the first paragraph. This movie isn’t scary and is more concerned with its message than it is about delivering a solid horror film. Future film students will get a lot of mileage out of it in term papers, but it generally fails at face value and has highly misleading trailers. The ads make this look like a home invasion movie, but it goes down quite a fucking rabbit hole after that sequence plays out. There is a big twist in this movie that I just need to talk about, so I’ll speak in generalities at first and then give a spoiler alert when I dive into the deeper nonsense on display here.
In 1986, young Adelaide wanders off from her parents on a boardwalk, goes into a funhouse and is confronted by an evil doppelganger of herself. Traumatized by the encounter, she gradually recovers through the therapy of dance, as is standard procedure for evil doppelganger-related trauma. Flash forward to the present day, Adelaide going on vacation with her husband and two children to the very spot of her childhood horrors because that just seems like a good idea. Long story short, they meet up with the evil doppelganger family and it turns out that there is an underground society of doppelgangers of everybody in America. Armed only (and oddly) with scissors, these duplicates plan to kill all of us normies and reenact Hands Across America. I’m not being a smartass either, that’s really what they’re doing and it’s set up by footage of the actual Hands Across America in the 1986 flashback. I couldn’t help but think that it might be possible to take over California with nothing but scissors, but these fuckers are going to have a hard time once they hit the southern states.
Quite simply, this isn’t scary. The bit with the evil family in the house has creepy moments (all of which are in the trailer), but the film starts to evoke memories of The Happening once the larger mayhem starts to play out in the streets. The characters are uninteresting and the broader plot is goddamn absurd. They briefly mention that this underground society of evil twins has been engineered by scientists or the government (not sure which). How? Why? Where are these people? I get that these have symbolic answers (I’m getting to that), but undertones aren’t effective when the overtones are ridiculous. The fucking plants in The Happening have a more realistic motivation and backstory than this. I also heard a lot of unintentional laughter in my theater, mainly due to the guttural vocals of the doppelgangers. That odd (and quite funny) touch was either an attempt at making the characters sound scary or as a commentary on the, um, limited linguistic abilities of some segments of the population. This being a Jordan Peele movie in 2019, I’m betting it’s the latter. And it doesn’t work. This is also a largely bloodless affair. Call me shallow if you want, but I like gore in my horror movies and this is basically only R-rated because we get to hear the entirety of “Fuck the Police” by N.W.A.
SPOILER ALERT
Alright, here is the big twist that would make mid-2000s M. Night Shyamalan proud: Us is basically a horror version of Trading Places. Yes, the movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. It turns out that Adelaide didn’t just meet her doppelganger in 1986, she was switched with her. The point of the film is the horror of privilege, that we are a product of our environment (which is forced upon us) and we have little control of our own destiny. Now, I’m not necessarily taking issue with that message. I go back and forth on how much I agree with it, plus it’s the same message as Trading Places and that’s one of my favorite comedies. But there are two problems here: First, the basic premise is ridiculous. Nobody, in 23 years, noticed that something was wrong? How fucking little do you know your own fucking kid? Why didn’t the real Adelaide just leave? There is literally no security, the evil version just walked out in the beginning. Wouldn’t people down there realize that she isn’t one of the sewer dwellers? She looks like she was 10 years old when she was switched, so why did she lose the ability to speak normally or not move like she’s impersonating a cyborg? If the message is that your environment dictates your behavior, why did she still end up with an identical family? Secondly, and more importantly, this movie puts its message ahead of its genre. Trading Places is a funny movie with great characters and performances, which makes me inclined to overlook logical issues with its plot. This isn’t scary and doesn’t have the memorable characters or moments needed to make me suspend disbelief to the extent needed for this story to work.
I mainly just want horror movies to be scary and/or fun, but I don’t automatically hate a film for also having an underlying social commentary. My all-time favorite director is John Carpenter and he was great at inserting a message deep into a film for those that wanted to look for it, while still making the movie fun for those that just wanted an entertaining time. Us is the opposite. The message here is the focal point and the horror is the mechanism for delivering it. Not my cup of tea.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_(2019_film)#/media/File:Us_(2019)_theatrical_poster.png
