Written and Directed by Jordan Peele

Starring: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elizabeth Moss

Jordan Peele’s Us intrigued me with its opening, excited me with its premise, but then began to bore and frustrate me in its middle to late sections. His now second feature film as writer/director has shown for sure that he has an eye for the camera and horror imagery, but ultimately it falls flat in the shadow of Get Out. It’s unfair to compare the two, but Get Out was an important film, and had that rare small scale story that truly meant something. That’s why I left the theater enjoying its perspective and implications. Us is just plain silly, and doesn’t quite satisfy until the very end, which involves a big mistake I think Peele should have avoided. But I’ll get to that.

The movie opens in 1986. A young girl is with her family at the beach in Santa Cruz. She wanders away from them to a hall of mirrors, and soon stumbles upon a girl who looks just like her. She opens her mouth to scream. Cuts to a close up on a rabbit, and slow zoom out to many rabbits in cages. And then you see it is in classroom. The opening credits play. You won’t understand this until the end.

Now it’s present day. The little girl has grown up to be played by Lupita Nyong’o (her name’s Adelaide). She’s on vacation with her family: husband Gabe, two kids Zora and Jason. There’s a lot of humor in the movie here. Gabe has an obsession with keeping up with his neighbor, and really likes boats. The little boy Jason always has a goofy monster mask on his head, and talks back in ways too wise for his years.

Adelaide finds out Gabe has planned a beach trip to that very same beach she lost in the hall of mirrors in as a kid. She still has PTSD from it, and it has effected her comfort in speaking.

But let’s cut to the chase. A group of strangers are out on their lawn. “There’s a family in our driveway” Jason says. They break in. They all resemble the family. Adelaide, Gabe, Zora, Jason. All  in red (except the kid boy wears a white mask). All carrying scissors. Another great line by Jason, “It’s us”.

Okay. Peele drags this upcoming scene on forever. Like he did with the opening and young Adelaide getting lost. But that was interesting. Here, it gets weird. And it gets weirder later on. I’m not sure Peele knows when to cut things shorter.

The doppelganger Adelaide’s (Red) voice cracks as she forces out each word. It’s clear she isn’t normal. She tells a story about a girl and her shadow, and how the shadow felt and got things secondhand from the girl. How everything was pain instead of join. A ruined existence.

We still don’t know where they came from, or who they are, or what they want. Red tortures Adelaide and her family. And this is where the movie frustrated and bored me. It’s not particularly scary at all, but the imagery is nice. The camera moves seamlessly like a good horror movie, but unfortunately Peele and his editor let scenes drag. And they go on, and the audience I was with called out at the inexplicable decisions of several of the characters.

But I’ll say Peele’s style seems to always shift between comedy and horror and cringe. So many moments in Us and Get Out ring the same. Awkward, puzzling shifts in tone. Do we laugh at this? Do we scream? Do we cringe? I think Peele is still perfecting his voice, and I hope he gets his wobbling storytelling down one day. I enjoy his movies, but sometimes I sit there and expect better of him. Maybe that’s an error on my part.

No more of the plot. The movie goes in a direction that I think almost cheapens the premise. Get Out was so good because it was a contained story about a trapped man in a single place he knew he didn’t belong, and its messages were what was global. Us makes the mistake of taking what should have been a great small horror story and expanding it on a global scale. I dunno, it just took away so much for me.

That and the explanation. Red and Adelaide end up somewhere that leads to an extremely long story and reasoning for everything that has happened. And this scene right here is why sometimes it’s better to leave things open and for interpretation instead of giving us all the answers. I did love the final showdown between two characters, and the remix of I Got Five On It is so great it just makes it all the more haunting.

The very final reveal/twist of Us is a really good one, and maybe will forgive so many of the movies boring and lackluster scares throughout. It also would explain so many pointless decisions by certain characters. I think I liked the beginning of this movie, the family dynamic and actors, but I think I kinda hate how meandering it gets from before the halfway point all the way until the very end. The final scenes of the movie are what make it okay for me, but without those I think I would have been more frustrated with it all that I currently am.

But I’ll say something. Lupita shines in this movie. I think almost all the actors do. In roles where they get to play two versions of themselves. But Lupita is the heart and center of it all, and she is spellbinding. I don’t think I have seen her in a leading role in a movie before, and I’d love to see her lead more films after this. She has the versatility and command of her craft to play almost anything. The way she looks at Red when she is terrified is just so good. I just wish Peele’s story had lead to something better. I feel his message may be muted because of the poor pacing. Maybe it’s about the disparity between social classes. I thought about the Morlocks and the Elois from The Time Machine. But I think the opening words on tunnels would have sufficed. I don’t think he needed that long winded sci fi reason telling us exactly how things came to be. But that’s just me