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Doug and I just saw Jordan Peele’s movie Us. Oh my God. The movie starts slow, but by the middle I was clinging to Doug, and at the end I was swearing never to see another Jordan Peele movie again: my heart wouldn’t take it.
The premise is pretty straightforward: What if there was another version of you, one that looked like you but was rougher and simpler, shambling instead of walking, speaking in shouts and groans instead of words? And what if one night you saw a family of these people standing at the end of your driveway? And to twist it one notch tighter, what if your counterpart even shares your inner life in some ways, so that, for example, if you’re a little boy who’s fascinated with a cigarette lighter, your other self wants to burn the world down?
Addy knows more about these doppelgängers than almost anyone. As a child, she got lost in a House of Mirrors and came face-to-face with her own double. Now an adult, married and with two children, she finds out that their family vacation will put them near that same House of Mirrors, and she urges her husband to cut the vacation short and take them home.
All the acting is good, but Lupita Nyong’o as Addy Wilson and her counterpart is in a category by herself. She’s terrifying in entirely new ways, inventing a new lexicons of fear right before your eyes. She deserved any number of awards for her performance. Hell, all the awards.
As the movie went on I thought I saw discrepancies, and I started to worry that maybe it wasn’t going to hang together. Why did the doppelgängers seem to settle in for a discussion with the Wilson family, when they dispatched all their other targets as quickly as they could? And then came the final twist, making sense of everything, casting a new and different light on what went before. And things kept falling into place, one after the other, so that the next day I woke up thinking, Oh, so that’s why…
There was more violence than I’m comfortable with, so if this is a problem for you I’d suggest, reluctantly, that you give the movie a miss. Otherwise go see it. Yeah — right now. I’ll wait.
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I read a few reviews before I wrote this, and I found out that there were a number of references that I missed. Here’s one that I didn’t see anyone mention, though: the daughter Zora has to be named for Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote Tell My Horse, about, among other things, voodoo in Haiti.
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