Film Review: Us

There are filmmakers who have just really strange and incredible world views. Jordan Peele is among that number, with the Oscar winning Get Out and his follow up film Us, starring Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke. With Us, Jordan Peele tries to weave so many different threads and themes together: trauma, otherness, failed charity initiatives, how to best shoot and use Lupita’s incredibly expressive face, etc. The sum of the parts however, provide a film that’s merely entertaining, the strain of all of the elements spoken and unspoken ultimately weigh the film down by the ending.

The aforementioned Lupita and Winston, star as Adelaide and Gabriel, a married couple who are taking their kids on a much needed vacation in Santa Cruz. Adelaide seems a bit off the entire time, remembering a moment where she experienced something so traumatic she’s tried to keep it buried her entire life. Things don’t get much better when she has to return to the same beach where the trauma occurred. For anyone, this would probably be the worst that could happen, but not Adelaide as that same night, her and her family are visited and terrorized by cloned versions of themselves, known as the Tethered. Over the course of a very long night and day, they must fight not only to stay alive, but to confront the very nature of humanity.

I don’t want to turn this review into a Lupita stan account, but the movie essentially rests on her incredibly capable Oscar winning shoulders. Whether she’s playing Adelaide or Red, she is on fire here, charting the multiple levels of trauma and allowing herself to be a vessel for the film’s message. If the movie didn’t reveal any of its many twists in the plot, you’d be able to chart them just by the minute changes in action and performance that Lupita gives us. What a treat to witness an actor so on top of their game.

And Us is a treat, though the movie does get mired down by the end. I found Us to be incredibly entertaining whether watching the giant that is Winston Duke amble onto a twin size bed or gleefully cheering on Adelaide’s kids (played by Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex) as they started getting in on the action. Peele’s sense of balance as a filmmaker is on display for much of this movie, blending incredible shots and truly laugh out loud moments with ease. That is, until he needs to find a way to end the film and tie together his cavalcade of ideas.

Jordan Peele’s Us falls victim to the ideas, mechanics, and film language it has chosen to use in its dense third act. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I found that once film got into the end, where all would be revealed, the movie ground to a halt. It was nice receiving the information but Peele’s script falters in doing this in a clever way, needing characters to deliver long monologues and to show multiple flashbacks that screamed “SEE! If you didn’t get it, this is what is going on.” Us is a confident movie, but apparently not enough to let the audience put some of the pieces together ourselves from Lupita’s brilliant performance and the context clues of one particular flashback.

It all adds up to this kind of uneven end. The movie feels confident enough to wallop you over the head with messaging and thoughts and easter eggs but it doesn’t manage to make many of them stick beyond “oh that’s what you meant” and “I get that reference.” Particularly as it relates to the final moments, I found Us to be incredibly frustrating in how it ultimately attempted to deliver a message. Is it enough to just have a statement made for a statements sake and not including future actions? My brain felt like it had been render inert, not because of lack of understanding, but Us has so much it wants to be about that it ends up only being about pieces of those things, rather than feeling like a 100% whole movie.