Us starts with a bravura scare-sequence set in 1986 -- a little girl wanders away from her parents at a sinister-looking carnival located on the beach at Santa Cruz. The sky is belligerent with lightning and the child sees odd people standing apart from the happy carnival-goers. She enters a fun-house called VisionQuest built into the side of seaside bluff and encounters what seems to be her double -- then, something awful occurs off-screen and we see the anxious parents seeking counseling for the little girl's obstinate and inexplicable silence. The counselors tell her parents to indulge her in something that she loves -- in this case, ballet. Cut to the present, the little girl is a grown-up woman now with a husband and two attractive children. Her family is prosperous and have enough money to own a palatial summer house on a lake. Her husband suggests that the family go to the beach at Santa Cruz. The woman resists this idea -- she recalls being traumatized at that beach and doesn't even like the idea of sand, let alone a return visit to the site of her primal fears. But the family (they are African-American) go to the beach, meet friends (a superficial and obnoxious White family), and, then, after some odd coincidences return home to their isolated lake cabin. (At the beach, there's a religious fanatic at the beach as there was in 1986 and a fun-house built into the side of the bluff called "Merlin's Forrest.") That night, their Doppelgaengers appear outside their house -- there's a big, hulking man, a woman with weirdly automaton-like motions, a little boy in a frightening Jobst mask (covering terrible facial burns), and a teenage daughter. After a frightening siege, the doubles get into the house, chain up the wife and, then, proceed to try to kill their counterparts with long, gleaming scissors. All sorts of mayhem ensues. The family escapes, its members wounded but alive, and flees to the house of the White family, apparently across the lake. But the doubles of the White family have also appeared out of nowhere and succeeded in stabbing to death everyone in that house. There's more bloody mayhem. The Black family now seems to have developed savage traits -- they seem committed to hunting down their doubles and beating them to death with golf clubs or baseball bats. More bloody mayhem ensues. At last, the wife pursues her Doppelgaenger into a subterranean world full of eerie corridors and thousands of white rabbits. There's a big reveal. The heroine returns to the surface and sees that thousands and thousands of the Doppelgaengers have emerged in a sort of rebellion from under ground -- they have killed their counterparts and, now, stand in a sinister-looking chain, holding hands, a line of people in red jump-suits (like county lock-up garb) that snakes across the country with no end in sight. Jordan Peele's direction is generally effective; he manages the horror and gore sequences efficiently -- nothing is too extreme and the worst stuff is off-camera, but it's all quite disturbing. There are suitably eerie images -- one vertical shot of people walking across a beach emphasizes the huge spidery shadows that they cast -- and the music is convincingly grotesque, like a waltz for a sinister puppet theater. Peele began his career with racially inflected comedy and there's a fair amount of humor in the movie (parts of it are quite funny). The film has a lot of good ideas -- perhaps, too many, and, in the end, it's energy is diluted into so many different channels that the whole thing seems a little diffuse. The plot makes no sense by any rational criteria, but you don't go to a horror movie for reasoned argument -- it's an irrational form since fear is irrational and Us' dream-logic makes good enough sense. The big reveal is well-prepared -- a reveal of this sort isn't effective unless the audience can anticipate it. I figured out the reveal about twenty minutes before it occurred -- this is just about right. The audience must have a good suspicion as to the true horror that is afoot and Peele, who is expert in horror films and their conventions, calculates these sorts of effects exactly right. (Spoilers ahead...)
The film operates on the basis of a Jekyll and Hyde duality: there are those of us who are successful, at least, outwardly, and have most of the good things in life. Peele views wealth and prosperity as a Hobbesian zero sum gain -- what I possess has been taken from someone else. My joy is someone else's despair. There is a literal underclass -- people who are exactly like you and me and, in fact, our doubles, but whose lives have been horribly impoverished to the extent that our lives have been successful. This sort of argument affords the basis for Fritz Lang's Metropolis (with its armies of proles working below the gleaming city) and H.G. Wells' The Time Machine in which hideous Morlocks labor in mines far underground and feed upon the beautiful, if helpless, Eloi. (The same system exists in Wagner's Ring -- the glory of the Gods rests upon the slave labor of the dwarf-blacksmith's in their subterranean caves.) Metropolis is Science Fiction -- it's a dystopia that involves a slave revolt and ends with the characters finding a way to live together with some semblance of justice. Metropolis is Science Fiction because the people living in the bright, well-ordered city of the future are the masters of the slave workers below. Us is horror because, in a startling reversal, the film asserts that the slaves under the earth, in fact, are controlling their counterparts on the surface and, indeed, operating them like marionettes. Although there are two imago -- the well-groomed prosperous people in their elegantly casual clothes and the underground monsters who move like cockroaches, have raw voices that can barely speak, and wear prison red jump-suits -- each divided being shares only one soul. And the soul resides in the depths, that is, underground in the labyrinth of hidden chambers and galleries feeding on raw and bloody rabbit meat. Thus, the surface is all epiphenomena -- it merely imitates a dark and brutal underworld that comprises the real world. With Peele, racial parables are always present -- and, in fact, aspects of the movie are very similar to the more extravagant passages in Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man. (That novel also involves people living in sewers underground, rioters emerging from the shadows, and strange industrial operations hidden below the city -- for instance, the weird factory that produces white paint.) White people, and more generally, the capitalist bourgeois have created an underclass. But the underclass rules us -- it's passions, jargon, music, and ideas all percolate up into the light to control our reality. This is dramatized wonderfully in a hilarious, and disturbing, sequence. The White family lives in a "smart home" called Ophelia, the whitest of all white heroines. When the White family's doubles are stabbing them to death, one of the victims cries out: "Ophelia, call the police!" Orphelia misunderstands the command and says: "Playing NWA's Fuck the Police!" -- thunderous and profane rap music, then, provides accompaniment to the murders. Needless to say, the police don't show up and the cavalry never rides to the rescue.
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