Movie Review: Us (English)

Watching Jordan Peele's Us is like being trapped in a nightmarish carnival house of mirrors. As much as it's thrilling and straightforward, Peele also cleverly distorts and repackages genre tropes in unexpected ways to expound themes of privilege and neglect, appropriation and marginalisation, and that we, humans, might just be our own worst enemies. This duality, enforced through a series of leitmotifs — from the time on the clock, which reads 11:11, to Bible verses, from rabbits to mirrors, not to mention a pair of scissors that feature prominently all through the film — is what underpins Us, a revisionist home-invasion horror flick whose central conceit is that the invaders are doppelgängers of the victims, with the plot kicking into overdrive when the Wilsons confront their worst fears in the form of their murderous twins.

When a young girl wanders across a beach one fateful night, she is drawn to a strange building with a sign that seems to be calling out to her. "Find yourself," it reads, and in she goes to a hall of mirrors where she, quite literally, runs into herself. With Get Out (2017), Peele overturned the classic tale of body possession horror into a chilling metaphor for black and white relations in America (or the U.S., or us), but in his sophomore effort, he plants an ordinary family in an extraordinary situation to unleash a dark Jekyll and Hyde tale that extends the idea of a divided self to a much broader "us versus them" debate, turning it into an insightful yet topical social commentary. Anchored as it may be by Lupita Nyong'o's sterling performance and Mike Gioulakis' (It Follows, Split) stunning camerawork, the film's startling climactic twist (almost like The Sixth Sense or The Others) flips the story on its head, while content to not play by the rules it set for itself.

P.S.: (Spoilers ahead) - There is ample amount of foreshadowing right in the opening scene. We see what appears to be young Adelaide watching television, to the left of which are several VHS cassette tapes, one among them being C.H.U.D., a 1984 sci-fi horror film about Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. That's not all. Once Adelaide wanders away from her dad at Santa Cruz beach, she passes two people who are playing a game of rock-paper-scissors, an allusion to the fate that awaits her at the funhouse.