US

Lupita Nyong'o

US (2019). Writer/director: Jordan Peele. NOTE: This review gives away important plot points of the movie.

When she's a child Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) is temporarily lost in a fun house and has an unnerving experience. Many years later she is married with children and returns to the same vacation spot that has the carnival and the fun house -- and strange things begin to happen. When they return to their home, her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), looks out the door and sees four strangers standing stock still in their driveway. When he confronts them, he realizes that they look just like us ... 

Demon duplicates? 

Now what's going on here, you may wonder. Impoverished, angry duplicates of this nice middle-class black family are threatening Adelaide, her husband and two children. Do these strangers represent the black inner city underclass who are jealous of blacks who are upwardly mobile and have gotten their piece of the American Dream? The haves vs the have-nots?  But then the white family next door (who are depicted as vapid, stupid, and not nearly as nice as Adelaide's family) are also targeted by murderous duplicates. Then a whole host of  disenfranchised people living underground come up from below to terrorize the city, killing their own duplicates and others. The revenge of the poor and homeless? 

Boo!

Perhaps Jordan Peele should have just let the audience take the movie as an allegory of some sort and not tried to come up with an explanation, some nonsense about a scientific experiment that is abandoned, leaving the people  -- known as "The Tethered" -- in their underground habitats (which are surprisingly clean and sterile after all these years) to go insane. This only insures that the audience will have far more questions than answers as they walk out of the movie theater in a confused semi-stupor. In spite of this, far too many people have seen Us as being profound, when it's more along the lines of gobbledygook, and even Peele himself probably knows it. The movie is not nearly as original as some people claim. 

So what we're left with are some striking images and good performances, especially from Nyong'o. The movie temporarily becomes tense and interesting about the time the duplicates show up at the front door, but the tension is not sustained (anymore than it was in Peele's previous film, Get Out) and flippant remarks and dumb jokes from a family undergoing an incredible nightmare only make things worse. Ultimately Us winds up as tedious and pretentious twaddle that could have been a major film but instead is a major misfire. You can also see the twist ending from a mile away, but this only makes the plot even more ludicrous. 

Verdict: By no means "the greatest horror movie ever made." **.