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“Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.” - Jeremiah 11:11

In Rodney Ascher ’s documentary “ Room 237 ,” four theorists attempt to explain the hidden messages in Stanley Kubrick ’s movie “ The Shining .” The ideas about what the movie is about range from the possible to the downright bizarre. One theory fixates on the possibility that “The Shining” was Kubrick’s way of confessing he faked the landing on the moon footage, and another obsesses over the details of the hedge maze. The other two see evidence that the 1980 film indirectly references either the genocide of Native Americans or the Holocaust.

Like “The Shining,” there are a number of different ways to interpret Jordan Peele ’s excellent new horror movie, “Us.” Every image seems to be a clue for what’s about to happen or a stand-in for something outside the main story of a family in danger. Peele’s film, which he directed, wrote and produced, will likely reward audiences on multiple viewings, each visit revealing a new secret, showing you something you missed before in a new light.

“Us” begins back in 1986 with a young girl and her parents wandering through the Santa Cruz boardwalk at night. She separates from them to walk out on the empty beach, watching a foreboding flock of thunderclouds roll in. Her eyes find an attraction just off the main pier, and she walks into what looks like an abandoned hall of mirrors, discovering something deeply terrifying—her doppelgänger. The movie shifts to the present day, with Janelle Monae on the radio as the Wilson family is heading towards their vacation home. The little girl has now grown up to be a woman, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), nervous about returning to that spot on the Santa Cruz beach. Her husband, Gabe ( Winston Duke ), thinks her reaction is overblown, but he tries to make her feel at ease so they can take their kids Zora ( Shahadi Wright Joseph ) and Jason ( Evan Alex ) to the beach and meet up with old friends, the Tylers ( Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker ) and their twin daughters. After one small scare and a few strange coincidences on the beach, the family returns home for a quiet night in, only to have their peace broken by a most unlikely set of trespassers lined up across their driveway: doppelgängers of their family.

Part of the appeal of “Us” is how you interpret what all of this information and images mean. No doubt the movie will give audiences plenty to mull over long after the credits. In the film, the Jeremiah 11:11 Bible verse appears twice before pivotal moments, and there are plenty of other Biblical references to dig into, including an analogy to heaven and hell. Perhaps Jason’s “ Jaws ” shirt is a reference to the rocket sweater the little boy wears in “The Shining” or it could be a warning about the film’s oceanside dangers. In the ‘80s scene, when young Adelaide walks into the mysterious attraction, the sign welcoming her is that of a Native American in a headdress above the name “Shaman Vision Quest.” When the family returns to the beach, the sign has been replaced with a more PC-friendly sign bearing a wizard advertising it as “Merlin’s Enchanted Forest,” a bandaid solution to hiding the racist exterior and the horror inside its halls.

As he did with “ Get Out ,” Peele pays significant tribute to the films that have influenced him in “Us.” Though this time, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus. As I spoke with others who saw the movie, we focused on different titles that stood out to us. For me, “The Shining” looked to be the film that received the most nods in “Us,” including an overhead shot of the Wilson family driving through hilly forests to their vacation home, much like the Torrance family does on the way to the Overlook Hotel. There’s also a reference to “The Shining” twins, a few architectural and cinematography similarities and, in one shot, Nyong’o charges the camera with a weapon much like Jack Nicholson menacingly drags along an ax in a chase. However, “Us” is not just a love letter to one horror movie. Peele also pays tribute to Brian De Palma with a split diopter shot that places both Adelaide and her doppelgänger in equal focus for the first time in the movie. There’s also a tip of the hat to Darren Aronofsky ’s “ Black Swan ” in terms of dueling balletic styles and a gorgeously choreographed fight scene that looks like a combative pas de deux.

This delightfully deranged home invasion-family horror film works because Peele not only knows how to tell his story, he assembled an incredible cast to play two roles. The Wilsons are a picture of an all-American family: a family of four that looks to be middle class, with college-educated (Gabe is wearing a Howard University sweater) parents doting on their two children. Their doppelgängers may look like them and be tied to them in some way, but their lives are inverses of each other, and their existence has been one of limits and misery. It’s one of the most poignant analogies of class in America to come out in a studio film in recent memory. For the actors, it’s a chance to play two extremes, one of intense normality and the other of wretched evil. In “Us,” Duke shows off his comedic strengths as the dorky father who often embarrasses his kids, and his doppelgänger is a frighting wall of violence with little to say other than grunts and fighting his adversary. If Nyong’o doesn’t get some professional recognition for her performances here, I will be very disappointed. As Adelaide, she’s fearful, trying to keep some traumatic memories at bay but putting on a brave face for her family. To play her character’s opposite, Nyong’o adopts a graceful, confident movement for her doppelgänger, sliding into the family’s home with scissors at the ready. The doppelgänger looks wide-eyed and maliciously curious as if she’s looking for new ways to terrorize this family. She whispers in a raspy but sinister voice that would make many people jump and run away.

A suspenseful story and marvelous cast need a great crew to make the film a home run, and “Us” is not short on talent. “ It Follows ” cinematographer Mike Gioulakis creates unsettling images in mundane spaces, like how a strange family standing at a driveway isn’t necessarily scary, but when it’s eerily dark out, they’re backlit so that their faces go unseen and the four bodies are standing at a higher elevation from our heroes, so it looks like evil is swooping in from above. Kym Barrett ’s costume designs not only supply the doppelgängers’ nefarious looking red jumpsuits but also the normal, comfy clothes the Wilsons and Tylers wear on vacation. Michael Abels , who also composed the score for “Get Out,” and the ominous notes from the sound design team lay the groundwork for nerve-wracking sequences.

Jordan Peele isn’t the next Kubrick, M. Night Shyamalan, Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg . He’s his own director, with a vision that melds comedy, horror and social commentary. And he has a visual style that’s luminous, playful and delightfully unnerving. Peele uses an alternate cinematic language to Kubrick, seems more comfortable at teasing his story’s twists throughout the narrative unlike Shyamalan, uses suspense differently than Hitchcock, and possesses the comedic timing Spielberg never had. “Us” is another thrilling exploration of the past and oppression this country is still too afraid to bring up. Peele wants us to talk, and he’s given audiences the material to think, to feel our way through some of the darker sides of the human condition and the American experience.

This review was originally filed from the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 9, 2019.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to RogerEbert.com .

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Rated R for violence/terror, and language.

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Lupita Nyong'o as Adelaide Wilson

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Review: Jordan Peele’s “Us” Is a Colossal Cinematic Achievement

By Richard Brody

The success of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, “ Get Out ,” bought him time, he said, in a recent interview with Le Monde —for his new film, “Us,” he had twice as many shoot days. The expanded time frame allowed him to produce a work of expanded ambition: “Us” bounces back and forth between 1986 and the present day, and its action, compared to “Get Out,” has a vast range—geographical, dramatic, and intellectual. The movie’s imaginative spectrum is enormous, four-dimensionally so: it delves deep into a literal underground world that lends the hallucinatory concept of the “sunken place” from “Get Out” a physical embodiment. And it captures the transformative, radical power of a political conscience, of an idea long held in secret, as it ripens and develops over decades’ worth of time. “Us” is nothing short of a colossal achievement.

Structured like a home-invasion drama, “Us” is a horror film—though saying so is like offering a reminder that “The Godfather” is a gangster film or that “2001: A Space Odyssey” is science fiction. Genre is irrelevant to the merits of a film, whether its conventions are followed or defied; what matters is that Peele cites the tropes and precedents of horror in order to deeply root his film in the terrain of pop culture—and then to pull up those roots. “Us” is a film that places itself within pop culture for diagnostic—and even self-diagnostic—purposes; its subject is, in large measure, cultural consciousness and its counterpart, the cultural unconscious. The crucial element of horror is political and moral—the realities that metaphorical fantasies evoke.

Peele reaches deep into the symbolic DNA of pop culture to discover a hidden, implicit history that he brings to the fore, at a moment of growing recognition that the deeds of the past still rage with silent and devastating force in the present time. After a title card notes the presence of a vast hidden network of tunnels (as for abandoned railways and mines) beneath American soil, the action begins with a bit of pop archeology: a shot of an old-fashioned tube TV set, on which a commercial is playing for “Hands Across America,” a 1986 philanthropic fund-raising event that involved an effort to create a human chain from coast to coast. (The announcer’s voice-over says, “Six million people will tether themselves together to fight hunger in America.”)

At that time, a young girl named Adelaide (though her name isn’t heard until much later in the film, when she’s an adult) is visiting a Santa Cruz beach with her squabbling parents. The child (Madison Curry) wanders off, enters a beachside haunted-house attraction, and, there, walking through a hall of mirrors reminiscent of the one in Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai,” sees not her reflection but her physical double. After the incident, her parents find her traumatized, but just what happened isn’t clear to them. In the present day, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is married to Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke), and they have two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), a teen-ager, and Jason (Evan Alex), who seems to be about eight. The Wilsons are prosperous—they’re heading to a summer house by a lake, where Gabe buys a speedboat (albeit a beat-up, run-down one) on a whim. It’s not clear what they do for a living; Adelaide used to dance but gave it up. What is clear is that she now has an aversion to the beach because of the haunted house, which is still there, in a slightly different guise. Her memories and flashbacks suggest that the trauma from whatever happened in the house has haunted her for her whole life.

The Wilsons are black, a fact that, as depicted, has little overt effect on their lives. Avoiding the stereotypes of black Americans in movies, Peele instead knowingly depicts them as a stereotype of a financially successful, socially stable, and cinematically average American family. It’s as though they naturally and unintentionally use what Boots Riley’s film, “Sorry to Bother You,” would call their “white voice,” the voice of white-dominated corporate prosperity. (There’s even a wink back to “Get Out,” regarding the Wilsons’ utterly untroubled confidence in the police.) Their summer companions are a white (and wealthier) family, the Tylers, Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), and their twin daughters, Becca (Cali Sheldon) and Lindsey (Noelle Sheldon).

Back at their summer house that night, Adelaide experiences premonitions—she tells Gabe that she feels that her double is out there somewhere. “My whole life I’ve felt as if she’s still coming for me,” she says, and, on this night, she feels as if “she’s getting closer.” Moments later, Jason sees another family standing outside the house; it turns out to be four doubles of the Wilson family, distinguished by their matching red jumpsuits (reminiscent of prison uniforms) and tan sandals, their static posture—holding hands side by side, in the manner of Hands Across America—and their silence. The doubles soon burst into the house, facing off against the Wilsons while Adelaide’s double (named, in the credits, Red)—the only one of the four doppelgängers to speak—states, in a hoarse and halting voice, her demands.

No less than “Get Out,” “Us” is a work of directorial virtuosity, in which Peele invests every moment, every twist, every diabolically conceived and gleefully invoked detail with graphic, psychological resonance and controlled tone, in performance and gesture. Here, as in “Get Out,” Peele employs point-of-view shots to put audience members in the position of the characters, to conjure subjective and fragmentary experience that reverberates with the metaphysical eeriness of their suddenly doubled world. (Recurring nods to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” suggest a mysterious transformation of the natural order.) Exactly as the title promises (and as the drama delivers, when Jason identifies the intruders, saying, “It’s us”), the movie turns the screen into a funhouse mirror in which the distortions prove to be truer representations of the state of things—in the world of its viewers—than more familiar, realistic depictions.

A distinctively American vision is planted throughout the action of “Us,” with an explicit and monitory allusion to the notion of national destiny. As a child, Adelaide sees, at the beach, a silent beachcomber-prophet with a sign that reads “Jeremiah 11:11.” In that chapter, God grants people land on the condition that they keep their covenant with Him, but when they revert to “the sins of their ancestors,” they face divine retribution: “Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.’ ” When Adelaide asks the family’s doubles “What are you people?,” the wording of the question (not “who” but “what”) is less offensive than it is literally ontological: Are they alive or dead? Are they zombies or robots or creatures from space or figments of their imagination? Red’s answer is “We’re Americans.” (Even the title, “Us,” doubles as “U.S.”)

“Us” is intensely suspenseful (it would be sinful to spoil its twists or even to hint at its scares) and moderately gory—yet the bloodshed rigorously serves the drama. It’s never there to gross out viewers or to test their threshold of shock or disgust. (And I’m squeamish.) In particular, the explicit violence provides a serious view of life-threatening dangers that compel bourgeois characters to get their hands dirty with the act of killing—it shows what they’re up against and what they have to face, and to do, in an effort to save themselves. Yet “Us” also offers that safety, that salvation, with bitter irony. (It brings to mind Florence Reece’s pro-union song “ Which Side Are You On? ”) It’s a movie that, true to its genre, is plotted with hair-trigger mechanisms that tweak suspense with surprises—intellectual ones along with dramatic and sensory ones.

With its foretold emphasis on tunnels, “Us” proves to be something like Peele’s version of “ Notes from Underground ,” complete with its fiery arias of torment from those whose voices otherwise go unheard. (There’s a relevant wink along the way at Samuel Fuller’s jangling masterwork “ Shock Corridor .”) The term that describes the link between the Wilsons and their doubles is called “tethering”—and that word, in its many grammatical forms, recurs throughout the film (not least, in repeated allusions to Hands Across America). The nature of bonds—social bonds, voluntary and involuntary connections of some people to others—is at the heart of the movie, the desire for solidarity with some, the intended or oblivious dissociation from others.

The movie’s many pop-culture references—whether kids wearing T-shirts for “Thriller” and “Jaws” or the presence of “Good Vibrations” and “Fuck tha Police” on the soundtrack—are no mere decorations. Peele’s radical vision of inequality, of the haves and the have-nots, those who are in and those who are out, is reflected brightly and brilliantly in his view of pop culture, current and classic (including riffs on romantic melodrama and on the notion of emotional expression as a luxury in itself). Mass media is presented in “Us” as a rich people’s culture, if not in the immediate origins of its artists, then in the production, distribution, marketing, platforming, and lawyering of the work—in the very notion of its valuable and ubiquitous legacy. (In the Le Monde interview, Peele cited the soundtrack as another principal benefit of his higher budget.)

“Us” highlights the unwitting complicity of even apparently well-meaning and conscientious people in an unjust order that masquerades as natural and immutable but is, in fact, the product of malevolent designs that leave some languishing in the perma-shadows. (Designed by whom? The movie doesn’t name names, but it winks and nods and nudges in a general direction that runs from the sea to the lake.) It dramatizes this world, but with a twist—one that (avoiding spoilers) risks overturning conventional values and sympathies with ecstatic fervor. Suffice it to say that “Us” reserves empathy for its unwitting villains while gleefully deriding their comfortably normal state of obliviousness—and the ordinary absurdities of the world at large.

The movie’s exquisite perceptiveness and its alluring details are part of a vision that ranges between the outrageously sardonic and the grandly tragic. It renders the movie, for all its suspense, violence, and moral outrage, as much of a joy to recall, moment by moment, as it is to watch. Zora, after wielding an improvised weapon in a desperate, defensive rage, wiggles her arm in fatigue, as if she’d just completed a household chore. Gabe, challenging the doppelgängers with a metal baseball bat, adopts a stereotypical black-dialect voice as if, by doing so, he could make himself more menacing. Jason, suspicious of his own double (named Pluto), crafts a chess-like strategy leading to results and images of anguished grandeur. There are all kinds of magnificently world-built elements that only make sense in the light of big, late reveals, such as a strange and bloody preview, on the Santa Cruz beach, of the Wilson family’s doubles, and Adelaide’s early success as a dancer (and her double’s ability to use it against her).

This world-building has a stark thematic simplicity that both belies and inspires immense complexity. “Us” is a movie that defies the jigsaw-fit, quasi-academic interpretation that pervades recent criticism. As much as the movie offers a metaphorical vision of the enormities of social and political life, it also offers implications of an inner world, a projection of Peele-iana that maps his personal vision onto that of the world at large—and that, in turn, calls upon viewers to receive that world as intensely and consciously and imaginatively as he tries to do. The results of doing so, he suggests, are intrinsically political, even revolutionary.

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“Get Out”: Jordan Peele’s Radical Cinematic Vision of the World Through a Black Man’s Eyes

By Kyle Chayka

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Us Doesn’t Live Up to Get Out , But It Shows the Promise of Jordan Peele

Once you get over the disappointment that Jordan Peele’s second feature , Us , isn’t as trim or impish in its satire as his marvelous debut, Get Out , you can settle back and salute what it is: the most inspiring kind of miss. It’s what you want an artist of Peele’s sensibility and stature to attempt — to broaden his canvas, deepen his psychological insight, and add new cinematic tools to his kit. However clunky and repetitive, Us continues to demonstrate Peele’s understanding that great horror requires metaphors that are insanely great, that might have come to him in dreams of falling into a “sunken place” or, in this film, into a parallel subterranean world denuded of all material pleasures. Imagine Alice’s White Rabbit down and out and eaten away by deprivation. Imagine that it’s a white lab rabbit. Imagine a fusion of Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, and James Baldwin — plus arterial spray. So much here to love.

Peele’s opening is up there with the nightmare classics. After titles that assert there are thousands of miles of tunnels under the U.S., many of which “have no known purpose at all,” we’re in a beachside Santa Cruz amusement park in 1986, where a little girl wanders away while her father is distracted by a game of Whac-a-Mole. (What better metaphor for macho futility?) Gothic convention compels the girl to enter a fun house on the beach with a sign reading vision quest: find yourself. In the hall of mirrors, she nervously whistles “Itsy Bitsy Spider” — and then hears someone whistling it back. What appears to be her mirror image is actually … well, that’s the question. The credit sequence that follows is diabolically brilliant: The camera rests on a white rabbit, then slowly pulls back to reveal a cage and then a vast wall of cages, each with its own leporine specimen. Michael Abels’s blend of The Omen –like Latin chants and polyphonic Afro-rhythms is so infectious you don’t even realize that by tapping your feet you’re helping to conjure the devil. It possesses you, this music.

The first scenes lose the pulse, though, and the film never really recovers. In the present, the reasonably prosperous Wilson family goes to Santa Cruz for a vacation, its arrival broken by flashbacks to ’86 and the aftermath of the little girl’s trip to the fun house, when she’s mute, apparently in shock. The connection is Adelaide Wilson, who was once that little girl and is now a jittery mom played by Lupita Nyong’o. Adelaide is nervous about going back to the beach, which is easy to understand — but then why is she there in the first place? Peele’s writing is blah and perfunctory, especially when Adelaide’s husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), shows up with a powerboat he bought in a vain attempt to keep up with the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker) and their much fancier house and athletic blonde daughters. The Wilson kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), are more cerebral, but we don’t get to know them before the so-called “us” arrive.

If you’ve seen the trailer , you know Us centers on the appearance of the Wilsons’ exact doubles in the family’s driveway, which might lead you to expect semi-farcical scenes in which the identical Not-Wilsons take their look-alikes’ places or cause at least momentary (potentially deadly) confusion. But apart from Adelaide’s double, the invaders have little in the way of personality — only pairs of scissors they aim to sink into their counterparts’ throats. Peele and his cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, show their relish for the genre in the attacks, in how the doubles seem to rise up from the ground (you don’t see how they got there) to envelop and then puncture their victims. But I almost wrote “ zombie attacks”: Although it’s packed with mythically scary images, much of the movie plays like just another walking-dead splatterfest. Peele saves the big reveals for the end, when they’re effective but too late. In the ways that matter, the attackers are “them” and not “us.”

This is the sort of movie that fans will rewatch to appreciate the fillips, the purposeful echoes, the bits of foreshadowing, and the performances. Moss has little screen time, but she shows her genius as her character’s murderous double. Watch her savor the act of putting on lip gloss: Her eyes turn dreamy, and her smile spreads so wide it looks as if it will swallow her face. This is zombie Kabuki. Nyong’o hits extraordinary notes. When she’s the double, her voice is the whistle of someone whose throat has been cut, with a gap between the start of a word in the diaphragm and its finish in the head. It’s like a rush of acrid air from a tomb, further chilled by eyes like boiled eggs, fixed on nothing in this world. The terrestrial Adelaide is more subtly scary; Nyong’o builds extra beats into the performance, lurches and ellipses that keep you from identifying with her too closely. Something’s off — but what?

When the movie ends, you can rearrange the pieces in your head and appreciate the breadth of what Peele set out to achieve. Social scientists and pundits speak of human society in terms of gaps — in wages, in education, in quality of life. It’s Peele’s ingenious notion that the under- and over classes are not estranged but “tethered” in ways that those at the bottom perceive as mockery and theft but that the privileged can’t see — and can perhaps feel only at the instant those scissors slash their jugulars. As in Get Out, that privilege breeds dissociation, one of the ripest subjects for a genre that brings to roaring life the revenge of the repressed.

But to give Peele’s vision its due, you’d need the skills of an artist-animator like Hayao Miyazaki, for whom the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds is porous and those rabbits could take human form — and vice versa. As a horror buff, I hate to admit it, but Peele’s attachment to creaky genre tropes is already starting to hold him back. The good news is that he’s more than halfway to creating his own syntax, his own means for illuminating the sunken places of the world. I have a feeling there will be miraculous excavations to come.

*This article appears in the March 18, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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‘us’: film review | sxsw 2019.

Jordan Peele follows 'Get Out' with 'Us,' a horror film starring Lupita Nyong'o in which the monsters look just like the heroes.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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“We’re Americans.”

That single line will be the portal through which Jordan Peele ‘s fans might seek sociopolitical meaning in Us , an often terrifying thriller whose fantastical premise isn’t nearly as easy to read allegorically as that of his shockingly good debut, Get Out . Clearly the work of an ambitious writer-director who can see himself inheriting the mantle of Rod Serling (the Peele-hosted Twilight Zone reboot launches in less than a month), it offers twists and ironies and false endings galore — along with more laughs than the comedian-turned-auteur dared to include in his debut film. Though probably more commercially limited by its genre than its hard-to-pigeonhole predecessor, it packs a punch.

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‘A horrified double-take in the mirror of certainty’ ... Us

Us review – Jordan Peele's brash and brilliant beach holiday horror

Peele’s follow-up to Get Out is a superb doppelganger satire of the American dream, with Lupita Nyong’o delivering a magnificent performance

A n almost erotic surge of dread powers this brash and spectacular new horror-comedy from Jordan Peele , right from its ineffably creepy opening. It’s a satirical doppelganger nightmare of the American way, a horrified double-take in the mirror of certainty, a realisation that the corroborative image of happiness and prosperity you hoped to see has turned its back, like something by Magritte. And though this doesn’t quite have the same lethal narrative discipline of Peele’s debut masterpiece Get Out, with its drum-tight clarity and control, what it certainly does have is a magnificent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o, who brings to it a basilisk stare of horror. The musical score by Michael Abels has the same disturbing “Satan spiritual” feel of his compositions for Get Out.

This is a Twilight Zone chiller with something of John Frankenheimer or George A Romero. It opens with a playful borrowing from the spirit and the letter of Spielberg’s Jaws and there’s a horribly prescient invocation of Michael Jackson. The title is of course ambiguous: meaning either the snugly inclusive “us” or the US itself. ( An RSC group-devised play about Vietnam in 1966 directed by Peter Brook had the same title and the same double-edged meaning.)

Nyong’o plays Adelaide, who with her genial, good-natured husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is taking the kids for a summer lakehouse vacation: this is Zora and younger brother Jason, in which roles Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex are both excellent. The family is in a handsomely appointed cabin, which they have stayed in before, but Gabe is discontented. He wants to drive a little further down to the coast for some old-fashioned family time at the beach. Adelaide is not so sure. It was at this very beach resort that she had a horrible experience when she was a child – in 1986, the Reaganite era of the optimistic Hands Across America charity campaign. While with her parents at the funfair, right after her dad had won her a Michael Jackson T-shirt, little Adelaide had wandered off on her own and had a terrible ordeal. Now, as an adult, she is terrified of her own children straying from her and being “taken”. And she has cause to remember a sickening detail: a strange man on the pier holding a sign with the biblical reference – Jeremiah 11:11 .

The traumatised memory has stayed with her, although she has never spoken about it, and being back at this cursed place makes her jittery and on edge. On the beach, they are reunited with a somewhat jaded white couple, the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), who annoy Gabe by showing off about being just that little bit richer. Their cabin is flashier, his car is a cooler model than Gabe’s and their rented boat seems in better shape. (Gabe’s is called “Craw Daddy”; the Tylers’ is toe-curlingly called “B’Yacht’ch”.) And so Adelaide and Gabe’s compromised family happiness, with its tingling undertow of material and personal disquiet, is shattered one night when they see a group of four people standing in their driveway, a group which seems eerily familiar.

Impostor syndrome is something that afflicts people who have fought their way up to a position of some prestige, while never quite being able to suppress the feeling that they don’t deserve it, that they are just fakes, and that they are taking up a space that should be filled by someone more deserving. Is that partly what Us is about: a whole nation of people who each feel a shadow of historical rebuke behind them? Or perhaps the impostors are coming back to grab everything back, having just been deposed? The demonic invaders seem to be attacking from below and at the height of the horror and mayhem, Gabe and Adelaide briefly discuss the possibility of escaping to Mexico, before deciding they are much better off where they are. Perhaps if America was in dispute with Canada, we would be getting a zeitgeisty horror-thriller about Americans getting attacked from above.

Yet perhaps these lines of interpretation are beside the point and what is important is the attack from within. It leads to uproarious scenes of chaos, as Gabe shouts to the invaders: “If you wanna get crazy, we can get crazy” – and crazy is certainly what they get, especially in the outrageous fight scene, which makes shrewd use of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations and NWA’s Fuck tha Police.

The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.

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Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Will Haunt You

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s scary as hell, and that’s just for starters. But Us , the new mesmerizing mindbender from writer-director-producer Jordan Peele , also carries the weight of expectation. Get Out , Peele’s smashing debut from 2017, was a brilliantly caustic satire of race division in America that won Peele an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (he’s the first African-American to triumph in that category) and became a phenom with critics and audiences. How can Peele top that? Short answer: he can’t and doesn’t. In interviews , Peele insists that Us is a straight-up horror show. Not really. Leave it to Peele to blaze a trail by putting a black family smack in the middle of a commercial thriller-diller. That’s more than a novelty, it’s a quiet revolution. And Peele’s hints at the larger conspiracies of race, class and social violence festering inside the American dream resonate darkly. Ding Peele all you want for taking on more than he can comfortably handle, but this 40-year-old from New York who started as one half of the sketch-comedy team of Key & Peele is now shaping up as a world-class filmmaker. Flaws and all, Us has the power to haunt your waking dreams. You won’t be able to stop talking about it.

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Critics, in mortal fear of the spoiler police, need to shut the fuck up. Or at least tread carefully as Peele introduces the Wilson family of sunny California. Mom Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), dad Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two kids — Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) — are on vacation in Santa Cruz. Gabe has an unspoken competition with his friends the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), a white couple with twin daughters given to conspicuous consumption. Everyone is up for a fun time, especially dad (the excellent Duke — looking much like Peele — gets laughs in the unlikeliest places). But Adelaide is not feeling it. In a chilling prologue, set in 1986, we see Adelaide as a child getting majorly freaked out by a trip to a beachside funhouse containing a hall of mirrors. Now the grown Adelaide is back on the same beach where she was traumatized as a child, and she’s taking her own children along. You can cut the foreboding with a knife — or a pair of gold scissors.

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Scissors figure prominently when the Wilsons are confronted in their driveway by unexpected visitors. Since the scene is included in the film’s trailer, I’m not giving away anything to note that these home invaders — clad in red — are exact doubles of the four Wilsons. And the scissors these zombie-like doppelgängers carry are meant to slit throats. “What the hell are you?” asks Gabe. The answer is croaked out by Adelaide’s evil twin (the only double who speaks) in a voice that induces shudders: “We’re Americans.”

The political implications of that genuinely creepy setup are tantalizing, as are the film’s allusions to Hands Across America — the 1986 event in which a human chain of millions was formed to help alleviate poverty and hunger — and the thousands of miles of empty tunnels that run under the continental United States, including the Underground Railroad that symbolizes African enslavement. Is Peele referencing the Sunken Place of the Trump era in which the new gospel preaches fear of the other? If so, the theme remains frustratingly undeveloped. Yet Peele, the supreme cinema stylist, is on a roll. The violence is unnerving as the doubles set out to untether themselves from their human counterparts. By necessity,the Wilsons become a family that kills together. Even the Tylers get invaded. Kudos to Moss, who takes a small role and runs with it. The scene in which her character’s wild-eyed double smears on lip gloss is an unforgettable blend of mirth and menace.

Still, the acting honors in Us go to Nyong’o, who is actually playing two roles, one as protective mother and another as predator. She is superb as both. And what she does with her voice as Adelaide’s double is impossible to shake. Nyong’o, already an Oscar winner for Twelve Years a Slave , should be in the running again for delivering one of the great performances in horror movie history, right up there with Sissy Spacek in Carrie and Jack Nicholson in The Shining .

Peele, an unapologetic horror fanatic, nods to those films and dozens more in Us , including Invasion of the Body Snatchers , Jaws and Michael Jackson’s Thriller . Yet his style is completely his own, as assured as it is ambitious. With the help of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, up to his It Follows mischief, and a score by Get Out composer Michael Abels that is built to shatter your nerves, the action never lets up. The Beach Boys anthem “Good Vibrations” is featured in the mix, as is “I Got 5 On It” by the hip-hop duo Luniz. You’ll never be able to hear those songs again in the same way.

SXSW 2019: Jordan Peele's 'Us' Is Terrifying

The first time: jordan peele, jane schoenbrun is flipping the script in horror.

There are times when Us plays like an extended and exceptional episode of The Twilight Zone , the 1950’s TV series revived next month on CBS All Access and hosted by Peele in Rod Serling mode. But Peele can’t stop himself from reaching higher and cutting deeper. The twisty road he takes us on opens itself to many interpretations. There are times when the film grips us with such hallucinatory terror that you may think it’s another of Adelaide’s PTSD-induced nightmares. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a ghastly reflection of the way we live now. Peele uses a Biblical quote from Jeremiah 11:11 that suggests even God has turned his back on us. What is never in doubt is that Peele is using the scare genre to show us a world tragically untethered to its own humanity, its empathy, its soul. If that’s not a horror film for its time, I don’t know what is.

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Film Review: Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’

Comedian-turned-horror-maestro Jordan Peele veers farther into the dark recesses of America's collective id, implicating us as our own worst enemies.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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For all the genius of Jordan Peele ’s 2017 debut, “Get Out” — a movie that oh-so-smartly reinforced its horror-movie skeleton with an adamantium-strong (and twice as sharp) racial-tension allegory — audiences seemed to have one critique in common: The movie wasn’t nearly scary enough. People aren’t likely to have the same complaint about “Us,” the genre-savvy writer-director’s terrifying — if somewhat less clearly double-edged — second feature, which comes loaded with nightmare-inducing images of tunnel-dwelling döppelgangers who’ve come to claim the privileged lives their aboveground counterparts have been enjoying all this time.

Debuting to an enthusiastic reception at the SXSW Film Festival (keep in mind, those Austin audiences seem to love everything) mere weeks before Peele’s reboot of “The Twilight Zone” drops, “Us” arrives in a shroud of secrecy that definitely works to the film’s advantage. The less you know going in — and the less energy you spend thinking about it after the fact — the better the movie works, trading on some uncanny combination of Peele’s imagination and our own to suggest a horror infinitely larger and more insidious than the film is capable of representing.

Do you ever get the sense that your actions are partly out of your control? Does it occasionally seem like some external force is driving your decisions? That disconcerting feeling may explain why Adelaide wanders off from her parents during a trip to the Santa Cruz boardwalk, straying from the amusement park proper to visit an eerie Vision Quest attraction along the beach by herself. But something happens while Adelaide is exploring the hall of mirrors: A storm rages, the power goes out, and she comes face to face with something more than her reflection.

That was 1986. The encounter is so unsettling (for Adelaide … the horror hasn’t quite kicked in for audiences just yet) that she’s suppressed its memory for more than 30 years — which happens to be when the film picks up, in the present day. Adelaide (played by Lupita Nyong’o) is now in her 30s, married to Gabe (her “Black Panther” co-star Winston Duke, a source of welcome comic relief), with two relatively well-adjusted kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). The Wilsons. Though not quite as wealthy as good friends Josh and Kitty Tyler (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss), they are the picture of the ideal American family, heading back to Santa Cruz for their summer vacation.

As in “Get Out,” we know to suspect that when things look too good to be true, they probably are, and yet, it would take a pretty twisted mind to anticipate what Peele has in store for us this time. There’s that word: Us. Within the realm of scary movies, döppelganger stories occupy an entire subgenre unto themselves — and they nearly all end with the same “twist,” which won’t surprise many here — though Peele is a clever enough social commentator to orchestrate an entire horror movie around that old adage, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Americans spend so much time worrying about “the other” — demonizing immigrants, unfamiliar races, or the all-powerful 1% — that we seldom think to look for what’s holding us back where we’re most likely to find it: in the mirror.

Early in “Us,” youngest child Jason gazes out the front window and eerily announces, “There’s a family in our driveway.” Sure enough, there stand four people in silhouette: mother, father, daughter, and son. While Adelaide doesn’t hesitate to call the cops (another Peele signature, making his characters smarter than the dead-meat-walking idiots who typically populate horror movies), Gabe does the manly thing, all but thumping his chest as he steps outside to confront these unannounced visitors, who freak him out by refusing to acknowledge his macho display. The movie is constantly illustrating — and nearly as often inverting — the gender roles we play in a patriarchal society, as when daughter Zora takes the lead to become the family’s most effective defender at one point.

But long before the police have a chance to arrive (they never get there, by the way, which is one more reason N.W.A’s “F— tha Police” feels like such a fitting addition to a soundtrack that otherwise relies mostly on Michael Abels’ nerve-twisting suspense work), those four uninvited guests find their way into the Wilsons’ living room, and wouldn’t you know, they look just like their hosts. The press notes refer to these almost zombie-like home invaders, dressed in red and all but incapable of human speech, as “the Tethered,” although “twins” is the closest the characters come to naming them.

Peele doesn’t explain much about these mysterious visitors, letting our worst fears run wild as the intruders hover menacingly around the family, dressed in heavy-duty red coveralls. Only Nyong’o’s döppelganger can speak, and even then, her words come out strained, as if she’s never had reason to talk before — and perhaps she hasn’t, as the Tethered seem to communicate primarily via sign language and guttural animal noises. One thing is certain: They do not come in peace, though Peele draws out these early uncertain scenes, taking advantage of the ambiguity for the threat to unfold in our subconscious.

That’s a brave move on his part, since it assumes that Americans all share enough of the same anxieties — and/or pop-culture reference points — that Peele can identify and exploit our collective dread. And perhaps we do: What could be more upsetting than being faced with primitive, apparently resentful versions of ourselves looking to take possession of our homes and hurt our families? But too many of Peele’s concepts don’t quite come across, like the suggestion that the Tethered have been manipulating us all along, or the implication that they can anticipate our defenses because they are us.

We never really see that last idea in action. In fact, although the Tethered seem to have been far more successful killing everyone else in the country, they are no match for the Wilsons, who fight back with fireplace pokers, golf clubs, and other blunt objects. And then there’s the whole matter of the third act, in which “Us” attempts to explain its master plan, taking us beneath the surface to reveal what may as well be an elaborate metaphor for the id — the primitive place where our impulses and unconscious aspects of our thinking (which could well be our worst enemy) lurk. Like the “sunken place” Peele invented for “Get Out,” this sinister domain offers a visual allegory for the darker aspects of our own socialization — which, if the film were more successful in its final stretch, would force us to confront the monsters within each of us.

Reviewed at SXSW Film Festival (opener), March 8, 2019. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 116 MIN.

Production: A Universal Pictures release, presented in association with Perfect World Pictures, of a Monkeypaw production. Producers: Jordan Peele, Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, Ian Cooper. Executive producers: Daniel Lupi, Beatriz Sequeira.
Crew: Director, writer: Jordan Peele. Camera (color, widescreen): Mike Gioulakis. Editor: Nicholas Monsour. Music: Michael Abels.
With: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss , Tim Heidecker, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Evan Alex, Shahadi Wright-Joseph, Madison Curry, Cali Sheldon.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Peele's bloody, startling, inventive horror movie.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Raises interesting questions about idea of doppelg

The family members (including kids) do what they h

Very scary (jump scares, etc.); also lots of blood

A man is affectionate toward his wife, kissing her

Several uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "ass,"

Michael Jackson "Thriller" T-shirt.

Secondary characters drink a lot (wine, whiskey, b

Positive Messages

Raises interesting questions about idea of doppelgangers. But real message here is that movie portrays a rather ordinary, interesting, likable African American family with no strings attached -- which is very welcome. Also promotes idea of the depth of a family's love.

Positive Role Models

The family members (including kids) do what they have to do to survive, including killing doppelgangers in very bloody ways. They rise above an unexpected challenge, but their survival is largely about luck and brute force. A villain's voice is based on the disability known as spasmodic dysphonia, which has caused some controversy.

Violence & Scariness

Very scary (jump scares, etc.); also lots of blood and gore. Blood splatters, pools of blood, dead bodies. Characters bash doppelgangers with blunt instruments (baseball bat, fireplace poker, golf club, etc.). Doppelgangers killing humans by slicing or stabbing them with sharp scissors. A character is ground up by a boat motor. Character hit by car. Choking with chains. Character's leg injured by baseball bat. Female character handcuffed. Boy with burn scars on his face. Boy on fire. Children in peril.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A man is affectionate toward his wife, kissing her, hinting that he's going to have sex with her, and arranging himself on the bed to try to seduce her.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "ass," "anus," "goddamn," and "Jesus Christ" (as an exclamation). In one scene, song "F--k tha Police" by N.W.A. plays, with brief, incessant language, including the "N" word. "Bulls--tty" spoken by a young boy.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Secondary characters drink a lot (wine, whiskey, beer, etc.) to comic effect; no hangovers or consequences. Character says he's "going for a smoke."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Us -- a shocking, inventive, often funny horror movie about doppelgangers starring Lupita Nyong'o -- is writer/director Jordan Peele 's follow-up to his enormously popular Get Out . While this film isn't likely to have the same cultural impact, it's still quite good. It's also very scary and violent. There are jump scares, plus many attacks and killings with blood and gore. Characters use blunt objects on doppelgangers, and doppelgangers slice and stab people with sharp scissors. A woman is handcuffed, and children are sometimes in peril. Language is also strong, with many uses of "f--k" and "s--t." The "N" word is heard in a song ("F--k tha Police" by N.W.A.), and a boy uses the word "bulls--t." A man kisses his wife and makes silly comments and gestures to indicate that he'd like to have sex, but it doesn't go any further. Secondary characters are seen drinking heavily in a comic way, without consequences. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (47)
Kids say (139)

Based on 47 parent reviews

some violence, a song plays the "N-word"

What's the story.

US begins with young Adelaide enjoying the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents in 1986. While her father is distracted, she wanders off and winds up in a house of mirrors. The power winks off, and she finds herself standing next to what looks like her own reflection ... except that it's not a reflection. Flash forward to the present: Grown-up Adelaide ( Lupita Nyong'o ) is now married to Gabe (Winston Duke), with a teen daughter, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and a young son, Jason (Evan Alex). While the family vacations at their summer home, Gabe suggests going back to Santa Cruz; though the idea terrifies Adelaide, she reluctantly agrees. Jason is briefly missing, but otherwise the day goes well. But when they get home, they discover a strange family of four standing in their driveway. And they look a lot like the Wilsons ... except that they don't seem friendly.

Is It Any Good?

Jordan Peele 's horror shocker can't compete with its sensational predecessor Get Out , but it doesn't have to. Made with precision, intelligence, and humor, Us is inventive and wildly entertaining in its own right. It can be said that Us has something to do with doppelgangers, but just how far the story goes and what it all means is best left to individual discussion. It's like a carnival ride of crazy ideas -- it's startling and also actually sometimes funny. While Get Out had little pockets of comic relief inserted into strategic places, the laughs in Us , based both on ironic jokes and on the happy feel of relief and release, are scattered throughout. Any character in this film can earn a laugh.

Since Peele -- well known as part of the comedy team Key & Peele -- understands the primal, bodily sensations of both laughter and fear, he approaches the filmmaking in Us with supreme confidence. His camera never shakes but rather moves in such a way to hide or reveal information for maximum impact. He's as precise here as Hitchcock or Kubrick. He also understands the use of music and sound, merging back and forth between a chilling, chanting orchestral score and pop songs, each adjusted at just the right volume or tone. It's an undeniably well-crafted and brutally effective movie, but where Get Out created a sharp, satirical commentary on race relations, this one very simply presents a positive portrayal of an African American family.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Us . Do the blood and gore seem over the top? Do the violent scenes help tell the story in an effective way? Is it shocking or thrilling? Why? Does exposure to violent media desensitize kids to violence?

Is the movie scary? What's the appeal of scary movies ?

What is a doppelganger? Do you think they exist in real life? Could there be a "good" and "evil" version of a person? Why or why not?

How many movies have you seen that portray an average/regular African American family? How did this one compare? Why is the family's ordinariness notable?

Movie Details

In theaters : March 22, 2019
On DVD or streaming : June 18, 2019
Cast : Lupita Nyong'o , Wilson Duke , Elisabeth Moss
Director : Jordan Peele
Inclusion Information : Black directors, Female actors, Black actors, Latino actors
Studio : Universal Pictures
Genre : Horror
Run time : 116 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : violence/terror, and language
Last updated : March 5, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Review: Jordan Peele’s <i>Us</i> Is Dazzling to Look At. But What Is It Trying to Say?

Review: Jordan Peele’s Us Is Dazzling to Look At. But What Is It Trying to Say?

W riter-director Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out was a brash and intriguing debut, a picture that wrestled with the notion of whether or not America can ever be a post-racial society: Vital and spooky, it refused to hand over easy answers. With the ambitious home-invasion horror chiller Us, Peele goes even deeper into the conflicted territory of class and race and privilege; he also ponders the traits that make us most human. But this time, he’s got so many ideas he can barely corral them, let alone connect them. He overthinks himself into a corner, and we’re stuck there with him.

Lupita Nyong’o stars as Adelaide, who has overcome a traumatic childhood experience and now has a family of her own, including husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and two kids: graceful, well-adjusted Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and the slightly more awkward Jason (Evan Alex), who wears a wolfman mask pushed up on his head as a kind of security blanket. We meet the comfortably middle-class Wilson family as they’re heading off on vacation to Santa Cruz, the site of Adelaide’s childhood ordeal. On their first night away, they look out and see a family of four, mute and stony echoes of themselves, standing in the driveway. From there, Peele unspools a story of “shadow” people, long forced to live underground but now streaming to the Earth’s surface to claim, violently, what they feel is rightfully theirs.

The effectiveness of Us may depend on how little you know about it going in, so the spoiler-averse may wish to stop reading here. But it’s impossible to address any of the movie’s larger ideas without giving away key plot points: Before long, that shadow family has infiltrated the house, and now that we can get a good look, we see that each of them is a not-quite-right replica of a Wilson, dressed in a red jumpsuit and wielding a pair of menacing-looking shears. At one point a terrified Adelaide asks the other mother, a twin of herself but with vacant, crazy eyes and a demented smile, “What are you people?” “We are Americans,” the lookalike responds, in a whispery growl.

That’s a bright, neon-lit Author’s Message if ever there was one, though the idea of using a group of sunlight-deprived semi-zombies as a metaphorical element in a parable about class complacency isn’t necessarily a bad one. Are you and your family doing great? Do you live in a nice place, drive an expensive car, and have plenty of food for everyone to eat? Be grateful for it. But be aware that there are others who, through no fault of their own, don’t live at the same comfort level—or are, in fact, barely surviving. (The Wilsons also have close friends, Josh and Kitty, played by Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss, who have more money and nicer stuff than they do, a source of irritation for Gabe in particular, and another of the movie’s threads about class consciousness in America.) But Peele doesn’t always lay out his ideas clearly. Us isn’t always fun to watch; there are stretches where it’s plodding and dour. He’s overly fond of heavy-duty references, including Biblical ones: A creepy dude holds a sign that reads Jeremiah 11:11. (If you don’t know it outright, it’s the one that goes, “Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.”) The mood of Us is sometimes chilling, but even then, you’re not always sure what, exactly, is chilling you. Maybe it’s just the feeling of being trapped in an over-air-conditioned lecture hall, because there’s a strain of preachiness running through the whole thing.

One thing that’s unquestionable: Peele is a dazzling visual stylist. (Peele’s cinematographer is Mike Gioulakis, who also shot David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, as well as M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass .) The movie’s opening, which details young Adelaide’s nightmare—it takes place in a ghoulish hall of mirrors on the Santa Cruz boardwalk—is a mini-horror masterpiece by itself, an evocation of the outright weirdness of childhood rather than its wonder: As the girl wanders away from her parents, in an almost trancelike state, she clutches a candied apple so shiny it’s like blood-red crystal ball—and puts us in a trance, too.

Yet the rest of Us is laden with metaphors, and they pile up so quickly that not even Peele can keep up with them. The movie repeatedly references Hands Across America, a 1986 benefit event in which some 6.5 million people joined hands along a route mapped out across the contiguous United States. (Many participants had donated $10 to reserve a space in the chain; the money was donated to local charities dedicated to fighting hunger and ending poverty.) In Us, the shadow people form a similar chain. But it’s hard to know what Peele is trying to say with that image. Are the semi-zombies of Us just less fortunate versions of us? Are they actually us and we don’t know it? Is their clumsy anger somehow superior to thought and reason? After all, it has unified them, while we aboveground humans are more divided than ever.

How, in the end, are we supposed to feel about these shadow people, for so long deprived of basic human rights—including daylight—that they have become murderous clones? Sometimes great movies are ambiguous, but ambiguity resulting from unclear thinking makes nothing great. It’s one thing for a movie to humble you by leaving you unsure about yourself and your place in the world; it’s another for it to leave you wondering what, exactly, a filmmaker is trying to use his formidable verbal and visual vocabulary to say.

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Us (II) (2019)

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Chipper F. Xavier, Esq.

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Jordan Peele’s Us — and its ending — explained. Sort of.

The new movie’s conclusion is one elastic metaphor after another. That’s what makes it frustrating. And brilliant.

by Emily St. James

The doubles arrive, and they’re not playing around.

Guess what? Spoilers follow!

First things first: I’m going to give this article a headline that’s something like, “ Us ’s ending, explained” or “ Us ’s ending, dissected,” and I should tell you upfront that I’m not going to explain Us ’s ending. I can’t.

Jordan Peele’s second film has an ending that dares you to bring what you think to it. Where the ending of his first film, Get Out (for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), was a series of puzzle pieces snapping into place, Us ends in a way that causes the film’s structure to sprawl endlessly. It’s five different puzzles mixed up in the same box, and you only have about 75 percent of the pieces for any of them at best.

Us is Jordan Peele’s thrilling, blood-curdling allegory about a self-destructing America

But I found that approach incredibly engaging. The audience leaving my screening the other night seemed sharply divided on the film — and its last-minute twist — but I plunged deeper and deeper into it because of that messy, glorious ending.

So let’s talk first about what happens in that ending and how we could read that ending, and then try to find a way to synthesize all of these ideas.

What happens at the end of Us

Us breaks evenly into a classic three-act structure. The first act is all unsettling setup — first with a flashback to our protagonist, Adelaide ( Lupita Nyong’o ), as a young girl, meeting an eerie mirror version of herself, then to the first few days of a family vacation that she takes with her husband ( Winston Duke ) and kids as an adult. The second act follows Adelaide’s and her family’s actions after being menaced by horrifying double versions of themselves — played by the same actors — over the course of one long, gory night.

The second act — roughly the middle hour of the 116-minute film — is pretty much perfect, the kind of expertly pitched horror comedy we see far too rarely. And all along the way, Peele is seeding in exposition, like when we learn that Adelaide and her family aren’t the only ones being menaced by their doubles (who are called “Tethers” in the film, because they’re tethered to their mirror images), and the film cuts away to the vicious murder of two of their friends ( Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss ) by the friends ’ doubles.

Some of this exposition is stated outright, as when Adelaide’s double, Red, explains exactly who she is and who her compatriots are. Other exposition is mostly implied. (Pay close attention, for instance, to whom the Tethers kill and whom they just maim.) And still other stuff is probably just me reading my own opinions into the movie.

Anyway, the third act begins when the family finally makes it to daylight, having killed two of their doubles, with a third double falling right at the top of Act 3. The only Tether left is Red, who absconds with Adelaide’s son, Jason ( Evan Alex ), and races with him down into a gigantic complex of tunnels that exists beneath the Santa Cruz, California, boardwalk and — it’s implied — the entire country.

The tunnels have the feel of an abandoned military facility more than anything else, and they’re filled with rabbits, which have been set free from cages. (The bunnies are the only food the Tethers get.) This vague military feel tracks with something Red tells Adelaide when the two finally face off in what seems to be a classroom. The Tethers were created by a nebulous “them” to control their other selves.

But the experiment was abandoned for unexplained reasons, leaving the Tethers belowground, mimicking our every movement up here, and living lives where they have no free will, lives entirely dictated by our choices. (The long expository monologue where Red basically explains all of this is the movie’s weakest section and kills its momentum. This was also true of the long expository monologue in Get Out !)

The status quo held until Red and Adelaide met as young girls, and the two begin a fight that’s almost a dance but still recognizably a fight. (Peele intercuts this with footage of the teenage Adelaide — a great ballerina — dancing beautifully as Red replicates her actions in a weirdly grotesque mirror belowground.) Finally, Adelaide overcomes Red and kills her. She finds Jason and exits the tunnels.

But aboveground, the many Tethers have joined hands together in a mirror of Hands Across America , the 1986 event meant to raise money and awareness of hunger, which stretched a 6.5 million-person chain (almost all the way) across the Lower 48. The presence of this massive chain of Tethers should hopefully clue in viewers to the film’s final twist. An ad for Hands Across America is one of the last things little Adelaide sees before she goes to the Santa Cruz boardwalk with her parents — which is where she meets Red and (the final scene reveals) is forced to take Red’s place in the Tether world while Red comes up to ours.

The movie never makes clear whether this is long-buried trauma that Adelaide is resurfacing as she and her family ride off into the new, post-apocalyptic landscape of a world where seemingly millions have been murdered by their doubles and a chain of those doubles stands athwart the continent, or whether it’s something she’s pointedly avoided referencing throughout the film. You can make an argument for either.

The movie leaves you with the twist: Adelaide was Red, and Red was Adelaide, and they switched places as young girls. Jason, somehow, seems to realize this in his mother’s eyes, and he looks worried as the scene cuts to the camera tilting over the hills surrounding Santa Cruz — where a long chain of Tethers stretches, presumably from sea to shining sea.

What’s it all mean?

There is no single meaning to the conclusion of Us , and the beauty of it is how elastic its metaphor is

One of the reasons Get Out took off so readily with online theorists was that every single piece of it was crafted to add up to the film’s central revelation about elderly white people literally possessing the bodies of young black people. It was a potent commentary on racial relations, yes, but Peele seeded hints about the big twist into the plot as well. He had clearly thought through every little detail of the movie’s world.

You can’t really say the same for Us . Every time you think you’ve got the movie pinned down to say, “It’s about this!” it slips away from you. Its central metaphor of meeting a literal evil twin of yourself certainly can be read as a commentary on race, but it’s also a pretty brilliant commentary on class, on capitalism, on gender, and on the lasting effects of trauma or mental illness. You can probably add your own possibilities to this list.

All of these concepts keep informing one another. If you want to read what happens to Red and Adelaide as a commentary on how differently traumatic incidents weigh on children of means versus children who grow up with little money, doing so can support both an interpretation of the film as being about mental illness and one where it’s about class.

What’s more, Us doesn’t seem to want to be read as social commentary in the same way Get Out was. That middle hour is so fun precisely because it never really bothers to stop and make you think about the movie’s deeper themes. It’s too busy killing off Tethers by chewing them up in a boat’s motor.

Now, granted, my experience of Us was pretty different from a lot of folks’ experiences (at least from the people I’ve talked to), because I guessed from the first flashback sequence that Red and Adelaide had switched places as kids. I assumed the movie wanted me to figure this out, because it was essentially the only way the movie’s larger plot — the idea that everybody has a Tether, and not just this specific family — could make any sense. Something had to have caused this breach in reality, and the connection between Adelaide and Red seemed the most likely culprit.

Yet it’s honestly remarkable that the movie works as well as it does when you figure out its big twist early on, because Peele does a terrific job of teasing you in ways that make you think maybe you didn’t figure it out, or that the twist is something else entirely. ( Get Out , after all, didn’t really have “a twist” in the way this movie does, only a reveal that happens before the ending.)

Still, set the twist aside, and let’s take Red at her word when it comes to the origin of the Tethers. Some strange experiment produced them, and now they’re a kind of national id, a barely checked shadow self that every American has. (At one point, when asked who she and her family are, Red croaks, “We’re Americans,” which ... fair.)

The natural pushback to this is — it’s preposterous. By giving so much information but still so little, Peele creates a situation where it feels like he’s going to answer all our questions and then just doesn’t. (Credit where it’s due: I love how accurately the whole third act replicates the experience of falling down a particularly disturbing Wikipedia hole at 3 am, right down to somehow finding yourself reading about Hands Across America .)

And yet ... is the twist that preposterous? I don’t literally have a shadow self, but there’s some other person out there in the country right now who could have had my life and career but, instead, has some less comfortable one because he grew up with parents who didn’t have enough money to send him to college, or because he grew up some race other than white, or because he was born a girl, or ... fill in the blank.

Taking Red at her word means believing in an idea that seems self-evidently kooky, but it’s also an idea that drives much of modern society. Capitalism demands that we cling desperately to what we’ve got, and the fear that some dark underbelly might come and rob us of what little we have is always present.

Yet the very idea of society means we’re all tethered together somehow, and the actions of those of us with power and money often make those without either jerk about on puppet strings, even if we never know how what we do affects our doppelgängers.

And all the while, “they” — whoever “they” are — get richer and richer and more powerful.

Thoughts on a universal read of the ending of Us (with apologies to Stanley Kubrick)

But Us isn’t really “about” capitalism, unless you (like me) want to read that into it. The movie’s metaphor is so elastic that you could easily mount a read of the film that says it’s about climate change or the 2016 election or zombies. (In the scenes set in the underground complex especially, Peele plays off the familiar images of zombie films, like legions of people shuffling about, shadows of some life they should otherwise be living.) And I also want to be clear that if you just want to watch Us as a super-fun horror comedy, it is absolutely possible, and you should do that.

But I think you can get to a kind of universal understanding of Us, one that drills down into what the film is about at its core while still leaving room for the elasticity that allows you to read as much or as little into its central metaphor as you’d like. To get there, we have to look at the hall of mirrors that first brings Adelaide and Red together as kids.

In 1986, the hall of mirrors features a stereotypical painting of an American Indian that sits atop its entrance. The art is offensive in the way all thoughtlessness is. Nobody cared who might be hurt by this painting; they just went ahead and painted it. Peele isn’t digging into one of America’s original sins here in the way he alluded to slavery in Get Out , but the evocation of a terrible genocide is at least there .

In 2019, the hall of mirrors has now, clumsily, been converted into one for Merlin the wizard. The inside is the same. Most of the outside is the same. But the painting of the Indian has been replaced — not particularly convincingly — with a painting of Merlin that’s seemingly just been mounted over the old American Indian one. It’s a really good joke, honestly; it’s a spin on how willing modern America is to gloss over the horrors in its past in the name of simply coming up with some other story entirely.

It’s also key to the movie’s more universal read. The hall of mirrors was constructed in the first place as a distillation of tropes around a racially charged stereotype. Just because it’s now ostensibly about Merlin doesn’t mean that it’s no longer built around those darker ideas. You can’t simply scrub away the darker past by putting a more palatable face on it.

America (okay, this is, like, 99.9999 percent on white America) likes to pretend it’s a country without a grim history, that its self-proclaimed exceptionalism makes it free from anything too dark. But, of course, that’s not true. The hall of mirrors was constructed with an American Indian atop it because whoever built it could be reasonably certain no one would care if it was offensive. Those who might care are mostly sequestered on reservations or died generations ago. And you, if you’re an American, live on the land you live on because they died.

(Sidebar: This could also be a really elaborate riff on Peele’s part on The Shining , another horror movie that is occasionally read by some of its hardcore fans through the lens of America’s general inability to deal with the genocide lurking in its root system. Peele has been dressing like The Shining ’s Jack Torrance on the press tour...)

Now consider Hands Across America. The movement did raise some money for hunger — around $34 million — but much of that was eaten up by operational fees, leaving $15 million to be donated to the actual cause. That isn’t chump change, but it’s a drop in the bucket of the problem of actually trying to fight hunger. Is there anything more American than thinking you’ve solved a problem by creating a gigantic spectacle that accomplishes less than you’d think? Again — something dark is covered up by something glossy, and we celebrate the glossy surface.

Us put me in mind of a book I read recently. In The City in the Middle of the Night , the new novel by science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders, the protagonist, Sophie, meets members of an alien species whose telepathic links mean that they are essentially forced to remember everything that has ever happened, stretching back into their distant past. Even when one member of the species dies, that member’s memories are carried forward by those who knew them, and those memories become part of the collective consciousness.

Anders not only shows just how hard this could be for those who don’t quite feel at home in the collective (those who are dealing with huge emotions that they need to understand privately, say), but she also keenly contrasts this species’ long memory with humanity’s short one. Sophie carries the burdens of decisions made millennia before she was born, back on the massive spaceship that brought her ancestors from Earth to this new planet. Those ancestors were shaped by the decisions that you and I are making right now, even as we’re shaped by decisions made hundreds of years ago, and so on. And many of those decisions are now half-remembered dreams.

It is hard to really deal with this, maybe all but impossible. To really sit and think about all of the ways that you are a product of human history, floating through the immense sweep of time and space, rather than someone who can take control of their life and make a difference, is so dispiriting . So we try to gloss over all of that. We put up paintings of Merlin where once paintings of an Indian stood, and we smile and say, “That’s better.” But the painting is still there, underneath the surface. If the aliens Sophie meets in Anders’s novel are doomed to remember, then we, perhaps, are doomed to forget, to pretend that we are more powerful than we are, simply because we’re alive.

This, I think, is why both Anders’s novel and Us spoke so profoundly to me. To try to escape the past is to try to escape yourself. But to try to escape the past is also deeply, deeply human, because to make any progress, we have to find a way to excuse, forgive, or ignore our own faults, to lock them up in a subterranean basement and hope we don’t remain tethered to them forever. But what a fool’s errand that is.

And this reading of the film’s ending, that it was always about the perils of trying to ignore inconvenient truths when they’re looking right back at you in the mirror, is one that unites every other possible reading of the film, too. Race, gender, class, trauma — they’re all covered by the idea that you can have a great life and be a good person but still unknowingly be causing so much suffering.

All of which is to say, when Jason looks at Adelaide late in this movie, seeing, for the first time, his mother’s true self, he’s not realizing that she’s Red, or that she’s Adelaide, or anything like that. He’s realizing that she is, and always has been, both.

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Movie Review: Us (2019)

Floyd Smith III
Movie Reviews
--> March 22, 2019

Fans of Jordan Peele’s incomparable societal critique “ Get Out ” can rejoice as the horror-auteur swings for the fences in his newest horror-thriller Us , and for the most part, hits it straight out of the park. Piggybacking off of the inquisitive, yet cynical, tone of his directorial debut, Us follows the Wilson family as they attempt to blow off some steam with a family road trip following the death of the children’s grandmother.

Heading this family is the ideally cast Winston Duke (“ Black Panther ”) as the father Gabriel, who not only handles a great deal of the films comedic relief but serves as the most easily relatable protagonist of the film considering the quirks of the rest of the family. Next to him is the timid, yet strict wife and mother Adelaide (Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o, “ 12 Years a Slave ”). Adelaide acts as the driving force for the film’s supernatural arc, introduced to viewers when she is a child who experiences a traumatic event that has lasting effects even relatively far into her motherhood. Her children, Zora and Jason (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex, respectively), are accustomed to their mother’s outbursts and tenderness, but still question the validity of her concerns.

The first act of Us portrays a thoroughly heartwarming introduction to this modern family, each character of course dons some of not only the horror genre’s typical character tropes but of family films in general such as the daughter being a bit of a smart-ass and the son being labeled “weird” just because he likes to make sandcastles and play hide and seek. Peele offers a decent dose of nuance to the audience, however, most emphatically in the interactions between Adelaide and her son Jason. The two seem to have a lot of the same isolating tendencies along with feelings of being misjudged. Even rolling over into the second act, Peele’s pacing is exacting as we’re given time to feel like a member of this family. This fun and relaxed immersion can easily cause one to forget it’s a horror film they’re watching . . .

But of course this is a misdirection by Peele, who gathers the audience’s comfort and curiosity before laying down a heavy dose of surrealism and twists that would make even “The Twilight Zone” a bit jealous. I use this reference not only because it is a show that Peele is currently resurrecting, but also because it’s what he has labeled an inspiration for the film’s narrative (I’ll let you all discover what episode on your own). Soon a quartet of people who look a lot like the Wilsons invade the home throwing the proceedings into abject tumult. It’s also around the end of this second act, the audience learns of the potential depth of the film’s plot and that there are in fact grander implications than the film’s jokes, jump scares and general creepiness would suggest.

Rather than spoon feed the audience the message like his previous film, in the last act he gives the audience a little more wiggle room to discern and unravel the societal perspective themselves. Beyond the dopplegangers and the apparent chaos they’ve unleashed on the family, lie concerns about introspection and social turmoil, the liabilities of human processing, and the overall lack of reflection and sensitivity in modern culture. Upon reflection, these communal breakdowns are nearly as horrific as the goings-ons at the Wilson’s lake house.

With Us , Jordan Peele has refreshingly delivered not only a bonafide frightener, but also a movie that presses his audience to dig deeper to not only dissect the many layers of a torn societal structure but also the many layers of ourselves. And though Us doesn’t quite reach the heights attained by “Get Out,” its message certainly does and it’s one that may stick around for a much longer time.

Tagged: home invasion , mask , relationships , supernatural , twins

A journalist and alumni of the Film Theory & Criticism graduate program at Central Michigan University; Floyd Smith III is a cinephile whose written for multiple publications including moviepilot and RadioOne and has a background in news writing for the independent publication The North Wind. Studying film since his time as an undergrad, he began officially reviewing films and reporting on entertainment in 2014. Smith joined CMC in January of 2016 and enjoys films of the science fiction, comic book, and horror genres.

Movie Review: Da 5 Bloods (2020) Movie Review: The Lighthouse (2019) Movie Review: Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019) Movie Review: Crawl (2019) Movie Review: Brightburn (2019) Movie Review: Aquaman (2018) Movie Review: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

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‘Us’ Explained: When the “Why” Is Far More Interesting Than the “How”

If you’re trying to “solve” Jordan Peele’s new movie, you’re going about it the wrong way.

Spoilers ahead for Us .

For the most part, movies are not puzzles. They may have mysterious aspects that lead to an answer, but if your movie just asks you to “solve” it, then the film dies upon its resolution. A far more interesting and lasting picture doesn’t ask for solutions, but instead looks for interpretations. When it comes to Jordan Peele ’s new movie, Us , I can understand the temptation to solve how the doubles work, how they relate to the people above ground, and so forth. But these questions miss the more interesting and engaging subtext the doubles convey.

The text of the doubles is ultimately unsatisfying because it just leads to more questions . The “how” of it is pretty basic. There was a government program where everyone got a double and these doubles lived underground in tunnels. These doubles were created to control the above-ground population, although how this was supposed to happen is never explained. The doubles lived off rabbits (a food source known for its vast replication) and then the program was abandoned. They were given a new purpose by “Red” ( Lupita Nyong’o ), who led an uprising where everyone was set to kill their double and then join hands across America, inspired by the real 1986 benefit event, “Hands Across America”.

A family's serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgängers appear and begin to terrorize them.

Jordan Peele's 'Us' Gives More Questions Than Answers

Of course, this just raises more questions. How did they feed the rabbits? Where did they get their clothes? Where did they get the scissors? And even if these questions had answers, they would be unsatisfying because the text, itself, is a rabbit hole that doesn’t lead to the more interesting aspects of the film , which is the subtext presented by the doubles.

We’re told that the tethered don’t have souls, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “everyone’s dark side”. Rather, it’s the darkness we choose to ignore . It’s not simply a matter of inverses. It’s not like sociopaths have well-rounded people wandering the tunnels. So why have it uniform? Because it’s far more terrifying that our individuality is an illusion and that there’s nothing special about our brutality. Furthermore, if the doubles are soulless, then they can’t know individuality. However, they’re still tethered to us . Their actions are tied to ours, which isn’t explained. Again, any explanation would probably be unsatisfying, bu t they don’t get any of the benefit of our uniqueness, regardless of the fact. They live sad, hollow lives, and it’s hard to blame them for being a little stabby.

Jordan Peele's 'Us' is a Social Statement

You can also look at the various social reads on this. It doesn’t seem to really work as a slavery or indentured servitude metaphor, because the doubles don’t produce anything and no one seems to rely on their labor. Instead, I see a parallel in how we let our dark sides out . In our interpersonal relationships, we keep things polite and cordial. But in our anonymity -- that is , the uniformity that denies the doubles any individuality -- we lash out. And just as the doubles rise and link hands across America, so too are we becoming far more comfortable expressing hatred and violence and letting that darkness unite us. This can be evidenced by any social media commentary.

'Us' Blu-ray Details Promise Six Deleted Scenes & a Bounty of Behind-the-Scenes Features

There will be those who get hung up on the “how” of Us , but the “why” is far more interesting. Additionally, while we can critique Peele for what he doesn’t do, we shouldn’t miss what he is doing. If he chooses not to paint inverse personalities for the doubles, then we should look at why he chooses to make them largely uniform with only minor variations. In Us , our dark sides are not a fully realized totality. Instead, they are a potent but fractional part of ourselves. The fear comes if we let them out and run wild.

Us is available for streaming on Netflix in the U.S.

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Cannes Film Festival Winners Analysis: Comedy, Humanity Takes Jury’s Heart Over Politics

‘The Apprentice’ Review: Sebastian Stan And Jeremy Strong Soar As Young Donald Trump And His Ruthless Mentor Roy Cohn In Devilish Origin Story – Cannes Film Festival

By Pete Hammond

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(L-R) Maria Bakalova, Ali Abbasi, Sebastian Stan and Amy Baer attend the

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Will it sell, and will it be released before November’s election? We shall see, but this is not a hit job on Trump, and actually considering the 77-year-old we see today at MAGA rallies and dozing off in courtrooms defending his indictments on various charges including starting an insurrection to overturn the 2020 election. Instead, it presents a person somewhat driven but awkward, a man striving for the approval of a tough-love father, unsure but determined to succeed and even oddly charming at times. Yes, I said that. Cohn, responsible for helping Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s reprehensible anti-communist crusade in the ’50s as well as putting away convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, was the man pulling the strings — until he wasn’t. Think of it as a twisted Pygmalion with Cohn tutoring and training Trump the way Henry Higgins did with Eliza Dolittle.

The latter was the one Cohn emphasized above all as the most important thing to remember. He also told Trump no one likes a loser. “Everyone wants to suck a winner’s cock,” he tells Trump, who convinced his cold-hearted father Fred Trump (Martin Donovan) that they needed a lawyer like Cohn to take on a case the DOJ had launched over their housing developments (after being indicted for discriminating against Black tenants). In his own inimitable way he got the government to settle with no fines, thus endearing him to Donald. “You have to be willing to do anything to anyone in order to win,” Cohn says.

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The lawyer even dresses his mentee, who was born in Queens; not exactly the right breeding ground. “Is this gonna be a guy from Flushing or 5th Avenue?” he asks, getting an affirmative on the latter. He then puts him on the phone with a New York Times society columnist, and the result is a puff piece comparing his looks to Robert Redford and marking him as an up-and-comer. One of the key Cohn lessons is always chase the press, be in the newspapers every day.

Trump started moving up the ladder, with Cohn bringing him to a party with Rupert Murdoch, George Steinbrenner and others, cheekily (and now ironically in hindsight) telling him, “If you’re indicted, you’re invited.” Cohn himself had been in major legal hot water for tax evasion and also handled shady underworld characters, but he knew how to help Trump’s dreams of finishing Trump Tower come to fruition, essentially rigging a planning commission meeting to get $160 million tax abatement for which Trump was begging.

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Separately, he introduced him to a friend, Roger Stone (Mark Rendall), whose “specialty” is dirty tricks and who touts candidate Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan “let’s make America great again” (a slogan Trump would later steal as his own when he ran for president). And when the top of the still unfinished first-ever all-concrete hotel in NYC is set on fire, Cohn brings Trump to a meeting with some of his mob clients who deliver Trump a come-to-Jesus moment demanding the “f*cking concrete guy” gets paid. Trump is shown already as being notorious for not paying his construction workers.

The film shows his darker side, that scene included, as he is changing, becoming more ruthless himself — even to Cohn, by double crossing his lawyer whose partner has contracted AIDS and needed help in getting a room at the Hyatt; Trump reluctantly agreed but later sent him a bill. Soon Cohn himself contracts AIDS, but they make up when Trump comes to his birthday celebration with a gift of “diamond” cufflinks that say “Trump” on each one. Ivana later tells Roy they were fake.

This exceptionally well-researched first screenplay by Gabriel Sherman, who had profiled Trump for various publications and thought the Trump-Cohn story would make a good movie, has turned out a tale that is essentially a Faustian deal between the two. Although they have both been described as monsters in different circles, they are really given an empathetic treatment here, at least in part, and at least in an attempt to show us what led to historical change in America, and what may well continue in a story whose end has yet to be written.

Trump has never seemed so, well, human, as his own early years show a man trying desperately for his father’s approval while at the same time trying to come out from under his shadow. Progressively the two-hour film shows him doing just that, but also losing some of that humanity in the process. I wouldn’t describe the portrait as flattering, but it is not a hatchet job — perhaps part of the reason is a foreign director who didn’t even know Trump before he came down those stairs to announce his presidential bid in 2015. The goal is to show the makings of that man, not who he would later become – no matter what your opinion of that man is. I have a feeling his base of voters, the ones he dug up from under a rock, might look at these early years and give their approval, warts and all. Ironically though the first image in the film is that of Richard Nixon swearing “I am not a crook.” What the filmmakers’ intention with that choice is certainly intriguing.

Stan eases into the role, suggesting the young Trump without venturing into an SNL -like impersonation. He captures him precisely and believably throughout. Cohn has been portrayed in other projects like Al Pacino did in Angels In America, but Strong is ideal casting, going all in and delivering a three-dimensional portrait of this complicated man. Bakalova is excellent in her few scenes, as is Donovan as father Fred who early on tries to explain he is not racist. “How can I be racist when I have a Black chauffeur?” he asks at the dinner table while berating his sons. Charlie Carrick as Trump’s older brother Fred Jr. is also very fine, showing a man who just couldn’t live up to his father’s expectations. Scenes between the two siblings show Donald has at least some empathy.

Special notice to Sean Sansom’s seamless hair, makeup and prosthetics work here which never brings attention to itself.

Producers are Daniel Bekerman, Jacob Jarek, Ruth Treacy and Julianne Forde, Louis Tisne and Abbasi.

Title: The Apprentice Festival: Cannes (Competition) Director: Ali Abbasi Screenwriter: Gabriel Sherman Cast: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan, Charlie Carrick, Mark Rendall Sales agent: Rocket Science Running time: 2 hr

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6 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.

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By The New York Times

CRITIC’S PICK

He’s got killer charisma.

A woman with long brown hair leans her chin on the shoulder of a man wearing a leather jacket.

Gary (played by Glen Powell) is a reserved philosophy professor who finds himself posing as a hit man for a sting operation in this Richard Linklater comedy. While in disguise, he falls for one of his clients (Adria Arjona).

From our review:

If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now. It’s got the cheeky verve of a 1940s screwball rom-com in a thoroughly contemporary (and slightly racier) package. I’ve seen it twice, and a huge grin plastered itself across my face both times.

In theaters . Read the full review.

It’s worse than Mondays.

‘the garfield movie’.

The grouchy tabby gets another big-screen adaptation, this time following an unexpected reunion with his father.

The film, directed by Mark Dindal, is an inert adaptation that mostly tries to skate by on its namesake. In other words, it’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all. Part of this can be attributed to the voice — Chris Pratt, an overly spunky casting choice that was doomed from the start — but there’s also a built-in defect to the very concept of the big-screen Garfield treatment. An animated, animal-centric children’s movie tends to require a narrative structure of action-packed adventure — the antithesis of Garfield the cat’s raison d’être.

In theaters. Read the full review .

An A.I. movie that sticks to the script.

In this sci-fi thriller, Jennifer Lopez plays Atlas, a data analyst with a distaste for artificial intelligence, who must help capture an A.I. robot that wants to destroy humanity.

Lopez, who was also a producer on the movie, flings herself into the role with abandon, the kind of performance that’s especially impressive given that she’s largely by herself throughout. … At times “Atlas” feels like pure pastiche, and it looks, in a fashion we’re getting used to seeing on the streamers, kind of cheap, dark, plasticky and fake, particularly in the big action sequences. Science fiction often earns its place in memory by envisioning something new and startling — but with “Atlas,” we’ve seen it all before.

Watch on Netflix . Read the full review .

The sorrow and the surreal.

‘kidnapped: the abduction of edgardo mortara’.

Based on a true story, this film follows a Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, in 19th-century Italy who is kidnapped by the papal state and raised as Roman Catholic.

The director, Marco Bellocchio, anchors the period with a somber visual elegance and employs surreal gestures to tease out the psychological and spiritual aspects of the tragedy. Political cartoons lambasting Pope Pius IX come to life through animation. During an especially sorrowful moment in the boy’s confinement, one of the figures of the crucified Christ in the Roman dormitory for child converts takes leave of his cross with the help of little Edgardo.

Shantay, you stay.

In Montreal, Simon (Théodore Pellerin) pursues a career as a drag queen and contends with two thorny relationships: a destructive crush on a fellow performer and a reunion with his absentee mother.

“Solo” is a subtle snapshot into a gay man’s profound yet familiar upheavals. Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.

Inspirational, not necessarily insightful

A man who endured a traumatic childhood during the Chinese Cultural Revolution becomes a world-renowned eye surgeon in this fictionalized account of the life of Dr. Ming Wang.

As is the custom with inspirational medical movies, however, the new film “Sight,” directed by Andrew Hyatt, leans hard into uplift — it provides only the narrative-necessary minimum of the science. Wang’s achievement in developing innovative technology is central to one of the stories here, yes. But the dominating narrative is one of personal growth.

Compiled by Kellina Moore .

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Atlas review: an absurd Netflix sci-fi movie that works as a guilty pleasure

2.5 /5 ★★☆☆☆ Score Details

“Atlas won't change the world, but thanks to lead star Jennifer Lopez, it's a painless sci-fi movie to watch at home.”

Jennifer Lopez's star performance
The central relationship between Atlas and her pet AI
Occasionally decent CGI
Unoriginal plot
Too many action set pieces
Goes on too long

Great movies are easy to review. So are bad ones, since they elicit similarly immediate, emotional responses. A movie like Oppenheimer , for instance, can dazzle you with its technical achievements while also engage you intellectually with its heady, elliptical narrative. A bad movie like Unfrosted , on the other hand, is obviously terrible, with its stale jokes and thin satire, that there’s no challenge in conveying just how awful it is. For both films, it’s all there on the screen.

Movies like Atlas , however, are tougher to analyze. This a slick, somewhat competently made movie with ludicrous, stupid ideas, and a cast that often performs like they are in completely different movies. In many ways, it represents the problem with steaming-only movies. There’s a visual flatness to it, and a plot made out of the spare parts of other, better sci-fi movies. Atlas often doesn’t feel real; rather, it resembles something 30 Rock ‘s Jenna Maroney would star in after The Rural Juror bombed as a straight-to-DVD release. But here’s the rub: I enjoyed watching it. I shouldn’t have, but I did, and it’s due almost solely to Jennifer Lopez, who takes this material way too seriously and injects it with enough stern-faced absurdity to make it a mild joy to watch.

A bad case of deja vu

If you put some of the most influential sci-fi movies of the last 40 years in a blender, you’ll come up with something like the plot of Atlas . Inspired by, and outright stealing from, classic movies of the genre like (deep breath) Aliens , Blade Runner , Starship Troopers , Robot Jox , Pacific Rim , I, Robot , The Iron Giant , and about a half-dozen MCU movies, Atlas takes place in the near future, when AI has taken over the world for better and worse. Sentient machines can now make you coffee and detect your innermost thoughts, but they can also try to destroy the world.

That’s what Harlan (Simu Liu), a rogue AI, tried to do 29 years ago, and he’s amassed an army of disgruntled, jacked-up ChatGPT s on another planet to wipe out humans once and for all. The only person who can stop him, it seems, is Atlas Shepherd, a frazzled, brilliant data analyst who is secretly a badass. How do we know she’s smart? Because in the opening minutes of the movie, she plays chess with a robot and she wins . How do we know she’s a badass? Because she uses one of her chess pieces to destroy an android’s disembodied head in the very next scene. How do you know she’s a mess? Well, her hair is tousled and unkempt, and she keeps hinting at a traumatic event from her past that makes her distrustful of AI.

Very quickly, she’s persuaded to accompany a team of Marines to the faraway planet Harlan is located on to neutralize his threat before he lands on Earth. Just when you think this will be yet another Aliens ripoff, though, the movie abruptly shifts gears, kills off most of the Marines, and then becomes a tale of a woman and her pet robot, as Atlas must rely on an AI-powered suit of armor (think a live-action Mobile Suit Gundam , but worse) named Smith to fight Harlan before it’s too late.

Humanity’s savior: Jenny from the block?

Atlas ‘ plot is a messy quilt of other sci-fi stories, and it never really manages to forge an identity of its own. There are times, such as Atlas’ philosophical discussions with Smith about who gets to have a soul and who doesn’t, when the movie shows glimmers of deep thought, but too often that’s pushed aside by the next generic action sequence, which at least is pulled off with some skill and coherence. The CG ranges from impressive (the movie’s futuristic Los Angeles looks shiny and impressive) to meh (shots of J.Lo piloting Smith just aren’t that believable), and the overall visual look of the movie favors burnt-orange tones and shiny glassy surfaces that sometimes become a bit much.

The acting is better, if inconsistent. As Atlas’ peers, Mark Strong and Sterling K. Brown cash their checks with a detached professionalism that’s both commendable and forgettable. As Harlan, Liu is made up to look to like the Irish actor Barry Keoghan for some reason, and chews enough scenery to make you think the actor could be our generation’s George Hamilton. (That’s a compliment.)

But it’s Lopez who makes the film worth watching. As the tortured yet always stunningly beautiful heroine, Lopez fully commits herself to the character, even though on paper, she’s made up of “tough action chick” clichés that even Resident Evil ‘s Milla Jovovich grew tired of a decade ago. It would’ve been fatal if the actress had played this role at any less than a 10, or worse, for laughs; instead, she acts the house down , and forces you to take all of this nonsense seriously. It’s a reminder that the Lopez, more famous now as a singer who can’t fill stadiums or as a paramour to Dunkin Donuts’ most famous spokesman , is a magnetic screen presence when the opportunity presents itself, like in the forgotten crime caper Blood and Wine or Out of Sight .

And even when there isn’t an opportunity, like in Atlas , she creates one for herself, and makes a movie that could’ve been a groaner into something that’s frivolous and fun. Not everyone will agree, and that’s understandable: Atlas is the type of movie that needs to be watched with the right mood, and just enough lowered expectations to be considered passably entertaining.

Fortunately, Atlas caught me at the right time, and I was able to enjoy its corny sci-fi pleasures for all their worth. There’s a time and place for serious sci-fi epics like Dune: Part Two , but sometimes, you need a hackneyed B-movie to watch mindlessly as you sit on the couch. If that doesn’t sound like ringing endorsement, well, feel free to watch Blade Runner 2049 again. That movie is far better, but it doesn’t have J.Lo taking down an army of robots while pining for a café Americano. Now that’s cinema .

Atlas is now streaming on Netflix.

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Us movie review & film summary (2019)
Peele's film, which he directed, wrote and produced, will likely reward audiences on multiple viewings, each visit revealing a new secret, showing you something you missed before in a new light. "Us" begins back in 1986 with a young girl and her parents wandering through the Santa Cruz boardwalk at night. She separates from them to walk ...
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March 23, 2019. In "Us," a work of directorial virtuosity from Jordan Peele, Lupita Nyong'o plays a middle-class mother and her doppelgänger in a plot with graphic, psychological resonance ...
Us (2019)
Lawrence Ware New York Times "Us" offers no easy answers, but indicts us all. Rated: A Oct 13, 2023 Full Review Stephanie Zacharek TIME Magazine It's one thing for a movie to humble you by ...
Us review
Us review - a terrific horror tale from Jordan Peele. "W e're Americans.". That phrase, delivered in a deathless, deadpan drawl, echoes through the twists and turns of a movie whose very ...
'Us' Review: Jordan Peele's Creepy Latest Turns a Funhouse Mirror on Us
March 20, 2019. Jordan Peele's new horror movie, "Us," is an expansive philosophical hall of mirrors. Like his 2017 hit, "Get Out," this daring fun-until-it's-not shocker starts from ...
Jordan Peele's Us: Movie Review
Peele saves the big reveals for the end, when they're effective but too late. In the ways that matter, the attackers are "them" and not "us.". This is the sort of movie that fans will ...
'Us': Film Review
Maybe we're Them and they're Us. Maybe every happy ending is somebody else's catastrophe, and therefore, no horror film is ever really over. Rated R, 116 minutes. Jordan Peele follows 'Get ...
Us
Full Review | Dec 7, 2022. With "Us" the aim may be a little messy, but Peele brings it together with sharp instincts and a better grasp of scene-to-scene storytelling and tension-building ...
Us review
Us review - Jordan Peele's brash and brilliant beach holiday horror. Peele's follow-up to Get Out is a superb doppelganger satire of the American dream, with Lupita Nyong'o delivering a ...
'Us' Movie Review: Director Jordan Peele Horror Film
Jordan Peele's 'Us' Will Haunt You. Lupita Nyong'o delivers one of the great performances in horror movie history. It's scary as hell, and that's just for starters. But Us, the new ...
Film Review: Jordan Peele's 'Us'
A horror movie that explores the dark side of America's collective id, with döppelgangers as the enemy. Read the review of Peele's second feature, starring Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke, and see why it's not as clear as \"Get Out\".
Us review: Jordan Peele's horrific take on a self-destructing country
Movies; Reviews; Us is Jordan Peele's thrilling, blood-curdling allegory about a self-destructing America. ... Us is a movie about America. Rating: 4 out of 5 Rife with ...
Us (2019)
Us: Directed by Jordan Peele. With Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker. Adelaide Wilson and her family are attacked by mysterious figures dressed in red. Upon closer inspection, the Wilsons realize that the intruders are exact lookalikes of them.
Us Review
Verdict. Us is a very, very strange film. But that's OK because it wouldn't be a Jordan Peele joint if there wasn't a little risk involved. Peele has proven that he's not a one-hit-wonder ...
Us Movie Review
Parents need to know that Us-- a shocking, inventive, often funny horror movie about doppelgangers starring Lupita Nyong'o-- is writer/director Jordan Peele's follow-up to his enormously popular Get Out.While this film isn't likely to have the same cultural impact, it's still quite good. It's also very scary and violent. There are jump scares, plus many attacks and killings with blood and gore.
Us Movie Review: Horror Film Is Visually Dazzling But Muddled
The movie's opening, which details young Adelaide's nightmare—it takes place in a ghoulish hall of mirrors on the Santa Cruz boardwalk—is a mini-horror masterpiece by itself, an evocation ...
Us (2019 film)
Us is a 2019 psychological horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele, starring Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, and Tim Heidecker.The film follows Adelaide Wilson (Nyong'o) and her family, who are attacked by a group of menacing doppelgängers, called the 'Tethered'.. The project was announced in February 2018, and much of the cast joined in the following months.
Us (2019)
pere-25366 22 March 2019. People thinking this will be a straight-forward horror film will be disappointed; Us (2019) is a complex, mind bending experience that tests the limitations of what a horror film can be. What's great about the film is how differently people will interpret what they've witnessed.
Jordan Peele's Us: the ending, explained. Beware spoilers!
Where the ending of his first film, Get Out (for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), was a series of puzzle pieces snapping into place, Us ends in a way that causes the film's ...
Movie Review: Us (2019)
With Us, Jordan Peele has refreshingly delivered not only a bonafide frightener, but also a movie that presses his audience to dig deeper to not only dissect the many layers of a torn societal structure but also the many layers of ourselves. And though Us doesn't quite reach the heights attained by "Get Out," its message certainly does ...
Us
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ChrisStuckmannChris Stuckmann reviews Us, starring Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Yahya Abdul-...
'Us' Movie Explained: When the Why Is More Important than the How
Horror. A family's serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgängers appear and begin to terrorize them. Release Date. March 22, 2019. Director. Jordan Peele. Cast. Lupita Nyong'O ...
Us
A mother (Lupita Nyong'o) and a father (Winston Duke) take their kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex) for an idyllic summer getaway. Haunted by an unexplainable and unresolved trauma from her past and compounded by a string of eerie coincidences, Adelaide feels her paranoia elevate to high-alert as she grows increasingly certain that something bad is going to befall her family. After ...
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Rotten Tomatoes, home of the Tomatometer, is the most trusted measurement of quality for Movies & TV. The definitive site for Reviews, Trailers, Showtimes, and Tickets
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May 20, 2024 10:00am. (L-R) Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in 'The Apprentice' Apprentice Productions Ontario / Profile Productions / Tailored Films. Don't be confused about the title The ...
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