Review: Us

On vacation with her husband (Winston Duke) and kids at the beach, Lupita Nyong’o encounters some creepy intruders and troubling issues from her childhood. Elisabeth Moss plays the mother of another vacationing family.

Jordan Peele’s feature-length directorial debut “Get Out” won over both audiences and critics. A somewhat rare African-American horror/sci-fi flick, I was ever-so slightly less impressed by it than its biggest admirers, but nonetheless thought it was an enjoyable, absolutely insane film and I couldn’t wait to see what Peele came up with next. Well, he’s given us this 2019 doppelganger horror/thriller. It’s an exceptionally silly, exceptionally disappointing experience that I probably liked even less than a lot of critics and moviegoers seemed to (It’s been championed by some, but far more divisive than “Get Out”). The opening scene is an effective build of atmosphere, through lighting, camera placement, the use of sound and silence etc, but it’s all downhill after that. This one’s actually quite lousy.

A mixture of “The Strangers” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, I found this film irritating, unlikeable and frankly not particularly well-performed. Lupita Nyong’o in particular was a constant unsubtle irritation in the lead, playing a character who I just never got around to liking from moment one. Post-traumatic stress or not (and we find out eventually whether it’s one or the other), the character and/or performance to me was entirely miserable and bug-eyed to a histrionic degree. Part of that is Peele’s fault, as he has Nyong’o talk early and often about being uneasy about something and supposedly seeing signs. Yet we’re never shown what those signs are, thus it just seems like she’s ‘nucking futs’ to an unreasonable degree. We need to have an understanding, unless you just want us to think she’s a psycho. Then again, I’m not entirely certain we’re given a clear picture of just what this doppelganger thing is all about. At first it just appears to be about Nyong’o and her PTSD thing (whatever it is, I’m just calling it PTSD), but by the end other people seem to have doppelgangers too. Worse, after being an hour into this situation, Nyong’o is suddenly an expert on this phenomenon? Really? The ending somewhat gives an explanation for that, but it really just comes off as Peele continually trying to pull the rug out from under us, like a wannabe Shyamalan with a twist ending merely for the sake of it rather than a well thought out, organic piece of the fabric of the story. Peele never satisfactorily figures it all out on screen in any way that really made sense, at least to this admittedly dense viewer. Whatever he was trying to do here (I get that the theme is rich vs. poor, but I wasn’t entirely under the impression that the central family were above upper middle class at best), he’s not very good at it. Most of the other characters and performances are rather off-putting, too with Elizabeth Moss yet again showing that she should stick to the small-screen. For some reason, in movies she comes across as both hammy and somewhat curiously shrunken at the same time.

The majority of the first half of the film seems designed by the writer-director to keep you on edge with incessant chatter and noise, but surely not to the point where you start to contemplate giving up on the film. Peele has completely overpitched this one, right down to having the doppelgangers speak in hokey, clichéd manner that sounds like a severe case of laryngitis. It ends up pretty flat and uninvolving overall and about as frightening as “Goosebumps”. Also, the film has an agonisingly slow pace where after 30 minutes not a damn thing has happened after the first scene. It’s just an annoying family on holiday being annoying.

Lame, botched genre pic from Peele that made me appreciate “The Babadook” and “Hereditary” all the more, let alone Philip Kaufman’s outstanding 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. The best thing in the entire film is hearing Minnie Riperton’s lovely ‘Les Fleurs’ over the end credits (a song truly unlike any other I’ve heard), and I’m not sure it even belongs anywhere near this film. Massive disappointment, nicely shot by Mike Gioulakis (Shyamalan’s “Split” and “Glass”), but I’m not sure Peele has worked out what he was trying to do here. As good as “Get Out” was, here Peele had me thinking maybe he’s not going to be a great director. Perhaps he’s just another guy who has seen a lot of horror movies he likes.

Rating: D+