(Lupita
Nyong’o)
I loved Jordan Peele’s debut movie but his
latest is a bit of a head-scratcher. (Review Patrick Compton - 7/10)
There are a lot of things to like in Jordan
Peele’s new horror-satire romp, but the impenetrable plot is not one of them.
His debut, Get Out, was a beautifully rendered mix of satire, humour and
horror, with American racism getting the Peele treatment. It was a film whose
elegant lines enabled us to readily suspend our disbelief.
His target this time around proves somewhat
more elusive, although some have contended that the movie will prove a playpen
for Marxist and Freudian critics for years to come. I’ll leave that rather
pretentious intellectual game for the individual to sort out for him/herself.
For those not acquainted with Peele, he was
a star of TV’s Comedy Central with a
sketch series called Key and Peele.
When that show finished he turned to writing and directing and Get Out was a smash hit, earning $173
million in the US and landing him a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
He’s followed that up with Us, which, whatever its failings, does
offer the remarkable Lupita Nyong’o yet another chance to shine after her
breakthrough Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 12 Years a Slave.
The film begins promisingly at a Santa Cruz
amusement park in 1986 where a young girl named Adelaide gets separated from
her parents and wanders off into a house of mirrors where she has a frightening
but unexplained experience which renders her speechless.
Cut to the present where the now grown-up
Adelaide (Nyong’o) – a mother of two and married to Gabe (Winston Duke) –
returns for the first time to Santa Cruz on a family holiday.
Adelaide, who feels a sense of unease from
the start, becomes an increasingly fretful presence as she feels the return of
the sinister experience that engulfed her all those years ago. Her first
priority is to protect her preteen daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and
her young son Jason (Evan Alex) who she feels are under particular threat.
Gabe, a large, amiable fellow who has no
idea about his wife’s past, insists on meeting up with his friends – Kitty
(Elizabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker) – at the beach near the amusement
park, and Adelaide very reluctantly agrees. Jason, like his mother before him
years before, then wanders off into the amusement park ...
Revealing any more of the plot would be
unfair; suffice it to say that the movie then explodes into life when
Adelaide’s family are confronted by their doppelgängers – literally their
doubles – at their holiday cottage that night, and then things get very nasty.
The written preface to the movie reveals
that there are many subterranean places in the US that are deserted, or
seemingly unused, and Peele’s movie suggests that many of these places provide
homes for the doppelgängers, an underclass the film describes as “the tethered”
(or the “us” of the movie’s title), who are itching to find their place in the
sun, possibly at our expense.
It is possible to enjoy Us as a simple horror movie, with traces
of Poole’s trademark humour, but the African-American filmmaker more than hints
that he wants his picture to be taken way more seriously than that. The trouble
is that the overstuffed plot is almost too full of ideas. And even if one can
understand the movie’s political/philosophical premise(s), that doesn’t
translate into a satisfying experience as the film stretches our credulity a
bridge too far.
What we can all agree on, however, is the
quality of Nyong’o’s performance. She is brilliant playing both her own normal
character and her gravelly-voiced shadow, while Moss (star of The Handmaid’s Tale) offers a stunning
cameo as her friend Kitty.
Us opened in Durban on March 29, 2019. – Patrick Compton
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