By Chuy Dominguez
Circulation Manager
“Us” follows a family confronted by a group of doppelgängers. The movie stars Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, and Elisabeth Moss. Nyong’o and Duke play a couple who are taking their children (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex) to their beach house along the Northern California coastline. Nyong’o’s character is haunted by an unexplainable and unresolved trauma from her past.
In a trailer released on Christmas Day, four figures appeared at the foot of a driveway with the tagline “We are our own worst enemy.”
If you’ve seen the trailers, 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.
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 re-watch 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. Because when I finished the movie, I had to rethink literally everything.
I really like how they had many plot twists, but I think that story could have been better. I would give “Us” 3.5 out of 5 stars.