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Directed
by Jordan Peele (2019)
Down
below, where they keep all the rabbits, America has, for some reason,
created a shadow population which will one day rise to the surface and
take over. Like today, when the Wilson family have foolishly chosen to
take a trip to the beach.
Little
Jason (Evan Alex) is wearing his Jaws T-shirt, one of the many knowing
and witty film references strewn throughout Us, a comic horror for the
Trump era.
The
danger is not going to lurch out of the sea this time, but you’ve got
to be worried about the fairground and the forest. All the usual
nightmare locations are covered.
In
the opening fairground flashback scene, youngAdelaide (Madison Curry)
who will become Jason’s mum, is wearing a Michael Jackson Thriller
T-shirt as she wanders out of a symbolic storm into a hall of mirrors
where, it promises, you will ‘find yourself’.
She
finds her subterranean doppelganger, dressed exactly like her.
No,
the science fiction of Us doesn’t really make sense. Why/how the same
clothes? If all those rabbits down there are a food source, what do they
feed the rabbits on?
But
it doesn’t matter. Jordan Peele has crafted apolitical allegory, as
disturbing as it’s fun,in which we’re invited to take a hard look in
the mirror.
“Who
are you?” grown-up Adelaide(Lupita Nyong’o) asks when the shadow
Wilsons emerge from the pines, dressed in red Guantanamo-style overalls,
wearing one glove and armed with scissors (which are both one blade and
two).
“We’re
Americans,” croaks Red, her double. Even the film’s title is a play
on the US.
It’s
Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke) who strikes first, confronting the uninvited
visitors with a baseball bat. And as they battle the trespassersthe
Wilsons and their holiday home neighbours the Tylers, led by the already
monstrous Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and her obnoxious daughters, turn out
at least as ruthlessly brutal, when push comes to shove, as their
zombie-like other selves.
But
then zombies have always been fair game. As havestupid house-breakers.
In a momentary crisis of conscience Adelaide urges her besieged family
not to behave like it’s Home Alone.
“What’s
Home Alone?” asks teenage daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph). Well,
Zora, it’s achildren’s film whose sickening graphic violence
isjustified by the fact that it’s meted out in defence of property
rights.
The
filmopens in 1986 with the telly advertising Hands Across America, a
true-life charity event in which 6.5 million people formed a human chain
across the continent. It cost so much to organise that the homeless who
were supposed to benefit hardly got a cent.
Us
is their revenge.
April
3, 2019
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