This is Us

Us (2019) is Jordan Peele’s follow up to the horror comedy Get Out, with a lot less comedy this time.

It starts in the 90s, at Santa Cruz. A mom, a dad, and a little girl are visiting, and the girl wanders off. In a creepy house of mirrors, she meets her mirror image. When her parents find her, she is traumatized.

That girl grows up to be Lupita Nyong’o. She has a husband (Winston Duke) and a young son and daughter. The family is going to Santa Cruz, to her deceased mother’s place, and this makes her very nervous. We aren’t sure if she’s the little girl yet, and she hasn’t told her family about it. Duke is obliviously bent on enjoying a vacation. He even buys a boat, partly to impress his white friends Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss, also vacationing in Santa Cruz.

Then one evening, they discover four figures at the end of their driveway. Duke tries to run them off, but they come in - and they are doppelgangers for the family, except only Nyong’o’s double can speak, and they are all malevolent and violent.

That’s the set up - soulless doubles of some or all of us live underground in unused tunnels. They have a psychic connection to us, and want to replace us. And now they are coming out.

This works well as a plain old slasher or maybe zombie horror movie - it’s plenty bloody. It also is stuffed with cinematic references to other movies. In the opening scene at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, they mention that a movie is being made there - plainly Lost Boys, but I think they mention the Giant Dipper, which was in The Sting.

But mostly, this is a movie about privilege, class, and America. The underground doubles are clearly the underclass, the repressed id that will have to emerge. That the black family is well-to-do and fairly bougie lets you know this isn’t about race per se - except it is, because America has to be about race.

Then there is a twist at the ending. I am not going to spoil it except to say that we thought it was ambiguous - didn’t want to accept it, and didn’t think we had to. In retrospect, we have to accept the twist.