Us

US   ***

Jordan Peele

2019

IDEA:  A family's summer vacation begins to unravel when they are besieged by menacing versions of themselves.

BLURB:  Us is another singular thriller from Jordan Peele that cleverly mobilizes genre conventions toward sociopolitical critique. In his second feature he casts his net wider, taking on class division and governmental abuse through an audaciously knotty conceit that, sometimes frustratingly, prioritizes broad allegory over material sense. For much of the film, this isn’t a problem. Peele is so adept at sowing symbolism and foreboding that by the time the doppelgangers of the central family unit arrive, it is already clear to us that they stand in for the discriminately dispossessed, come to puncture the complacent privilege of Adelaide’s bourgeois life. The subtext continues to explode throughout a protracted second act that is typical in structure but executed with devilish style, as pop iconography mixes provocatively with scenes that invoke incarceration and racial and economic violence, emerging like the zombie embodiment of an American repressed. It is when Peele explains the origins of the doppelgangers that Us most attenuates the protean meanings and enigmatic power the premise had held. While his reveal does make the commentary on government malfeasance more potent by literalizing it, it also raises practical and sociological questions the film is unwilling to think about. To accept the class allegory of Us, ultimately, is to overlook some of the woolly, convoluted narrative logics that muddy its real-world applicability. Peele’s ideas may not all combine into something lucid and cohesive, but they are abundant and suggestive, imbuing each of Us’s indelible images with both conceptual heft and chains of connotations.