Review: Us

Posted on 11 April, 2019

A family’s serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgängers appear and begin to terrorise them. IMDb

Reviews of this film are as vague as that synopsis. In interviews the cast mention doppelgangers and little else. So – spoiler alert – I will try not to give anything away…but I’m only human. I am also not a fan of horror movies but the buzz around anything that Jordan Peele writes and/or directs is such that I felt I had to see it. So I saw it…with a support daughter.

I actually didn’t find it as horrifying as I thought it would be – I only actively jumped a few times, although I never let go of said support daughter’s hand throughout. Maybe it’s all the seasons of Game of Thrones and Walking Dead that I’ve watched.

However, I was, and still am, utterly disturbed by the story I watched. Every time I think I have finally settled on a single theme or subtext for the film my brain reminds me of a glimpse, a gesture, another object seen just-off-to-one-side in a shot that adds another layer of meaning or another avalanche of questions that sends my mind off onto yet another tangent.

Maybe the rabbits mean…what if the family is a metaphor…why doppelgangers…mirroring movements is just so creepy but how can I be sure the person on the other side of the mirror isn’t doing just that?

I find myself mentally skittering away from considering such aspects of the story – either because I actually have to focus on other things, like say, my job, or because you can read so many things into this that it is like disappearing down Alice’s rabbithole. If that hole was dark, full of frightening shapes, sharp scissors and significantly more rabbits.

I do not think I can listen to the ‘snick, snick’ of scissors in comfort ever again.

Jordan Peele is being compared to Hitchcock because of the psychological depth of his films but I think there is also an element of homage to classic psych creepers such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Further evidence of the influences or perhaps ancestry of this film can be found in the director’s instructions to his cast to watch several horror films that he said had a ’shared language’ with the film they were making. These included Dead Again (1991), The Shining (1980), A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), The Birds (1963), Let the Right One In (2008), The Sixth Sense (1999) and even Aussie creepfest The Babadook (2014).

A well made, wonderfully well-acted film that will play with your brain for days afterwards.