It’s been a hectic couple of weeks and I haven’t had much time to sit down and just watch a movie, but I snuck one in today, watching Us (2019) for the first time.

Jordan Peele’s follow up to 2017’s Get Out is a more pure horror film, which works for and against it at times. Every element of the design, costuming, music, and dialogue is meticulously crafted, and the film drips with visual references, but the plot is considerably thinner than Get Out’s, being based almost entirely on a spooky idea Peele had as a young man riding subway. As a horror film, this isn’t so much of a problem, the plot that is there does the job of setting up and delivering on solid scares and an overall atmosphere of paranoid dread. The very deliberate design creates the expectation that some grand reveal is being set up (again, as with Get Out’s reveal of the Sunken Place) but the answers to most of the movie’s questions are actually given to us in the opening text and TV segment (with a cheeky VHS of C.H.U.D. next to the screen) or at least heavily alluded to well before we actually meet the baddies. There are some obvious themes of privelege and the obfuscated costs of American prosperity that go pretty much unexplored once raised, and I wonder how much of the social commentary got left on the cutting room floor in the pursuit of a more ‘conventional’ horror film.

The cast all do fine work, particularly Lupita Nyong’o as Adelaide Wilson. Winston Duke plays Adelaide’s husband Gabe and leans hard into ‘loud dickhead dad’ pretty much the whole way through. Their two kids Jason (Evan Alex) and Zora (Shahedi Wright Joseph) are both great, and I loved Jason’s mask (both of them, actually). Tim Heidecker and Elizabeth Moss (Who I can only ever remember from Girl, Interrupted, even though she’s been in tons of other stuff) appear as friends of the Wilsons, and generally do a good job of being insufferable enough that their inevitable deaths are fun to watch, but otherwise don’t really do a whole lot in the film.

The plot itself follows Adelaide, first as a young girl who wanders into a terrifying carnival attraction at the board walk as a child, where she encounters a mysterious doppelganger of herself, and then as an adult and mother of two children of her own. The Wilsons are taking a vacation at their summer home, which is apparently just up the road from the Santa Cruz beach where Adelaide had her childhood experience. Almost as soon as they arrive, there are oddities afoot. A man that Adelaide recognizes from her childhood is seen dead, and then later seemingly alive again. There is a huge amount of doubled imagery, from the Bible verse on the man’s sign: Jeremiah 11:11, to Josh and Kitty’s (Heidecker and Moss) twin daughters, and a young Adelaide arranging toy animals into pairs in a sandbox.

After a trip to the very same beach and boardwalk from her childhood (during which Jason briefly disappears near the same carnival attraction) Adelaide is ready to bounce. Tensions are running high, and eventually she explains what happened to her to Gabe (it was at this point that I was 100% certain of the film’s “twist” ending for a number of reasons, all excellently communicated through the framing of the scene, the delivery of the dialogue, and indeed, some of the things Adelaide says before she tells Gabe what happened). That night a family of four appears in the driveway and begins to terrorize the Wilson family.

This one is relatively recent compared to most of the films I review, so I will stop there to avoid any further spoilers. I will say that the explanation given for the events of the plot is kind of disappointing. It’s creepy and weird, but also doesn’t make any sense once you think about it for more than a moment, even allowing for some serious movie logic. The lack of a really solid narrative base for the action is probably the weakest element of the film, and probably should have been cut altogether in favor of leaving the origin of the baddies unexplained (Or expanded into something with some meat, leaning back into the socio-thriller elements of Get Out).

It’s a good horror movie, definitely worth watching, but I would go into it aware that Peele was not trying to replicate the success of Get Out so much as to create a more traditional horror film while still having something to say. In that light, I’m giving Us 4/5 stars. I liked this movie, but there’s not much to recommend a repeat viewing other than trying to spot all the visual references and doubled motifs, and I can’t justify giving a movie I don’t really want to see again more than 4 stars.