Review of Us (2019)
Seen in 2021.
A pronounced horror comedy. As expected, Peele is more brainy than the average horror writer-director, but also more reflective. There’s a Heathers quality to the frequent allusions and references, and the comedy works.
The motif of correspondence between two sets of people is offered briefly in “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835), but the idea must be much older. Admirably, Peele breaks out of the private sphere, avoids the genre’s usual bad-jacketing motif where the family would have been blamed for the doubles’ actions, and tries to provide an explanation. The explanation is that some nefarious organization, presumably the government, built a massive facility underneath the coast to create and house the Fettered, fairytale creatures who maintain a magical connection to real people for generations and eat only rabbits for fairytale reasons. The purpose of this project was to control people. What the rabbits eat is not clear. It’s not a good explanation, but it adds an extra dimension to the more common Stephen-King-meets-the-brothers-Grimm stuff that happens in the foreground.
The symbolism is not what I thought at first. After the second scene at the beach I expected Peele to invest more in the conflict between bourgeois careerism (the neighbour demanding a list of material goods) and the economically disadvantaged position of the Wilsons as people of colour. The symbolic value of the doubles would then have fallen closer to that of Cassius’s white voice in Sorry to Bother You (2018). Kudos to Peele for subverting my initial interpretation with something less allegorical.