I Watch Movies: Us

Us

So I watched this with no actual memory of what the film was promoted as and what people said it was about and if you want that experience of a horror film that is both creepy and violent, then maybe stop reading my review as there are spoilers straight away.

Or maybe not; it might have been vague recollections but the combination of the caption about tunnels and the introductory sequence in which a girl in 1986 gets lost on the boardwalk of Santa Cruz, wanders into a weird “Vision Quest” funhouse and in the hall of mirrors meets an identical girl clued me in. And the title of course. There are doppelgangers under the ground.

In the present* she has a family and they go on vacation to a house by a lake, then to the beach at Santa Cruz. Where very little happens in the creepiest way possible. Then that night the doppelgangers come out, dressed in red, armed with scissors, terrible deformed, unspeaking but grunting versions of themselves.

The explanations make no sense***, but that’s not the point. The idea that everyone has a copy of themselves in tunnels under the world who might come out and replace you, and as well as replacing the original (“untethering”) might attempt something strange and scary and genuinely weird is powerful and arresting and even, just a little, illuminating.

Jordan Peele's got something to say is what I mean.

Watch This: For a creepy, scary horror film, unafraid to make things weirder every time it seems to have reached its limits
Don’t Watch This: If a red boilersuited version of yourself coming to take your life and maybe make America even weirder than it is is too scary for you.

* 1995**

** I’m kidding.

*** Air, power, food for the rabbits, waste, maintenance. And the mechanism by which they are tethered; there are twins in the story (of course) who aren’t connected. The partial explanations are inadequate and that, of course, is one of the things that drives the rage of the doppelgangers.