Film Review: Us

Jordan Peele's horror film Get Out (United States) was one of the most profitable movies of 2017, generating box-office returns of over $250 million on a budget of $4.5 million.¹ It was also critically acclaimed, receiving multiple accolades, including Academy Award nominations in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actor (Daniel Kaluuya), going on to win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.² Like notable earlier films such as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, United States) and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968, United States), Get Out self-consciously utilizes the formal and thematic conventions of genre film in order to engage in significant social commentary. In a disturbing vision of the hidden racism of apparently well-meaning white liberals, Get Out is an excoriating critique of the racial underpinnings of American social relationships. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the horror genre has proved a productive form for narratives of the African American experience, from Bill Gunn's Ganja and Hess (1973, United States) and William Crain's Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976, United States) to Rusty Cundieff's Tales from the Hood (1995, United States) and Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014, United States) (a revisioning of Gunn's earlier film.)

As does Get Out, Peele's latest film, Us (2019, United States), falls very much within this tradition, though its darkly comic satirical edge is far more pronounced. It is a satire on many things, not least of which is the notion of aspirational living, one of the staples of film and the television sitcom, which it recalls and riffs upon. Tonally it sits somewhere between horror and comedy and sometimes falls uneasily between the two stools. But comedy and horror are a compelling mix, sharing as they do profound structural similarities, not least of which is the literal or metaphorical—and frequently both—entrapment of the characters. Each form is dependent on the inability of characters to simply leave, which, if it were an option, would make their narratives redundant. But Us moves far beyond the social satire of aspirational living. Indeed, this is black comedy in every sense of that word. The notion of "black" comedy here is critical in terms of its multivalence. It is black comedy in the traditional sense of being darkly satirical; and it is black comedy also in that it is a black American filmmaker employing the appropriate tropes to create a horror film that constantly gestures toward the absurdity in which the social realities of race and class are rooted. And those two meanings sit at the heart of this film which, at a second-order level, is speaking to the grim history of race that is the beating heart of the American experience. From one perspective this might be seen as the darkest, most violent and absurd of all comedies but one that, in the end, leaves little to laugh at.

As many critics and reviewers pointed out upon the film's release, the title itself works as a pointed and ironic statement on the nature of unity within the context of the United States, in which e pluribus unum gestures toward a world in which "US" is synonymous with "us." Peele seems to refute this notion by presenting a world in which the very foundations of life and identity are predicated on the most complete and utter distinctions between "us" and "them." However, the twist at the film's end demonstrates that it is not that straightforward, as it reveals that in reality "they" are "us" and "we" are "them." This is by no means some vacuous call to unity and a shared humanity that might overcome all differences. There is nothing so trite or facile in Peele's construction. He is not saying that if we recognize the reality of our mutual racial and social subjectivities that we might reach a point of communion, but that the world is predicated on a profound (and perhaps ineradicable) social inequality of which race is one—perhaps the...