80s kids and horror fans of all kinds will find much to like about the new Jordan Peele film, Us (2019), a dazzling cornucopia of pop culture and film references.
Caution: Mild Spoilers Ahead.
Us (2019), directed, produced, and written by Jordan Peele of Get Out fame; starring Winston Duke, Lupita Nyong’o, Shahadi Wright Joseph, and Evan Alexander.
Us, the new Jordan Peele horror movie that debuted last week, is a highly entertaining film that’s replete with references to other movies/TV productions. Peele himself has said it was inspired by one of his favorite episodes of the original Twilight Zone, which is called Mirror Image.
Mirror Image stars Vera Miles as a single traveler who is stalked by her own doppelgänger in a deserted bus station. It is indeed a very creepy episode. Aside from Mirror Image, I counted references to Funny Games/The Strangers, Night of the Living Dead, Big, The Lost Boys, The Lady in White, The Goonies, and Home Alone. There may be even more; I saw it in the theater where there’s no rewind.
All of these references are fun to look for if you know your horror/sci-fi/80s movie history. All I can say is, Jordan Peele’s parents must have spent a shitload of time at Blockbuster back in the heyday of the VCR.
That said, the film to which Us owes its greatest debt is not Mirror Image or any of the others I mentioned, but Ridley Scotts’s seminal sci-fi masterpiece, Blade Runner (1982).
Us explores much of the same metaphysical territory, and includes several very pointed homages to the Ridley Scott film. In fact, Peele practically shouts this film’s Blade Runner lineage from the rooftops, and yet, of the four or five professional critics whose reviews I scanned after watching Us, not a single one caught the references. I guess a scene where a blonde replicant—oops I meant doppelgänger—does a superhumanly rapid series of handstands while attacking a major character just isn’t obvious enough for today’s film pundits. (And if that’s not enough, one of the main characters is named Zora, after the replicant that Deckard waxes in the shopping mall scene.)
But, I’m getting ahead of myself here. This film may be heavily informed by Blade Runner, but at the end of the day, it’s quite a different story and deserves to be judged on its own merits.
Winston Duke and Lupita Nyong'o, who starred together in the recent smash hit Black Panther, are reunited here, playing an upper-middle-class professional couple with two kids, who own a vacation house near Santa Cruz, California. Santa Cruz is famous for its 1920s-era beachside boardwalk amusement park, which is still in operation today. It’s also where the classic 80s vampire movie, The Lost Boys, was shot, which I suspect is why Peele set his story there.
As the film opens, there’s a flashback to Nyong'o's character, Adelaide, as a little girl of about eight, having a night out at the Santa Cruz boardwalk with her parents. The year is 1986, as we’ve seen previously on a TV news report about “Hands Across America”, a performance stunt to promote solutions to homelessness.
She wanders away from her inattentive dad while her mother’s in the restroom, and ends up in a spooky, cave-like attraction featuring tunnels and lots of mirrors. While in the tunnels, she encounters another child who looks exactly like her. This experience traumatizes Adelaide so much that she becomes autistic and needs therapy.
Back to the Present
Flash forward more than 30 years, and the recovered Adelaide is the fortyish wife of Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke) and mother of teenage Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and ten-year-old Jason (Evan Alexander), who constantly wears a Halloween gorilla mask on top of his head. They are planning to spend their summer vacation at their beach house, something that Adelaide seems to dread. At the shores they are joined by their beach house neighbors, Josh and Kitty, who have two snotty, teenage twin daughters. Everyone seems to be having fun except Adelaide. She just can’t shake the memory of that awful night in the tunnel attraction.
After the day at the beach, the family spends the night inside playing games, when they hear a noise outside and investigate. A creepy-looking family of four is standing in the dark in their driveway, motionless. They don’t answer when Gabe tries to get them to leave. Then they attack, and the Funny Games begin.
Once inside the beach house, the invading family members reveal themselves as clone-like replicas of the Wilsons, although they have different hairstyles and are all dressed in identical red twill jumpsuits. In addition, the replica of Jason--a mentally handicapped boy named Pluto--wears a creepy, white-faced monkey mask, in imitation of Jason’s gorilla mask.
The doppelgänger who looks like Adelaide, known as Red, explains that they are “ tethered” to the people that they replicated. And they seek to become “untethered” by killing their counterparts. Significantly, Red is the only one who can talk -- the others shuffle around like the mindless, rage-filled zombies in a Romero film.
Back to the Boardwalk
After a lot of scary hide-and-seek and bloody fight scenes, the Wilsons escape to Josh and Kitty’s house, where they find that their neighbors have doppelgängers also, but they weren’t so lucky: they’re all dead. Their doppelgängers, unfortunately, are very much alive. More fight scenes and bloodshed follow, but eventually the Wilsons kill the other doppelgängers and flee, only to find out that all of Santa Cruz has been taken over by even more doppelgängers, who are in the process of killing their lookalike counterparts.
As they try to figure out what to do, their quest leads Adelaide back to the creepy tunnel attraction at the boardwalk that traumatized her as a child. This is where the film kind of falls apart. We see the explanation of how the doppelgängers came into being, and it’s embarassingly hackneyed. We also discover the significance of “Hands Across America,” which is more original and interesting. Nevertheless, this part of the film is sloppily done and strains the viewer’s credibility, beyond even the loose parameters set by people who watch this type of film (i.e., people like me).
At the end, however, Us comes roaring back with a jolting “twist” that I didn’t see coming, even with multiple clues and all the Blade Runner references. I feel like a supreme dope, but give props to Peele for pulling off the sucker-punch. Deckard says "hello."