October Horrors # 8: Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Well, speaking of doppelgangers, look what else I watched this month…

There’s an awful lot to unpack in this ambitious attempt to take the Freudian conception of the unheimlich / uncanny to its ultimate extreme, but, given that I’ve got around to it five years late, and given that it was the high profile follow up to an Oscar-winning hit, I’m sure all of its semiotic / socio-political sub-texts and cultural antecedents so on have already been discussed and picked over ad nauseam. 

So, hopefully instead I can just use this space to throw up a few random observations about how well it stands up as horror film - which will be for more enjoyable for all of us, let’s face it. 

 #1:

There is a section of about ten or fifteen minutes in the middle of ‘Us’ (delineating the script’s first and second acts, pretty much), during which the underground / ‘shadow’ version of the film’s central family make their presence known to their real world/above ground counterparts, which is absolutely, honest-to-god terrifying.

In particular, the impact of this sequence is heightened because everything which has happened up to this point has been pretty light-hearted in tone. A bit of eerie atmos, some quirky character dynamics, lots of ‘80s/’90s cultural signifiers, a few laughs… but then, without warning, the tone crashes down into fucking hades. Suddenly, things have the potential to become incredibly grim and upsetting, extremely quickly, as we enter a seemingly inescapable home invasion / captivity scenario, with (checks watch)… nearly ninety minutes still left on the clock?

Thankfully though, this is not the film Jordan Peele chose not to make - for which I am grateful, because it is not one I wanted to watch either.

So, instead, our family members make their assorted, unlikely escapes from what seemed to be their inevitable gory fates, and for the remainder of the picture we are kept entertained by stylised action sequences, an ersatz Romero zombie survival narrative, the pleasure of watching a bunch of unsympathetic secondary characters get whacked, and - under the circumstances - an unfeasibly swift return to an atmosphere defined by wisecracks, laughs and familial banter.

For a few minutes back there though…. well, let’s just say that the (admittedly rather niche) concept of being tortured and killed by a soulless, inarticulate doppelganger of yourself has rarely been conveyed on screen as powerfully as it is here.

#2:

[Not quite a ‘spoiler warning’ as such, but the relevance of this next observation is probably limited to those who have already seen the film, so you might want to skip over it if you’ve not.]

Ok, so, to get straight to the point re: the biggest problem I had with ‘Us’, in spite of its many strengths - am I alone in feeling that everything in this film would have worked so much better if we never received an explanation of what the ‘shadow people’ are, or where they came from?

I mean, we’re given a few fragmentary hints in earlier dialogue about these creatures living underground, subsisting upon raw rabbit flesh etc - which I feel essentially gives us everything we need to pencil in some suitably horrific back story for ourselves, should we care to.

And, I’m about 99% sure that whatever twisted sketches we conjure up as viewers at that point, would prove vastly more effective than the staggeringly absurd, plothole-ridden, poorly thought out ‘rational explanation’ which Peele eventually concocts to help justify the various, totally irrational, scenes and images which clearly inspired him to make this film in the first place.

Given that the ‘big reveal’ segment of the final act is by far the weakest part of the movie, jettisoning it would also have helped slash about twenty minutes from ‘Us’s somewhat bloated run time - but, more importantly, I mean… why can’t contemporary filmmakers just have the balls to keep things mysterious, y’know?

This entire film is basically patterned upon a surrealistic / sub-conscious nightmare scenario, so… can’t we just keep it on that level sometimes, please?

But no. Instead, 21st century cinema’s curse of over-explanation - along with the simultaneous insistence that a story’s protagonists must play a personal/exceptional role in whatever global/societal events are depicted - rear their ugly head yet again.

As a result, we’re left watching the equivalent of a 2.5 hour cut of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ in which the characters travel to the source of the zombie plague and discover that Ben’s dad was actually behind it all, using recovered DNA from Atlantis to re-animate the corpses of astronauts whose deaths were covered up by the CIA, because he just can’t bring himself to reconnect with his estranged son, or some such horseshit.

As I think both Romero’s masterpiece and (more to the point, perhaps) the Two Faces of Evil episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ clearly demonstrate, this sort of thing is just not needed - and in fact proves catastrophically detrimental to an attempt to tell this kind of story.

#3:

Random talking point:

I realise this will seem like a bit of an off-beat comparison, but having now watched all three of the horror films Jordan Peele has been to date as writer/producer/director, I keep thinking that, in some way, his directorial style and generally approach to things reminds me of no one so much as Dario Argento.

Clearly the biggest difference between the two of course is in terms of subject matter and characterisation, given that Peele seems like a good-natured fellow who invests a lot of thought and affection into his characters, and doesn’t enjoy seeing them hurt, which is certainly the polar opposite of Argento’s approach to such matters (or, the general perception of it, at least).

Aside from THAT, though…

Peele, like Argento, focusses heavily on technically audacious, attention-grabbing Big Shots and painstakingly pre-planned set-pieces of outlandish mayhem, which nonetheless tend to end up feeling a bit confused, emphasising visceral impact over coherence.

And, both directors have a tendency to announce these set-piece scenes through the use of big, booming over-amped pieces of Signifying Music.

Additionally, although ‘Get Out’ was admittedly a pretty lean and efficient piece of work, in his other two films to date, Peele also seems to share Argento’s chronic difficulties with story-telling. As writers, both mean insist on cramming their scripts with far too many ideas, themes, images, cultural references and so, without ever pausing to think them through properly, or to consider how they might cohesively combine into a single narrative.

Related to which, both directors are also entirely shameless in their willingness to confront their viewers with events or ideas so ridiculous that they basically short circuit any attempt at rational thought, presenting projects which dispense with real world logic and diverge from their core ideas/themes to a quite extraordinary degree. Which is definitely a compliment in Argento’s case, once you get used to his uniquely peculiar MO. In Peele’s case, I’m note quite so sure...

Certainly, ‘Us’ sees him turning in a movie which gets about half way toward being absolutely extraordinary, then over-reaches itself to the point of absurdity.

Which, in a similar spirit, concludes my random, insufficiently processed, thoughts on ‘Us’ for the time being.