The child (Madison Curry) wanders off, enters a beachside haunted-house attraction, and, there, walking through a hall of mirrors reminiscent of the one in Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai,” sees not her reflection but her physical double. (The announcer’s voice-over says, “Six million people will tether themselves together to fight hunger in America.”)Īt that time, a young girl named Adelaide (though her name isn’t heard until much later in the film, when she’s an adult) is visiting a Santa Cruz beach with her squabbling parents. After a title card notes the presence of a vast hidden network of tunnels (as for abandoned railways and mines) beneath American soil, the action begins with a bit of pop archeology: a shot of an old-fashioned tube TV set, on which a commercial is playing for “Hands Across America,” a 1986 philanthropic fund-raising event that involved an effort to create a human chain from coast to coast. Peele reaches deep into the symbolic DNA of pop culture to discover a hidden, implicit history that he brings to the fore, at a moment of growing recognition that the deeds of the past still rage with silent and devastating force in the present time.
The crucial element of horror is political and moral-the realities that metaphorical fantasies evoke. “Us” is a film that places itself within pop culture for diagnostic-and even self-diagnostic-purposes its subject is, in large measure, cultural consciousness and its counterpart, the cultural unconscious. Genre is irrelevant to the merits of a film, whether its conventions are followed or defied what matters is that Peele cites the tropes and precedents of horror in order to deeply root his film in the terrain of pop culture-and then to pull up those roots. Structured like a home-invasion drama, “Us” is a horror film-though saying so is like offering a reminder that “The Godfather” is a gangster film or that “2001: A Space Odyssey” is science fiction. “Us” is nothing short of a colossal achievement. And it captures the transformative, radical power of a political conscience, of an idea long held in secret, as it ripens and develops over decades’ worth of time.
The movie’s imaginative spectrum is enormous, four-dimensionally so: it delves deep into a literal underground world that lends the hallucinatory concept of the “sunken place” from “Get Out” a physical embodiment. The expanded time frame allowed him to produce a work of expanded ambition: “Us” bounces back and forth between 1986 and the present day, and its action, compared to “Get Out,” has a vast range-geographical, dramatic, and intellectual. The success of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, “ Get Out,” bought him time, he said, in a recent interview with Le Monde-for his new film, “Us,” he had twice as many shoot days.
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