Us

Or: Out of the Cage

In 1986, on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, a little girl went missing. Adelaide Thomas (Madison Curry) wandered out of the lights and noise of the sea-side carnival and ran afoul of … something. In 2019, grown Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) returns to Santa Cruz with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). But despite the promise of sun and sand and passive aggression, Adelaide remains haunted and certain that something is watching her with envious, hungry eyes. And that’s when Red (Lupita Nyong’o) and her family show up in their driveway.

For all the bits I saw between my fingers, Us is a beautiful horror movie. The jumps flutter just on the edges of expectation, the dread creeps in soft and smooth like water under a door, and the gore, while copious, is tastefully covered in the form of a light spatter across a wall or a rich gurgle from a severed jugular (and never before has such a sound been put to so deft a use). The Wilson’s are a solid family of survivors, and comics, though not immune to making the poor decisions that plague the heroes of their genre, the ones where the whole audience tuts as one and thinks, ‘I wouldn’t have done that.’ But however well they work as a team, this is Nyongo’s movie, and the other performances remain in the shadows.

From the start, Adelaide keeps us in a slowly heating pot of anxiety. It’s nothing performative, just a palpable sense of discomfort that slowly hatches. By the time she tells the story of her early encounter, in a splendid shot of her reflection in a window, her fear has been supplanted in us by sheer force of personality. And as the threats keep coming, Adelaide devolves; howling and lunging at her attackers until she is almost as bestial as the Tethered, the unspeaking, crimson-clad doppelgängers bent on a program of murder and replacement (and sometimes prove, hilariously to be just as petty and full of , pardon my language, douchery as their originals).

But as Red, the Tethered’s leader, Nyongo is a thing of terrible grace. The most frightening scene in Silence of the Lambs, for me, is when Hannibal Lecter first appears, drawn up and neat in his little square; coiled and ready to strike. It’s the same kind of predators stillness that Red exudes, a balletic control, but unlike Hopkins, Nyong’o gets to use it to the full effect, ricocheting through rooms like a tight funnel cloud, dealing out destruction, her face a chilling mask. She is that best of all things, a villain that creates her own gravity through the story, compelling as she is terrifying.

Adelaide’s discomfort and Red’s sinister flow (as well as Curry’s silent evocations) are merely the acting manifestations of Jordan Peel’s excellent hand at film making. The movie is rich and lush, making a prophetic blossom from the peel of lighting that illuminates young Adelaide’s face to the sinister spadework of light and shadow that falls across her elder counterpart as she ventures into the Tethered’s realm. It is also beautifully, beautifully scored by Michael Ables, from classic rap to a swarm of strings, to the sweetly ominous Latin chanting of the title sequence (a long shot at a single uncanny rabbit in a cage, that is so much more powerful than you realize). If the film has a fault it is in its willingness to linger in scenes, tracking characters as they amble or creep. But sometimes, as the masterful Once More With Clarity ending shows, there’s a horror in the ordinary that’s twice as powerful as any slaughterer.

Us is a film that promises to stick under my nails, and not because I pressed them to my face so often that blood flowed. It’s inventive, surprising, delicate, beautiful, and best of all it spreads across the mind; a sense of fascination, a hunger to learn more that will leave you up at night; wondering what your own shadow-self might be thinking.