Us (2019)
Directed by Jordan Peele
Husband and wife Gabe and Adelaide Wilson take their kids to their beach house expecting to unplug and unwind with friends. But as night descends, their serenity turns to tension and chaos when some shocking visitors arrive uninvited.
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Film fans may notice the VHS tapes framing the television, including C.H.U.D. , The Man with Two Brains , The Right Stuff , A Nightmare on Elm Street , and one of three Corey Haim references in the picture, The Goonies .
Instead, it's remembered for The Lost Boys, which is just The Goonies wearing plastic vampire fangs.
Opening with a shot of a television surrounded by VHS tapes that tease at some of the film's possible inspirations ( C.H.U.D. , The Goonies , The Right Stuff ; which of these does not belong?)…
On the shelf next to the TV are VHS tapes of C.H.U.D., The Goonies, and, perhaps most prophetically, The Man with Two Brains.
Clues are scattered throughout that ask us to look for some deep, hidden meaning – starting with the row of 1980s VHS tapes visible at the start of the film's prologue, from The Goonies to The Man With Two Brains .
Interpreting Peele’s silliness — early nods to The Man with Two Brains, C.H.U.D., and The Goonies — doesn’t go beyond his trivializing black American deprivation into junk-movie entertainment.
Peele, an unapologetic horror fanatic, nods to those films and dozens more in Us, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jaws and Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The town is as warm as Amity, in “Jaws” (1975), and you have to go back to “The Birds” (1963) to see such enthusiastic gulls.
It also comes from spotting the many cinematic references — a kid in a mask named Jason, a “Jaws” T-shirt on a crowded beach — from a filmmaker with an effortless command of the horror lexicon.
The movie, which lacks the tight concept and the satiric gut-punch of Get Out, opens expertly, coming at us all sunny, unsettling and sideways, with double-edged pop-culture references including Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Jaws, Luniz's song “I Got Five On it” and the 1980s homelessness and hunger fund drive Hands Across America.
A beach scene that closes the first act of Us is an explicit homage to similarly set scenes in Jaws – a character is wearing a tee-shirt advertising that film, just so you know Peele is in on the gag – and, as with the original, it finishes not with a reveal of the monster, just an escalation of our apprehension.
He is not a one-hit wonder in the same way that Jaws proved Spielberg to be an elevated genre storyteller.
Peele’s homework for his sensational star, Lupita Nyong’o, included, according to Entertainment Weekly, “The Birds,” “The Shining,” “Dead Again,” the original “Funny Games,” “The Sixth Sense,” “A Tale of Two Sisters,” “Let the Right One In,” “The Babadook” and “It Follows.”
Nyong’o, already an Oscar winner for Twelve Years a Slave, should be in the running again for delivering one of the great performances in horror movie history, right up there with Sissy Spacek in Carrie and Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Peele's new sophomore effort reflects shades, if seen from the right angle, of a host of other works: The Shining, Candyman, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Funny Games, The Funhouse, and a raft of others all feature — still without calling too much attention to themselves as part of its DNA — which places the emphasis more on execution than any high concept.
The director creates a compelling frisson between the normal on-screen behavior and the eerie visual aesthetic (lots of slow zooms and Steadicam shots reminiscent of Kubrick's The Shining), but it wears out its welcome before the plot advances.
The drive to their sun-and-fun home recalls similar rides in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, although Peele adds dad-joke levity with the ’90s Luniz tune “I Got 5 On It.”
Out of all the films that Us harkens back to, there are particular, noticeable influences of 1980’s The Shining, especially in the multi-faceted performance of Lupita Nyong’o, the literal duality of all the main characters and of course, we can’t forget about the twins.
Otras, como The Goonies (1985), C.H.U.D (1984) y The Man With Two Brains (1983), son referencias ricas para comprender de dónde salió la extraña inspiración de Jordan Peele.
An opening sequence depicting an 80s-vintage home entertainment console adorned with VHS tapes of C.H.U.D., The Goonies, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Man With Two Brains (in which Steve Martin is telepathically linked with a separate brain), serve to twitchily wink at the film’s notion of a bifurcated underworld/overworld structure.
Film fans may notice the VHS tapes framing the television, including C.H.U.D. , The Man with Two Brains , The Right Stuff , A Nightmare on Elm Street , and one of three Corey Haim references in the picture, The Goonies .
Clues are scattered throughout that ask us to look for some deep, hidden meaning – starting with the row of 1980s VHS tapes visible at the start of the film's prologue, from The Goonies to The Man With Two Brains .
The television set is framed by VHS tapes of '80s genre movies like C.H.U.D., The Goonies , and The Man With Two Brains , and the artifacts serve to make her reflective silent stare even more arresting.
On the shelf next to the TV are VHS tapes of C.H.U.D., The Goonies, and, perhaps most prophetically, The Man with Two Brains.
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The film’s next big set piece, the home invasion by the doppelgängers, is equally masterful, playing on the same fears of intrusion as “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), “The Evil Dead” (1981), “Scream” (1996), “Funny Games” (1997), “The Others” (2001), “The Strangers” (2008) and “The Purge” (2013).
A 25-minute "Twilight Zone" episode couldn't include the character development and elaborate horror set pieces as a movie four times its length, so Peele also employs an expansive repertoire of references to other horror classics, particularly "The Strangers."
Their initial entrance into the Wilsons’ lives echoes home-invasion thrillers like The Strangers , and the later stalking sequences resemble It Follows in their particular combination of lurking, inevitable terror, and abrupt violence.
Starting off evocative of other terrifying home invasion narratives such as The Strangers and The Invitation, Peele’s second film, like Get Out, reveals its machinations originate in a landscape located somewhere between the realms of science fiction and fantasy.
As if Get Out wasn’t proof enough, in Us Peele shows off his horror vocabulary, referencing everything from The Strangers to The Twilight Zone —in fact , Us gives a really solid taste of what Peele can do with his Twilight Zone reboot—and he puts together some really tense sequences set to chef’s-kiss-level musical cues.
To call “Us” a movie about home invasion would be to oversimplify things, and gratefully, Peele’s effort is not a Santa Cruz echo of 2008’s “The Strangers,” which felt like an exercise in sadism.
As in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), there is the sense that the Wilsons simply deserve to be destroyed, because all bourgeois families are in possession of riches and comfort that are not rightfully theirs.
The drive to their sun-and-fun home recalls similar rides in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games , although Peele adds dad-joke levity with the ’90s Luniz tune “I Got 5 On It.”
He mines the recent past to mock and challenge the present in a way that is already reminding me of Michael Haneke ( Funny Games , Cache , Amour) , but without the chilly sadism – and with far funkier soundtracks.
Lo que comienza como una variante fantástica de esas invasiones domésticas que tendrían al Funny Games (1997) de Michael Haneke como más ilustre exponente, pronto acaba derivando en una suerte de relato de ciencia ficción conspiratoria, deudor de aquellos que, protagonizados por entidades que suplantaban las identidades de los humanos (ya fuesen ultracuerpos o invasores de Marte), hicieron furor en la década de los 50.
The film’s next big set piece, the home invasion by the doppelgängers, is equally masterful, playing on the same fears of intrusion as “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), “The Evil Dead” (1981), “Scream” (1996), “Funny Games” (1997), “The Others” (2001), “The Strangers” (2008) and “The Purge” (2013).
For horror aficionados, the golf club used as a weapon might bring to mind Michael Haneke’s disturbing Funny Games, and a shot of black gloves may evoke a giallo predator.
Meanwhile, the pod people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”—first in 1956 and then, with an added dash of humor from which Peele has learned, in 1978—morphed into us, mocking our social conformity and daring us to tell the difference between human simulacra and the real thing.
Throughout the years, moviegoers have bitten their nails to The Student of Prague (1913), The Man With My Face (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 1978), The Other, Sisters, The Stepford Wives (all from the 1970s), Mirrors (2008), Enemy (2013), and of course Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017).
Esta inquietud nace de otras influencias en el cine de horror con películas y series que muestran el miedo a encontrarse con uno mismo: ahí tenemos el episodio de “Mirror Image” de The Twilight Zone (1960), tenemos Dead Again de Kenneth Brannagh (1991), tenemos Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) o la muy inquietante Enemy (2013) de Denis Villeneuve.
“Us” borrows several tropes from such landmarks of the horror genre as George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and Wes Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes.”
Peele's uber-nerd cinephilia—the clever echoes of such horror-canon treasures as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers , Stanley Kubrick's The Shining , George Romero's Day of the Dead , Michael Haneke's Funny Games , and on and on—is non-stop fun ("Isn't that the Lost Boys boardwalk?").
Cinephiles will also notice shades of Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), Michael Bay’s “The Island” (2005) and Charlie McDowell’s “The One I Love” (2014), which fittingly starred Elisabeth Moss (“Mad Men”) in a double role.
An ad for Hands opens Us, playing on a tube TV in an ’80s-era entertainment console, flanked by VHSes of The Goonies, C.H.U.D., and The Right Stuff.
Film fans may notice the VHS tapes framing the television, including C.H.U.D. , The Man with Two Brains , The Right Stuff , A Nightmare on Elm Street , and one of three Corey Haim references in the picture, The Goonies .
But Peele wants us to know that Us is taking place now, in this country (“We’re Americans…”), in a world with Michael Jackson T-shirts, mid-90s Oakland hip-hop, and two-VHS box-sets of Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983).
Opening with a shot of a television surrounded by VHS tapes that tease at some of the film's possible inspirations ( C.H.U.D. , The Goonies , The Right Stuff ; which of these does not belong?)…
Arranged on the entertainment center shelves are video cassettes that include The Right Stuff (1983), The Goonies (1985), and – most salient to the story and themes of Us – Douglas Cheek’s cult horror-satire C.H.U.D. (1984).
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Starting the film in Santa Cruz on the same boardwalk on which The Lost Boys was shot in 1986 is definitely not an accident.
Instead, it's remembered for The Lost Boys, which is just The Goonies wearing plastic vampire fangs.
As the film opens, we see young Adelaide watching her TV; on the shelf next to the TV are VHS tapes of films including The Goonies and C.H.U.D, soon after there’s a sneaky reference to The Lost Boys (which might go over some people’s heads, but is a lovely touch).
Peele sets a prologue on the 1986 Santa Cruz, Calif., boardwalk (site of the 1987 vampire flick “The Lost Boys,” as it happens), where a little girl named Adelaide (Madison Curry) wanders away from her parents and into a beachside house of mirrors with an unnerving secret.
The flick opens at a nighttime carnival in Santa Cruz in the mid-1980s ( The Lost Boys , anyone?).
Peele sets Us’ tone with a dark beginning on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk circa The Lost Boys.
In 1986, it went by the name Vision Quest .
But the mother, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is reluctant to visit the nearby Santa Cruz beach; as a child, as seen in the film’s prologue, she wandered off from her family there, and what she discovered inside the right-off-the-boardwalk “Vision Quest” hall of mirrors (“find yourself,” dare its signs) left her deeply scarred.
In the flashback prologue, we witness her being separated from her parents as a little girl in 1986, wandering away from the carnival into the “Vision Quest” funhouse, which for some reason has been built facing the beach rather than the boardwalk.