Genre: Horror
Premise: (from IMDB) A family’s serenity turns to chaos when a group of doppelgängers begins to terrorize them.
About: After Get Out took the world by storm, Peele was offered everything in Hollywood. So it was a surprise to all when he rejected all those franchises and made another horror movie. It proved to be the right choice, though. There was crazy buzz immediately after he dropped the first trailer for “Us.” Since then, interest has only risen, and the film killed it at the box office this weekend, making 70 million bucks. That would be 37 million more than Get Out’s first weekend. It appears that in only two years, Peele has established himself as one of the top writer-directors in the business. What will he do next??
Writer: Jordan Peele
Details: 116 minutes
Before we get started, can we all take a second to appreciate the irony of Jordan Peele casting his acting doppelgänger in the role of the father here? Winston Duke even sounds like Peele. Also, kudos to Peele for figuring out how to make this premise marketable. It seems obvious in retrospect. But think about how many failed doppelgänger movies there have been. Can’t remember any? That’s my point. There was box office titan Enemy with Jake Gyllenhaal. Oh, and that Jesse Eisenberg movie that entered into the zeitgeist, The Double.
Once you see Us, it’s easy to understand why those movies failed. A doppelgänger movie about a single person has maybe a good 20 minutes of story in it before you’re descending into 3am college territory (“So what if, like, the doppelgänger is from… like… another dimension.” “No, what if WE’RE in the other dimension.” “Whoaaaaaa.”). Once Peele decided on creating an entire family of doppelgängers, he quadrupled the amount of story he could tell. I wasn’t surprised, after watching Peele’s interviews later on, that he credits that idea as the turning point for him. He had always wanted to make a movie about doppelgängers. But it was only when he conceived of an entire family of them that he knew he had a movie.
If you haven’t seen the film, it follows the Wilson family, Adelaide and Gabe, along with their kids, Zora and Jason, as they head up for a weekend at their lake house. Gabe wants to go to the beach but Adelaide is resistant as she had a traumatic experience there once as a kid. But Gabe guilt trips her into going anyway. Once there, Adelaide is overwhelmed by her memories and insists they leave.
Almost immediately after they get home, a family appears in their driveway. But not just any family. It’s them. Or some bizarre copies of them. This copy family corners the Wilson family, then forces them to separate so that each doppelgänger can torture their “original.” Somehow, the Wilson family escapes their doubles, only to find that every family in the entire community is experiencing the same thing. Their doppelgängers have come to kill them.
Adelaide is convinced that if they don’t eliminate these things, they will always be pursued. So she sets out to kill each one. This plan goes sideways, however, when Adelaide’s doppelgänger snatches Jason. Adelaide follows them deep underground, where she learns that the doppelgängers have been living for decades, preparing for this moment. She manages to kill her double and get her son back. But when she gets back to the surface, she learns that the doppelgängers are united, intent on finishing their master’s orders.
I had one heck of a time figuring out if I liked this movie or not.
I would literally go from hating it to loving it to hating it to loving it, back and forth over and over, and I couldn’t figure out why. I finally identified the issue. I didn’t know whether Jordan Peele was trying to make a serious statement movie or just having fun. If you’re trying to make a statement, you must be held to a higher standard. You can’t toss in half-baked ideas then tell us we’re watching a metaphor for Trump’s America.
For example, anybody who’s been to a house on the lake knows that even a whisper sounds like a bullhorn. So why at no point did the family scream for help when they were being stalked by the killer family from hell? There was literally a house 20 feet from them and they never thought to scream out, “HEY! COME OVER HERE AND HELP US!” However, if all you’re doing is making a fun film, that stuff isn’t as big of a deal. And in the end, particularly after the twist, I realized that all Jordan Peele was trying to do here was give us a good time. Through that lens, I enjoyed the movie.
But oh boy. This was not your garden variety screenplay. There were a lot of ideas packed in here. And Peele did not play things safe. As a reader, I respect that. One of the biggest risks Peele took was to open this up beyond your basic home invasion movie, and turn it into this larger overarching mythology. I’ve read so many home invasion movies over the years, that I know exactly the moment where 99% of them fall apart. It’s at the 45 page mark. After the hook and after the fun and games section, the writer realizes that everything that happens inside this house going forward is going to feel the same. Sometimes you can troubleshoot this with great characters but it’s rare I see great characters in a home invasion script. So most writer b.s. their way from page 45 to the climax.
Peele “solved” this problem by opening the movie up and expanding the threat to the entire community. You have to understand how giant of a risk this is. While keeping things inside the house does risk repetition, it’s also the place where the most tension is. It’s scarier for your characters to be trapped in a contained location than it is for them to have an entire town to run around in. So once they first escaped the house, I thought, “What the heck is he going to do next?” Turns out he upgraded his home invasion movie to a town invasion movie, almost like a zombie flick. It turned out to be a good move because I didn’t know where things were going from there.
However, it was far from a smooth ride. The more mythology Peele revealed, the more you were like, “Huh?” There’s a lot of things you can pick apart but just the idea that these people with an IQ of 40 all lived together in some kind of underground community, remained well dressed, kept it clean, and subsisted solely on live rabbits, was a little hard to believe.
And Peele had a tendency to make his characters do what he needed them to do to make his movie work as opposed to what they would really do. I’m sorry but if someone comes into my house and threatens my family not with a gun but with a pair of scissors? I ain’t gently sitting down on the couch and asking them to tell their story. I’m getting my family and getting the heck out of there. There were a lot of moments like that where you had to stretch the realm of believability to buy into what the characters were doing. Again, there were 700 moments in the film where a scream would’ve increased the chances of survival by a million percent. Yet no one thought to do it.
As for the twist, I thought it was okay (spoilers obviously). I’m just not sure it brought anything new to the table. It’s not as interesting to see the twist from the person who benefited from it as it is the person who got screwed by it, right? I’ll say this, though. The woman sitting behind me in the theater said, in complete shock, “Oh no no no no nonononono,” when it happened. So it definitely worked for some people!
The thing you gotta admit about Us is that whether you liked it or not, it’s one of those movies you have to talk about after it’s over. I’m sure you guys are chomping at the bit to give your own take. So have at it. What did you think?
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I consider the 45 page mark to be the most dangerous page in a screenplay. You’ve passed the inciting incident, the hook, the break into the second act, and the fun and games sections. All the fun stuff is behind you. What you do next will determine whether you have a good screenplay or a bad one. So you need to have a plan. Jordan Peele’s plan was to open up the movie beyond the house, expanding the mythology to something bigger. Whether you agree with that decision or not, it’s the thing that made this movie unlike any other horror movie you’ve seen.
