Us

Jordan Peele’s follow up to “Get Out” is another socially-engaged horror story, albeit somewhat different issues to those he examined in his first film. It starts with one of my favourite expositional devices (also used in “Climax”), a tv showing something plot relevant while the surrounding shelves show videos and books that contain possible relevance to the film that follows, and continues to tell of a nuclear family on a beachside vacation in Santa Cruz, whose idyll is disrupted when intruders show up at the house. Intruders that look unnervingly like themselves…

It's difficult to talk much about this without getting into all the twists and turns that happen, but this is definitely an effective shocker. Lupita Nyongo takes the lead as the worried mother whose prior experiences in Santa Cruz in the opening sequence set her up to fear, and she plays through the fear as things escalate to seize the attention and control of the film. Winston Duke as her slightly goofy husband is kinda adorable and 180 degrees away from his role in Black Panther. This manages the tricky task of being both terrifying and thought provoking – the doppelganger device has a whole heap of thematic resonance that keeps things bubbling away in my head well after the film has ended. Absolutely recommended.