This is "Us"

Like many people, I’ve been eagerly and impatiently awaiting comedian-turned-Master of Horror Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated follow-up to his critically and commercially successful horror debut ‘Get Out’ (which won an Oscar in the Best Original Screenplay category) with a bit of trepidation: Will his second release be as good as the first, or will he fall victim to a sophomore slump?  By the time the film’s trailer hit theaters, however, I was reassured that he has another winner in his hands.
 

‘Us’ follows a “typical” middle-class African-American family on a lakeside vacation in California, but their R&R gets rudely interrupted by (warning, spoilers ahead) another family, a family of maniacal scissors-wielding doppelgängers who terrorized and forced them to fight for their very lives.  Weird, huh?  The hapless family’s survival largely depended on the mom (played by the talented Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o) and how far she will go to protect her loved ones from the murderous doppelgängers.  And then there are rabbits, oh so many of them.
 

Just as ‘Get Out’ was a brilliant and frightening parable of race relations in our times, ‘Us’ is a tense and suspenseful reflection of our socio-economic divide that also manages to scare the bejesus out of us. The bizarro world which Peele portrays in his movies are wonderfully weird, alternate mirrors of our own that would fit right in “The Twilight Zone.”  Peele’s tightly plotted screenplay and the performances of the movie’s cast also grab our attention from the get-go and never let up, which is rare nowadays in horror because we’ve seen most of the usual tropes in the genre.  Well, at least I have.

Grade: A