Watch as director Jordan Peele dances around the ties and trademarks of a threadbare genre and then renders these tropes irrelevant with splenetic bites of satire and an audaciously intellectual pulse. He continually penetrates the horror genre with an irreverently political edict. Beautifully controlled, the macabre quality of the film lives in the slow pace of the film, the eerie sounds, the heavy political undertone and the unusual acts that are buried within the false safety of the many mundane ones. It feels oddly pedestrian, heavy in awkward symbolism as Peele struggles to strings together each concept, playing with and challenging its expectant audience. He wraps each frame in an echoing hypnotic rhythm, skeletons of Eminem's Five On It, manipulated, cut and thrown into various points of the film.
While Peele's debut Get Out rests more heavily on a singular concept, in Us, Peele ventures further, affording greater depth, thought and consequence to his depiction of enduring systematic racism. This is his answer to "post-racial" America, a satirical, absurdist piece that seeks to incorporate his understanding of mythology, human nature and postmodern culture.
The innumerable plot holes frustrate and antagonise the audience, but Peele relinquishes clarity and grace for the beauty bought by the vague and loosely defined, indulging in the space for interpretation created by the non-specificity of his frames. Rich in playful detail, in political commentary and perfectly measured, Us buys fully into antiquated satire, a piece of cinema drenched in symbolism, relying heavily on the horror of motifs. The film is affected by a chilling score woven with afro-beats and symphonic nuances. Disquieting moments are disturbed by sudden, unnatural movements, quick and constant plot twists to create a continuing guess game.
