Us (2019)

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE CONTAINED HEAVILY WITHIN THIS REVIEW.

Jordan Peele is now a first-rate horror director, it seems. Get Out was a great start, but I was curious where he could go from there. Fortunately, the answer seems to be into even more wild, pointed social commentary with his sophomore feature Us.

Director: Jordan Peele

Starring: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke

IMDb

This is a movie so dense you’ll probably walk out of it wanting to see it again. There is a real breadth of ideas to be unpacked here, and the movie – aside from a few exposition scenes – doesn’t waste its time waiting for you to catch up, weaving its commentary into cat-and-mouse horror tribute and some slasher gore. Basically the premise is that this family is on vacation and runs into exact doppelgangers of themselves in the night - and from there everything just spirals.

It’s a wandering, free-form exploration of the political and social divides in America. There’s something to be said for a few wry winks about Trump/MAGA types – the doubles of everyone that pop up from the subterranean are wearing red, and the fact that they target rich liberal-types in Santa Fe is something I noticed for sure, for maximum dichotomy between them.

But the larger message is about poverty and classism. Lupita Nyong’o’s character Adelaide’s double, Red, talks with some real spite in her about how everything good Adelaide has has been duplicated in a worse way: “And the girl ate, her food was given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit raw and bloody. On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys; soft and cushy. But the shadow's toys were so sharp and cold they sliced through her fingers when she tried to play with them.”

And then, when asked who they are, an even more direct line: “We’re Americans.” Later she also has a line about how “we’re humans, too.” Individually these lines are pretty evident in meaning, but the thing about social commentary is that it’s more about consistency of messaging and how the message is woven into each scene, and the story overall. It’s all about the haves and the have-nots. The rage of the under-class, burbling up to the surface like a volcano. All that’s wrapped up in a fiery and exciting romp through a beach town. Gorgeous images of the shore and of a classic American amusement park serve both to make this look great as well as to amplify the message – this is an American problem.

We’re at a fairly precarious, difficult time in our history right now, as anybody who lives here probably knows. Peele feeds off that like a vampire and creates a film that’s chaotic and off-kilter as the political climate here. Nobody understands each other in America right now. Suitably, the red-suited doppelgangers can only scream and howl – they’re unintelligible to those from the above-ground world. Violence becomes the only language common to them.

And I think what’s striking to me is that there’s really no resolution to it. Peele doesn’t pose a solution for the divide or the chaos. He just shows it as it is, this glorious miasma of violence and resentment. The red-suited doubles win in the end, unifying themselves in a literal hand-linked chain across the land, which is a pretty glaring commentary of its own. They were able to unify and come up to the surface.

At the end it’s also revealed that Adelaide is actually the real ‘Red,’ having switched places with the above-ground version as children when they met in a hall of mirrors. Both of them lived the others’ lives and now the fake Adelaide does whatever she has to to keep her status – every woman for herself. It becomes less of a monster movie, upon knowing this, and more of a struggle between two human beings. “We’re people too,” the real Adelaide, who’s spent her life underground as Red, says with biting venom and bile through every word. And maybe knowing that, then it’s a bit of an oversight for someone like me to have ever thought the other red-clad doubles were true monsters at all in the first place. Even the slasher-style murders start to make more sense. They’re fucking angry as hell.

A good twist is one that you can watch the whole movie again after knowing and the rest of the movie retroactively makes sense in a different way. This twist adds to the layers of the film and makes it more than just another monster flick. The fake Adelaide’s fear is for her own self-preservation. That’s as human as you can get.

It’s a weird-ass movie to be sure. Vague and metaphorical and not all of the in-universe world-building is explicitly explained. Why were there these shadow-doubles living in caves underground at all? We only get a few lines explaining that stuff and it’s not really a thorough explanation. I kinda like the vagueness, not gonna lie. I wouldn’t have wanted a bunch of long drawn out backstory scenes for the mechanical functions of this world – that would’ve just dragged it down and the exposition we got from Red, in character, made sense for how she sees things, adds context to the movie, and that was enough for me.

Horror, like any fantasy, is about feeling rather than mechanics. What we’re seeing on screen in Us has more resonance and meaning than a lot of movies in this genre try for. I think this is an evocative, mesmeric and hard-hitting piece of film. I haven’t been this fascinated by a movie in a while now. I’m sure there will be even more things to notice about this on future viewings. If you like classic horror and/or social commentary, Us is fucking profound and insanely engaging in its labyrinthine mirror-hall of layers.

PS: Here are some good pieces I’ve read about Us so far, which offer some views I didn’t know about or didn’t catch – I’m sure there are shitloads more, too.

https://twitter.com/kyalbr/status/1109984274114064385?s=19&fbclid=IwAR0trpsf-_PIpsflZZZLnIhOAuj_HXCYrtZXHYG4VooGwX9i1hGY6PVJjLI

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/us-was-movies-biggest-twist-hiding-plain-sight-1196584

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/us-meaning-costumes-kym-barrett-interview-red-jumpsuit/585793/?fbclid=IwAR0wCXNaXkRBJPQK9YBjwQEjXwN1EdWc7pl94T0K5epng003Cbjbs-aA7WI&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=5c9fe6f43ed3f00001723f9d_ta&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Dragged Across Concrete (2019)

S. Craig Zahler, a metal musician and now film director, has been making a name for himself with a series of gruesome movies even for horror fans’ standards: first, Bone Tomahawk was full of a lot of disemboweling and cannibal madness, and his last one Brawl in Cell Block 99 was full of enough brutal face-stompings and bone-breakings to fill up even the most devout gore-hound. Now we have Dragged Across Concrete, which based on the title I figured would be the most violent schlock-fest yet.

And it is pretty violent, yeah. But it also veers into something even more uncomfortable: mild conservative “anti-PC” racism.

Director: S. Craig Zahler

Starring: Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter

IMDb

I mean, it isn’t like they go full on MAGA hat or anything, but having Mel Gibson in a starring role was almost like a wink to the audience as to what this was gonna be like. Him and co-star Vince Vaughn, after their characters get suspended from the force for stepping on a Hispanic drug dealer’s head and neck on video, have a few lines early on about how PC everything is and it made me wonder what the hell this movie was playing at. Oh and another subplot has Gibson’s daughter getting orange juice thrown on her by a black kid while coming home from school, which prompts his wife to opine about how “she never thought she was racist before moving to this neighborhood.”

It’s all pretty perplexing at first – like, are we being asked to sympathize with that world view? Keep in mind that the actual plot has nothing to do with this. It’s like he just added it in for no reason really. It barely comes up again, but the stink of this stuff is striking as you go through the film. I think he was trying to show that yeah, these people exist and there’s not much you can do about it. They have pretty shitty, regressive-ish attitudes and yet they’re still out there working jobs and trying to figure their problems out like the rest of us.

It turns out, surprisingly, that the kind of people who espouse these pretty racist views aren’t dining on baby flesh every night. And not all of ‘em are wearing Klan uniforms or want some white ethnostate – some of ‘em are just mildly shitty. Most, in fact, are more like this than some extremity.

Zahler didn’t have to put any of these things in the movie – they’re ancillary and barely take up 10 minutes of screentime in this 2.5 hour movie. But at the same time, I’d much rather not have only movies that show people I like. That’s not a good path for anybody, that kind of sameness of intent.

If anything I think Zahler is just caught up in a whirlwind not of his own making. He’s just making movies he likes, but the culture around him has changed so rapidly and there are all kinds of voices right now that are genuinely inquiring as to why things are the way they are. And maybe there’s a sort of willful blindness in making a movie like this and just shrugging and going ‘well, it’s what I want to do, it doesn’t need to be political’ like he’s basically done several times. Unfortunately everything’s become political and the world is a goddamn dumpster fire because of it. I enjoy the guy’s movies. But I can see where detractors are coming from there.

But Zahler is nothing if not a storyteller, and we also have other plot threads coming together – another guy, Henry John, played by Tory Kittles, who’s getting back into crime to help his family. Jennifer Carpenter of Dexter fame is back in another Zahler movie, playing a new mother who gets caught up in the mayhem. Gibson and Vaughn’s cop characters get into this plot to steal a bunch of gold from even worse criminals, who Kittles’ Henry John is affiliated with. And Carpenter is kidnapped by the bad guys – people have also harped on this aspect of Zahler’s films, as it’s pretty antiquated damsel in distress type shit, but what can I say? He’s a metal musician and a fan of vintage gore and action movies. Not exactly the guy we should be looking to to lead us into the future.

What ensues is a lot of shootouts, some blood and guts. But also a typically well-paced narrative as Zahler has become known for. He takes his time with these scenes, relishing in showing you their conversations and their stakeouts in the car and their family lives – it’s all just build-up and table-setting but it’s compelling due to its rawness and the extent to which he takes it. It would be less so if he skimmed through it like other movies do.

He takes the audience seriously and delivers a full experience by not just jumping into action or sex or anything. By taking the leisurely and detailed route in setting up his story, the violence and action that comes later has more impact. Most Hollywood movies would just take five minutes to show a spouse character saying “please don’t die” and then jump into the action. Not this one.

The whole thing, like Zahler’s previous movies, comes off as a satisfying full meal. At 2.5 hours you won’t feel like you’ve been skimped on. It’s a three course movie and feels complete. I can’t always say the same thing about, say, a Marvel movie, which feels more like a big cheesy pretzel that will give you gas later.

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