Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon, Madison Curry, Ashley McKoy, Napiera Groves, Lon Gowan, Alan Frazier, Duke Nicholson, Dustin Ybarra, Nathan Harrington, Kara Hayward.
After World War Two American cinema developed a schizophrenic relationship with the idea of the everyday person being replaced by its doppelganger, mainly through the use of Science Fiction and in films that showed an alien invasion, the replicas at the time being a perfect, is sensualised, analogy for the Communist threat; that we didn’t truly know who was one of them, and who was one of Us.
Whilst the films themselves were good B-Movie fodder, and in one or two cases, absolute classics of the era and genre, The Day Of The Triffids and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers being chiefly amongst them, The Communist threat is a side affair, there if you want to look for it, and one only hints at the horror of what is truly going on, that we don’t know what our best-friends, our neighbours are capable of doing when their minds are turned against the system of Government they live under.
If films such as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is a portrayal of the existential threat from beyond the shores, then perhaps Jordan Peele has become the great adaptor and storyteller of what happens when the threat comes from within. The menace comes not from Russia or any other super power with world domination of its ideals and mantra on its agenda, but instead the cold-hearted application of replacing ourselves by a Government scared of its own people; a leaner, more compliant, less inclined to go against the system people who look like us, can be taught to sound like us and have all our memories intact.
Us follows that train of thought spectacularly, and with Mr. Peele’s highly rated and psychological thriller Get Out adding subtext to this new appreciation of horror, it could be argued that the world is waking up to its own culpability in allowing access to every minute detail of our being into the hands of the Government.
Whilst the film acknowledges its own subtle humour, the references deeply, but unashamedly, used, it is to the fear of being easily replaced that the audience must surely focus its attention on, and with it the tremendous performances on screen, especially that of Lupita Nyong’o, who portrays the sleight of hand at the centre of Jordan Peele’s work.
Gripping, insightful and passionate in its delivery, it is after all about Us and them, but now we have to ask who is who?
Ian D. Hall