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Review: Jordan Peele’s “Us” Is a Colossal Cinematic Achievement

By Richard Brody

The success of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, “ Get Out ,” bought him time, he said, in a recent interview with Le Monde —for his new film, “Us,” he had twice as many shoot days. The expanded time frame allowed him to produce a work of expanded ambition: “Us” bounces back and forth between 1986 and the present day, and its action, compared to “Get Out,” has a vast range—geographical, dramatic, and intellectual. The movie’s imaginative spectrum is enormous, four-dimensionally so: it delves deep into a literal underground world that lends the hallucinatory concept of the “sunken place” from “Get Out” a physical embodiment. And it captures the transformative, radical power of a political conscience, of an idea long held in secret, as it ripens and develops over decades’ worth of time. “Us” is nothing short of a colossal achievement.

Structured like a home-invasion drama, “Us” is a horror film—though saying so is like offering a reminder that “The Godfather” is a gangster film or that “2001: A Space Odyssey” is science fiction. Genre is irrelevant to the merits of a film, whether its conventions are followed or defied; what matters is that Peele cites the tropes and precedents of horror in order to deeply root his film in the terrain of pop culture—and then to pull up those roots. “Us” is a film that places itself within pop culture for diagnostic—and even self-diagnostic—purposes; its subject is, in large measure, cultural consciousness and its counterpart, the cultural unconscious. The crucial element of horror is political and moral—the realities that metaphorical fantasies evoke.

Peele reaches deep into the symbolic DNA of pop culture to discover a hidden, implicit history that he brings to the fore, at a moment of growing recognition that the deeds of the past still rage with silent and devastating force in the present time. After a title card notes the presence of a vast hidden network of tunnels (as for abandoned railways and mines) beneath American soil, the action begins with a bit of pop archeology: a shot of an old-fashioned tube TV set, on which a commercial is playing for “Hands Across America,” a 1986 philanthropic fund-raising event that involved an effort to create a human chain from coast to coast. (The announcer’s voice-over says, “Six million people will tether themselves together to fight hunger in America.”)

At that time, a young girl named Adelaide (though her name isn’t heard until much later in the film, when she’s an adult) is visiting a Santa Cruz beach with her squabbling parents. The child (Madison Curry) wanders off, enters a beachside haunted-house attraction, and, there, walking through a hall of mirrors reminiscent of the one in Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai,” sees not her reflection but her physical double. After the incident, her parents find her traumatized, but just what happened isn’t clear to them. In the present day, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is married to Gabe Wilson (Winston Duke), and they have two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), a teen-ager, and Jason (Evan Alex), who seems to be about eight. The Wilsons are prosperous—they’re heading to a summer house by a lake, where Gabe buys a speedboat (albeit a beat-up, run-down one) on a whim. It’s not clear what they do for a living; Adelaide used to dance but gave it up. What is clear is that she now has an aversion to the beach because of the haunted house, which is still there, in a slightly different guise. Her memories and flashbacks suggest that the trauma from whatever happened in the house has haunted her for her whole life.

The Wilsons are black, a fact that, as depicted, has little overt effect on their lives. Avoiding the stereotypes of black Americans in movies, Peele instead knowingly depicts them as a stereotype of a financially successful, socially stable, and cinematically average American family. It’s as though they naturally and unintentionally use what Boots Riley’s film, “Sorry to Bother You,” would call their “white voice,” the voice of white-dominated corporate prosperity. (There’s even a wink back to “Get Out,” regarding the Wilsons’ utterly untroubled confidence in the police.) Their summer companions are a white (and wealthier) family, the Tylers, Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), and their twin daughters, Becca (Cali Sheldon) and Lindsey (Noelle Sheldon).

Back at their summer house that night, Adelaide experiences premonitions—she tells Gabe that she feels that her double is out there somewhere. “My whole life I’ve felt as if she’s still coming for me,” she says, and, on this night, she feels as if “she’s getting closer.” Moments later, Jason sees another family standing outside the house; it turns out to be four doubles of the Wilson family, distinguished by their matching red jumpsuits (reminiscent of prison uniforms) and tan sandals, their static posture—holding hands side by side, in the manner of Hands Across America—and their silence. The doubles soon burst into the house, facing off against the Wilsons while Adelaide’s double (named, in the credits, Red)—the only one of the four doppelgängers to speak—states, in a hoarse and halting voice, her demands.

No less than “Get Out,” “Us” is a work of directorial virtuosity, in which Peele invests every moment, every twist, every diabolically conceived and gleefully invoked detail with graphic, psychological resonance and controlled tone, in performance and gesture. Here, as in “Get Out,” Peele employs point-of-view shots to put audience members in the position of the characters, to conjure subjective and fragmentary experience that reverberates with the metaphysical eeriness of their suddenly doubled world. (Recurring nods to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” suggest a mysterious transformation of the natural order.) Exactly as the title promises (and as the drama delivers, when Jason identifies the intruders, saying, “It’s us”), the movie turns the screen into a funhouse mirror in which the distortions prove to be truer representations of the state of things—in the world of its viewers—than more familiar, realistic depictions.

A distinctively American vision is planted throughout the action of “Us,” with an explicit and monitory allusion to the notion of national destiny. As a child, Adelaide sees, at the beach, a silent beachcomber-prophet with a sign that reads “Jeremiah 11:11.” In that chapter, God grants people land on the condition that they keep their covenant with Him, but when they revert to “the sins of their ancestors,” they face divine retribution: “Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.’ ” When Adelaide asks the family’s doubles “What are you people?,” the wording of the question (not “who” but “what”) is less offensive than it is literally ontological: Are they alive or dead? Are they zombies or robots or creatures from space or figments of their imagination? Red’s answer is “We’re Americans.” (Even the title, “Us,” doubles as “U.S.”)

“Us” is intensely suspenseful (it would be sinful to spoil its twists or even to hint at its scares) and moderately gory—yet the bloodshed rigorously serves the drama. It’s never there to gross out viewers or to test their threshold of shock or disgust. (And I’m squeamish.) In particular, the explicit violence provides a serious view of life-threatening dangers that compel bourgeois characters to get their hands dirty with the act of killing—it shows what they’re up against and what they have to face, and to do, in an effort to save themselves. Yet “Us” also offers that safety, that salvation, with bitter irony. (It brings to mind Florence Reece’s pro-union song “ Which Side Are You On? ”) It’s a movie that, true to its genre, is plotted with hair-trigger mechanisms that tweak suspense with surprises—intellectual ones along with dramatic and sensory ones.

With its foretold emphasis on tunnels, “Us” proves to be something like Peele’s version of “ Notes from Underground ,” complete with its fiery arias of torment from those whose voices otherwise go unheard. (There’s a relevant wink along the way at Samuel Fuller’s jangling masterwork “ Shock Corridor .”) The term that describes the link between the Wilsons and their doubles is called “tethering”—and that word, in its many grammatical forms, recurs throughout the film (not least, in repeated allusions to Hands Across America). The nature of bonds—social bonds, voluntary and involuntary connections of some people to others—is at the heart of the movie, the desire for solidarity with some, the intended or oblivious dissociation from others.

The movie’s many pop-culture references—whether kids wearing T-shirts for “Thriller” and “Jaws” or the presence of “Good Vibrations” and “Fuck tha Police” on the soundtrack—are no mere decorations. Peele’s radical vision of inequality, of the haves and the have-nots, those who are in and those who are out, is reflected brightly and brilliantly in his view of pop culture, current and classic (including riffs on romantic melodrama and on the notion of emotional expression as a luxury in itself). Mass media is presented in “Us” as a rich people’s culture, if not in the immediate origins of its artists, then in the production, distribution, marketing, platforming, and lawyering of the work—in the very notion of its valuable and ubiquitous legacy. (In the Le Monde interview, Peele cited the soundtrack as another principal benefit of his higher budget.)

“Us” highlights the unwitting complicity of even apparently well-meaning and conscientious people in an unjust order that masquerades as natural and immutable but is, in fact, the product of malevolent designs that leave some languishing in the perma-shadows. (Designed by whom? The movie doesn’t name names, but it winks and nods and nudges in a general direction that runs from the sea to the lake.) It dramatizes this world, but with a twist—one that (avoiding spoilers) risks overturning conventional values and sympathies with ecstatic fervor. Suffice it to say that “Us” reserves empathy for its unwitting villains while gleefully deriding their comfortably normal state of obliviousness—and the ordinary absurdities of the world at large.

The movie’s exquisite perceptiveness and its alluring details are part of a vision that ranges between the outrageously sardonic and the grandly tragic. It renders the movie, for all its suspense, violence, and moral outrage, as much of a joy to recall, moment by moment, as it is to watch. Zora, after wielding an improvised weapon in a desperate, defensive rage, wiggles her arm in fatigue, as if she’d just completed a household chore. Gabe, challenging the doppelgängers with a metal baseball bat, adopts a stereotypical black-dialect voice as if, by doing so, he could make himself more menacing. Jason, suspicious of his own double (named Pluto), crafts a chess-like strategy leading to results and images of anguished grandeur. There are all kinds of magnificently world-built elements that only make sense in the light of big, late reveals, such as a strange and bloody preview, on the Santa Cruz beach, of the Wilson family’s doubles, and Adelaide’s early success as a dancer (and her double’s ability to use it against her).

This world-building has a stark thematic simplicity that both belies and inspires immense complexity. “Us” is a movie that defies the jigsaw-fit, quasi-academic interpretation that pervades recent criticism. As much as the movie offers a metaphorical vision of the enormities of social and political life, it also offers implications of an inner world, a projection of Peele-iana that maps his personal vision onto that of the world at large—and that, in turn, calls upon viewers to receive that world as intensely and consciously and imaginatively as he tries to do. The results of doing so, he suggests, are intrinsically political, even revolutionary.

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‘Us’ Review: Jordan Peele’s Creepy Latest Turns a Funhouse Mirror on Us

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‘Us’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Jordan peele narrates a sequence from his film..

“I’m Jordan Peele. I’m the writer, producer, and director of the movie “Us.’” “There’s a family in our driveway.” “So here we have the scene where the tethered family arrives at the Wilson house for the first time. Jason, of course, says “there’s a family in our driveway.” A line designed, giddily, to attempt to be an iconic line, like “they’re here” from the “Poltergeist” movie and sort of help congeal this sense of an Amblin-esque predicament with a black family in the center of it.” - [heavy breathing] “What?” “Zora, give me your phone.” “I’m not on it.” “Zora!” “This is the point in the movie where I want the terror to really kick into a new gear for the audience. One of the techniques that I utilized to get that terror was that all of a sudden we go into real time. The movie before this has been going from some time dashes here and there. When we get into this moment where the four family members are standing holding hands outside, then we go into this sort of fluid — we use a lot of the Steadicam with very few edits. Really trying to subliminally signal to the audience that this sort of relentless, real time event has begun and is taking place.” “Wait, wait, wait, just one sec — Gabe.” “So we see Gabe leave. He goes out. He’s the dad, he’s got to deal with it. This is kind of like — probably pulled from my own anxieties of being a father and realizing, yeah, you got to man up sometimes.” “Hi. Can I help you?” “One of the things in this scene that really inspired me was the scene in “Halloween” where Michael Myers has the ghost sheet over him. And no matter how many questions he’s asked, he just doesn’t respond. The less response you get, the more impending and physical, I think, the threat gets. Probably after the second time someone doesn’t respond, you know one of you’s got to go down. [laughing] “A’ight, I asked you nice. Now I need y’all to get off my property.” “One of the pieces of this scene that works really well is we’ve got Winston to this spot where he’s code switching. You know, he goes back to some of his roots, as it were, to try and intimidate this mysterious family out there. That maybe if sort of reasoning with them doesn’t work, a good old fashioned low register, throwing some bass into his voice, coming out with a little swagger and a bat might work.” “O.K., let’s call the cops.” “Winston is just remarkable in this scene, and the audience really I think is in this tug of war between feeling the tension ratcheting up and the fear of what’s to come and the little bit of a comic relief of watching this kind of goofy dad who’s in over his head.” “Gabe.” “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right.” “Gabe!” “I got this.”

By Manohla Dargis

• March 20, 2019

Jordan Peele’s new horror movie, “Us,” is an expansive philosophical hall of mirrors. Like his 2017 hit, “Get Out,” this daring fun-until-it’s-not shocker starts from the genre’s central premise that everyday life is a wellspring of terrors. In “Get Out,” a young black man meets a group of white people who buy — at auction — younger, healthier black bodies. What makes “Get Out” so powerful is how Peele marshals a classic tale of unwilling bodily possession into a resonant, unsettling metaphor for the sweep of black and white relations in the United States — the U.S., or us.

“Us” is more ambitious than “Get Out,” and in some ways more unsettling. Once again, Peele is exploring existential terrors and the theme of possession, this time through the eerie form of the monstrous doppelgänger. The figure of the troublesome other — of Jekyll and Hyde, of the conscious and unconscious — ripples through the story of an ordinary family, the Wilsons, stalked by murderous doubles. These shadows look like the Wilsons but are frighteningly different, with fixed stares and guttural, animalistic vocalizations. Dressed in matching red coveralls and wielding large scissors (the better to slice and dice), they are funhouse-mirror visions turned nightmares.

The evil twin is a rich, durable motif, and it winds through “Us” from start to finish, beginning with a flashback to 1986 at a Santa Cruz, Calif., amusement park. There, a young girl (the expressive Madison Curry) and her parents are leisurely wandering the park. The girl is itsy-bitsy (the camera sticks close to her so that everything looms), and she and her parents maintain a chilly, near-geometric distance from one another. She’s clutching a perfect candied apple, a portentous splash of red and a witty emblem both of Halloween and Edenic forbidden fruit. Movies are journeys into knowledge, and what the girl knows is part of the simmering mystery.

The Wilsons, a family of four headed by Adelaide (a dazzling Lupita Nyong’o) and Gabe (Winston Duke), enter many years later, introduced with an aerial sweep of greenery. The bird’s-eye view (or god’s-eye, given the movie’s metaphysical reach) evokes the opener of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” a film Peele references throughout. A true cinephile, Peele scatters “Us” with nods and allusions to old-school 1970s and ’80s movies including “Goonies,” “Jaws,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” (One disturbing scene suggests that he’s also a fan of Michael Haneke.) But “The Shining” — another story of a grotesquely haunted family — serves as his most obvious guiding star, narratively and visually.

[Read about Lupita Nyong’o and her work on the movie.]

Peele likes to mix tones and moods, and as he did in “Get Out,” he uses broad humor both for delay and deflection. There’s a cryptic opener and an equally enigmatic credit sequence, but soon the Wilsons are laughing at their vacation home. It’s a breather that Peele uses for light jokes and intimacy (Duke’s amiable performance provides levity and warmth) while he scatters narrative bread crumbs. There’s a beach trip with another family, this one headed by Kitty (a fantastic Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), who have teenage twin girls (cue “The Shining”). At last, the movie jumps to kinetic life with the appearance of the Wilsons’ doubles, who descend in a brutal home invasion.

The assault is a master class of precision-timed scares filled with light shivers and deeper, reverberant frights. Working within the house’s tight, angled spaces — soon filled with fluid camerawork and bodies moving to dramatically different beats — Peele turns this domestic space into a double of the funhouse that loomed in the amusement park. After much scrambling and shrieking, the Wilsons and their weird twins face off in the living room, mirroring one another. Adelaide’s shadow, Red (the actors play their doubles), takes charge and splits up the Wilsons, ordering her husband, daughter and son to take charge of their terrified others while she remains with Adelaide.

[ Read Jason Zinoman’s essay on why this is the golden age of grown-up horror. ]

A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors. She gives each a specific walk and sharply opposite gestures and voices (maternally silky vs. monstrously raspy). Adelaide, who studied ballet, moves gracefully and, when need be, rapidly (she racks up miles); Red moves as if keeping time to a metronome, with the staccato, mechanical step and head turns of an automaton. Both have ramrod posture and large unblinking eyes. Red’s mouth is a monstrous abyss.

The confrontation between Adelaide and Red testifies to Peele’s strength with actors — here, he makes the most of Nyong’o’s dueling turns — but, once Red starts explaining things, it also telegraphs the story’s weakness. “Us” is Peele’s second movie, but as his ideas pile up — and the doubles and their terrors expand — it starts to feel like his second and third combined. One of the pleasures of “Get Out” was its conceptual and narrative elegance, a streamlining that makes it feel shorter than its one hour 44 minutes. “Us” runs a little longer, but its surfeit of stuff — its cinephilia, bunnies of doom, sharp political detours and less-successful mythmaking — can make it feel unproductively cluttered.

Peele’s boldest, most exciting and shaky conceptual move in “Us” is to yoke the American present with the past, first by invoking the 1986 super-event Hands Across America. A very ’80s charity drive (one of its organizers helped create the ’85 benefit hit “We Are the World” ), it had Americans holding hands from coast to coast, making a human chain meant to fight hunger and homelessness. President Reagan held hands in front of the White House even while his administration was criticized for cutting billions for programs to help the homeless.

In “Us,” the appearance of unity — in a nation, in a person — doesn’t last long before being ripped away like one of the movie’s masks. Peele piles on (and tears off) the masks and the metaphors, tethers the past to the present and draws a line between the Reagan and Trump presidencies, suggesting that we were, and remain, one nation profoundly divisible. He also busies up his story with too many details, explanations and cutaways. Peele’s problem isn’t that he’s ambitious; he is, blissfully. But he also feels like an artist who has been waiting a very long time to say a great deal, and here he steps on, and muddles, his material, including in a fight that dilutes even Nyong’o’s best efforts.

Early on, Peele drops in some text about the existence of abandoned tunnels, mines and subways in the United States. I flashed on Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad,” which literalizes the network of safe houses and routes used by enslaved black Americans, turning it into a fantastical subterranean passageway to freedom. In “Us,” Peele uses the metaphor of the divided self to explore what lies beneath contemporary America, its double consciousness, its identity, sins and terrors. The results are messy, brilliant, sobering, even bleak — the final scene is a gut punch delivered with a queasy smile — but Jordan Peele isn’t here just to play.

Us Rated R for horror violence, featuring scissors and a pesky boat motor. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes.

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• Review: Jordan Peele’s <i>Us</i> Is Dazzling to Look At. But What Is It Trying to Say?

Review: Jordan Peele’s Us Is Dazzling to Look At. But What Is It Trying to Say?

W riter-director Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out was a brash and intriguing debut, a picture that wrestled with the notion of whether or not America can ever be a post-racial society: Vital and spooky, it refused to hand over easy answers. With the ambitious home-invasion horror chiller Us, Peele goes even deeper into the conflicted territory of class and race and privilege; he also ponders the traits that make us most human. But this time, he’s got so many ideas he can barely corral them, let alone connect them. He overthinks himself into a corner, and we’re stuck there with him.

Lupita Nyong’o stars as Adelaide, who has overcome a traumatic childhood experience and now has a family of her own, including husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and two kids: graceful, well-adjusted Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and the slightly more awkward Jason (Evan Alex), who wears a wolfman mask pushed up on his head as a kind of security blanket. We meet the comfortably middle-class Wilson family as they’re heading off on vacation to Santa Cruz, the site of Adelaide’s childhood ordeal. On their first night away, they look out and see a family of four, mute and stony echoes of themselves, standing in the driveway. From there, Peele unspools a story of “shadow” people, long forced to live underground but now streaming to the Earth’s surface to claim, violently, what they feel is rightfully theirs.

The effectiveness of Us may depend on how little you know about it going in, so the spoiler-averse may wish to stop reading here. But it’s impossible to address any of the movie’s larger ideas without giving away key plot points: Before long, that shadow family has infiltrated the house, and now that we can get a good look, we see that each of them is a not-quite-right replica of a Wilson, dressed in a red jumpsuit and wielding a pair of menacing-looking shears. At one point a terrified Adelaide asks the other mother, a twin of herself but with vacant, crazy eyes and a demented smile, “What are you people?” “We are Americans,” the lookalike responds, in a whispery growl.

That’s a bright, neon-lit Author’s Message if ever there was one, though the idea of using a group of sunlight-deprived semi-zombies as a metaphorical element in a parable about class complacency isn’t necessarily a bad one. Are you and your family doing great? Do you live in a nice place, drive an expensive car, and have plenty of food for everyone to eat? Be grateful for it. But be aware that there are others who, through no fault of their own, don’t live at the same comfort level—or are, in fact, barely surviving. (The Wilsons also have close friends, Josh and Kitty, played by Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss, who have more money and nicer stuff than they do, a source of irritation for Gabe in particular, and another of the movie’s threads about class consciousness in America.) But Peele doesn’t always lay out his ideas clearly. Us isn’t always fun to watch; there are stretches where it’s plodding and dour. He’s overly fond of heavy-duty references, including Biblical ones: A creepy dude holds a sign that reads Jeremiah 11:11. (If you don’t know it outright, it’s the one that goes, “Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.”) The mood of Us is sometimes chilling, but even then, you’re not always sure what, exactly, is chilling you. Maybe it’s just the feeling of being trapped in an over-air-conditioned lecture hall, because there’s a strain of preachiness running through the whole thing.

One thing that’s unquestionable: Peele is a dazzling visual stylist. (Peele’s cinematographer is Mike Gioulakis, who also shot David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, as well as M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass .) The movie’s opening, which details young Adelaide’s nightmare—it takes place in a ghoulish hall of mirrors on the Santa Cruz boardwalk—is a mini-horror masterpiece by itself, an evocation of the outright weirdness of childhood rather than its wonder: As the girl wanders away from her parents, in an almost trancelike state, she clutches a candied apple so shiny it’s like blood-red crystal ball—and puts us in a trance, too.

Yet the rest of Us is laden with metaphors, and they pile up so quickly that not even Peele can keep up with them. The movie repeatedly references Hands Across America, a 1986 benefit event in which some 6.5 million people joined hands along a route mapped out across the contiguous United States. (Many participants had donated $10 to reserve a space in the chain; the money was donated to local charities dedicated to fighting hunger and ending poverty.) In Us, the shadow people form a similar chain. But it’s hard to know what Peele is trying to say with that image. Are the semi-zombies of Us just less fortunate versions of us? Are they actually us and we don’t know it? Is their clumsy anger somehow superior to thought and reason? After all, it has unified them, while we aboveground humans are more divided than ever.

How, in the end, are we supposed to feel about these shadow people, for so long deprived of basic human rights—including daylight—that they have become murderous clones? Sometimes great movies are ambiguous, but ambiguity resulting from unclear thinking makes nothing great. It’s one thing for a movie to humble you by leaving you unsure about yourself and your place in the world; it’s another for it to leave you wondering what, exactly, a filmmaker is trying to use his formidable verbal and visual vocabulary to say.

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Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Will Haunt You

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s scary as hell, and that’s just for starters. But Us , the new mesmerizing mindbender from writer-director-producer Jordan Peele , also carries the weight of expectation. Get Out , Peele’s smashing debut from 2017, was a brilliantly caustic satire of race division in America that won Peele an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (he’s the first African-American to triumph in that category) and became a phenom with critics and audiences. How can Peele top that? Short answer: he can’t and doesn’t. In interviews , Peele insists that Us is a straight-up horror show. Not really. Leave it to Peele to blaze a trail by putting a black family smack in the middle of a commercial thriller-diller. That’s more than a novelty, it’s a quiet revolution. And Peele’s hints at the larger conspiracies of race, class and social violence festering inside the American dream resonate darkly. Ding Peele all you want for taking on more than he can comfortably handle, but this 40-year-old from New York who started as one half of the sketch-comedy team of Key & Peele is now shaping up as a world-class filmmaker. Flaws and all, Us has the power to haunt your waking dreams. You won’t be able to stop talking about it.

Related: Jordan Peele on the Cover of Rolling Stone

Critics, in mortal fear of the spoiler police, need to shut the fuck up. Or at least tread carefully as Peele introduces the Wilson family of sunny California. Mom Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), dad Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two kids — Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) — are on vacation in Santa Cruz. Gabe has an unspoken competition with his friends the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), a white couple with twin daughters given to conspicuous consumption. Everyone is up for a fun time, especially dad (the excellent Duke — looking much like Peele — gets laughs in the unlikeliest places). But Adelaide is not feeling it. In a chilling prologue, set in 1986, we see Adelaide as a child getting majorly freaked out by a trip to a beachside funhouse containing a hall of mirrors. Now the grown Adelaide is back on the same beach where she was traumatized as a child, and she’s taking her own children along. You can cut the foreboding with a knife — or a pair of gold scissors.

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Scissors figure prominently when the Wilsons are confronted in their driveway by unexpected visitors. Since the scene is included in the film’s trailer, I’m not giving away anything to note that these home invaders — clad in red — are exact doubles of the four Wilsons. And the scissors these zombie-like doppelgängers carry are meant to slit throats. “What the hell are you?” asks Gabe. The answer is croaked out by Adelaide’s evil twin (the only double who speaks) in a voice that induces shudders: “We’re Americans.”

The political implications of that genuinely creepy setup are tantalizing, as are the film’s allusions to Hands Across America — the 1986 event in which a human chain of millions was formed to help alleviate poverty and hunger — and the thousands of miles of empty tunnels that run under the continental United States, including the Underground Railroad that symbolizes African enslavement. Is Peele referencing the Sunken Place of the Trump era in which the new gospel preaches fear of the other? If so, the theme remains frustratingly undeveloped. Yet Peele, the supreme cinema stylist, is on a roll. The violence is unnerving as the doubles set out to untether themselves from their human counterparts. By necessity,the Wilsons become a family that kills together. Even the Tylers get invaded. Kudos to Moss, who takes a small role and runs with it. The scene in which her character’s wild-eyed double smears on lip gloss is an unforgettable blend of mirth and menace.

Still, the acting honors in Us go to Nyong’o, who is actually playing two roles, one as protective mother and another as predator. She is superb as both. And what she does with her voice as Adelaide’s double is impossible to shake. Nyong’o, already an Oscar winner for Twelve Years a Slave , should be in the running again for delivering one of the great performances in horror movie history, right up there with Sissy Spacek in Carrie and Jack Nicholson in The Shining .

Peele, an unapologetic horror fanatic, nods to those films and dozens more in Us , including Invasion of the Body Snatchers , Jaws and Michael Jackson’s Thriller . Yet his style is completely his own, as assured as it is ambitious. With the help of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, up to his It Follows mischief, and a score by Get Out composer Michael Abels that is built to shatter your nerves, the action never lets up. The Beach Boys anthem “Good Vibrations” is featured in the mix, as is “I Got 5 On It” by the hip-hop duo Luniz. You’ll never be able to hear those songs again in the same way.

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There are times when Us plays like an extended and exceptional episode of The Twilight Zone , the 1950’s TV series revived next month on CBS All Access and hosted by Peele in Rod Serling mode. But Peele can’t stop himself from reaching higher and cutting deeper. The twisty road he takes us on opens itself to many interpretations. There are times when the film grips us with such hallucinatory terror that you may think it’s another of Adelaide’s PTSD-induced nightmares. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a ghastly reflection of the way we live now. Peele uses a Biblical quote from Jeremiah 11:11 that suggests even God has turned his back on us. What is never in doubt is that Peele is using the scare genre to show us a world tragically untethered to its own humanity, its empathy, its soul. If that’s not a horror film for its time, I don’t know what is.

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Writer-director Jordan Peele has created another marvelous new American horror story.

Us is a very, very strange film. But that’s OK because it wouldn’t be a Jordan Peele joint if there wasn’t a little risk involved. Peele has proven that he’s not a one-hit-wonder with this truly terrifying, poignant look at one American family that goes through hell at the hands of maniacal doppelgangers. The strangeness of the narrative stays grounded with excellent character development, especially with Lupita Nyong’o’s Adelaide. Winston Duke’s Gabe adds some much-needed humor to lighten the tense and bloody mood, and the kids also have plenty to contribute. The impactful use of music and dazzling cinematography elevates Us above your average horror-thriller. Peele has created another marvelous new American horror story.

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When you meet the enemy, and it is 'us'.

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Measure Twice ...: Lupita Nyong'o stars in Us, the latest horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. Claudette Barius/Universal Pictures hide caption

Measure Twice ...: Lupita Nyong'o stars in Us, the latest horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele.

There's so much to admire about Us , Jordan Peele's muscular follow-up to Get Out , that it's worth appreciating what Peele does when the ebb-and-flow of horror tension reaches low tide. Many of the most celebrated horror maestros are hailed for their big, atmospheric set-pieces, but getting to those moments can often feel like crude narrative patchwork, the listless verses before a killer chorus. Peele excels in these obligatory sections, where his skills as a sketch comedy writer and pop-culture savant can liven up conversations that we've been conditioned to expect as the yadda-yadda bridging to nightfall, when a film can finally uncork some suspense and mayhem.

There's mayhem aplenty to be uncorked in Us , which is as conceptually messy as Get Out was ruthlessly self-contained, but Peele's quick evolution into a full-service entertainer dispels any fears of a sophomore slump. He can deftly mix-and-match ideas cherry-picked from past classics — the echoing childhood trauma of Don't Look Now , the alien doppelgängers of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , the masked home-invasion of The Strangers — but he can also handle the banalities of a family car trip to the beach or underscore a gruesome sequence with the theremin whistle of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations." He's actively engaged at every moment, which is especially helpful when the film's bold abstractions start to wriggle away from it a little.

Code Switch

The horror, the horror: "get out" and the place of race in scary movies.

'Get Out' Offers Sharp Satire Along With The Scares

Where Get Out turned a Stepford Wives premise into a bitterly satirical allegory for what it's like to be black in America, Us opens up to a broader, vaguer, more suggestive diagnosis of social ills, packaged as a metaphysical shocker where the characters are attacked by versions of themselves. Starting with a flashback in 1986, the film opens with young Adelaide Wilson wandering off from a Santa Cruz boardwalk one stormy summer night and entering a hall of mirrors, where she encounters a child that's her exact reflection—but not. (Think of the famed mirror sequence with Groucho and Harpo Marx in Duck Soup , only utterly bone-chilling.)

Now a grown-up with a husband (Winston Duke) and two children (Evan Alex and Shahadi Wright Joseph) of her own, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) vacations to a secluded home near Santa Cruz and immediately seizes up with panic, as memories of this past trauma bleed insidiously into the present. Seemingly innocuous visual cues land with such a devastating impact that Adelaide pleads with her husband to split town even before a more tangible threat arrives. But as they're preparing to leave, another family of four arrives on their driveway, dressed in matching red jumpsuits. They also happen to look exactly like they do, making them literally their own worst enemy.

There's an explanation for this curious phenomenon — a big one, in fact, connected to a network of tunnels cited in the opening titles — but Peele is asking America herself (the Us or U.S. of the title) to look itself in the mirror and consider the destinies of those invisible millions who share our country, but not always our good fortune. The deeper the film goes into accounting for what's really happening, the less it holds up under scrutiny, both in the logistics of the doppelgängers' existence and in the abstract themes Peele appears to be exploring. That's not as damaging to the film as it sounds, but Us plays better as an intuitive experience than a puzzle box where every question has an answer. Peele would rather tease the imagination than tidy things up.

In that respect, Us is a leap forward for Peele as a director, because so much of what he's trying to express doesn't make sense on the page, as Get Out did. In a stunning dual performance as Adelaide and her gravel-voiced other, Lupita Nyong'o carries the psychological complexities of a woman whose identity was shattered by an incident over 30 years earlier and who still gets cut by the shards. What's happening to her is fundamentally inexplicable and unresolvable, so Peele allows that chasm to open up and swallow the rest of the film whole, like a crack in the earth that portends the apocalypse.

It's also possible to receive Us simply as a gripping home invasion thriller, with Adelaide and her family squaring off against these uncanny, relentless attackers whose origins and motives are a mystery. Though Peele has made it emphatically clear that Us is a horror film, not a comedy — the film itself makes the case just fine on its own, frankly — he seizes the opportunity to lighten up the tone, whether through a funny gesture in the middle of a skirmish or through the casting of Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss as a bourgeois couple who seem to be staging their own version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? . Us is a serious film about the American underclass, those who toil out of sight and out of mind. Us is also a lot of fun.

Screen Rant

Us review: jordan peele returns with another terrific horror movie, us manages to be funny, freaky, and thrilling all at once, and marks another step forward in peele's evolving sense of storytelling and craftsmanship..

Jordan Peele caught many people off-guard with his directorial debut on 2017's Get Out . The acclaimed horror-thriller was a big hit that went on to snag an Oscar for Peele's screenplay and firmly established the former Key & Peele comedian as a filmmaker on the rise. As such, moviegoers are a little more prepared for Peele's second movie Us , knowing now that the writer-director is a horror aficinado with someting to say (even if he's not necessarily commenting on racism in America, this time around). Still, even his biggest supporters may not be entirely ready for the twisted concoction that Peele's asssembled for his sophomore feature.  Us manages to be funny, freaky, and thrilling all at once, and marks another step forward in Peele's evolving sense of storytelling and craftsmanship.

Naturally, there are parallels between Get Out and Us , like the way that they both start out with characters going on what promises to be a fairly normal trip - even after a foreboding prologue that lets us know that all is not right in this world. In Us ' case, that means a summer vacation to the Wilson family beach house, with husband Gabe and wife Adelaide ( Black Panther costars Winston Duke and Lupita Nyong'o) leading their children Jason (Evan Alex) and Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) along the way. The movie's first act does an excellent job of building up tension in the process, while at the same time laying the foundation for the story developments to come in ways both subtle and overtly threatening. And that's alll before the trouble really hits the fan and the Wilsons look out in their driveway one night to see (bizarre as it seems) doppelgängers of themselves... ones that definitely do not come in peace.

From the very beginning, Us serves to showcase Peele's improvements as a director since his debut on Get Out . The sound editing in the film's prologue alone is richly detailed and specific, as are the subjective camera angles that Peele and his DP Mike Gioulakis ( It Follows , Split ) use to make something as inocuous as a boardwalk carnival appear ominous and dangerous onscreen. These early scenes in particular further illustrate how much better Peele has gotten at using silence and a lack of music to create suspense since he began directing, as does his later usage of Get Out composer Michael Abels' score (which, like his prior work, is fueled by spooky chorus singing and unsettling orchestral compositions). Peele doesn't drop the ball when the movie becomes more action-driven either and succeeds in crafting some genuinely exciting set pieces here, while at the same time carrying over the visual motifs introduced in Us ' first third (reflections, mirror images, doubles, and so on).

Meanwhile, Peele's script here is as carefully structured as his screenplay for Get Out and finds ways to organically weave humor into the mix throughout the story, in ways that befit the movie's generally off-kilter tone. It helps that the main cast is strong across the board and make their characters feel like fully-rounded individuals, both before and after their doubles (aka. The Tethered) show up. Speaking of which: Nyong'o is the standout here in the dual roles of Adelaide and her doppelgänger "Red", which allow the Oscar-winner to flex her acting muscles in surprising and engaging ways. At the same time, she's able to generate real sympathy for both characters and give them distinct personalities, despite the fact that (obviously) they are dark reflections of one another. Duke is also pretty great in the film, especially since his role as the loveably adorkable dad Gabe is worlds apart from his breakout performance as the Wakandan warrior M'Baku.

The one element of Us that might prove to be relatively divisive is the film's central metaphor - or, more specifically, whether it has one. Peele, in another move that signals his continuing maturation as a storyteller, ultimately ties everything together here in a way that makes it clear that there's a deeper parable behind the larger narrative, but leaves room for audiences to interpret it as they will. As such, there are certainly different yet equally valid ways to read into Us , based on the film's themes about trauma, privilege, fractured social identities, and, of course, what it even means to battle your "other self". In that regard, the movie really works as a spiritual descendant of the original Twilight Zone (a series that, fittingly, Peele will revive in April) and skips over spoon-feeding its messages to audiences, in an effort to encourage them to consider the darkness that simmers beneath the surface of our society (quite literally, in the Us universe).

While Peele could've easily rested on his laurels with his sophomore feature and tried to simply recreate what he did so well on Get Out , he instead chose to challenge himself as a filmmaker and tackle a thought-provoking horror allegory that might be even more layered than his breakout effort. Suffice it to say, Us is a must-see for cinephiles and is sure to generate lots of interesting post-screenings discussions about what the film's saying and the symbolism baked into the narrative (not to mention, its clever use of '90s pop songs). For everyone else, Us is just like Get Out in the way that it wants to entertain and make audiences laugh and scream (sometimes within the same scene), while also serving up social commentary without feeling like a sermon. In short: Jordan Peele the director is not only here to stay, he's also just getting started.

Us  is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 116 minutes long and is rated R for violence/terror, and language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

Key Release Dates

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Common sense media reviewers.

Peele's bloody, startling, inventive horror movie.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Raises interesting questions about idea of doppelg

The family members (including kids) do what they h

Very scary (jump scares, etc.); also lots of blood

A man is affectionate toward his wife, kissing her

Several uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "ass,"

Michael Jackson "Thriller" T-shirt.

Secondary characters drink a lot (wine, whiskey, b

Parents need to know that Us -- a shocking, inventive, often funny horror movie about doppelgangers starring Lupita Nyong'o -- is writer/director Jordan Peele's follow-up to his enormously popular Get Out . While this film isn't likely to have the same cultural impact, it's still quite good. It's also…

Positive Messages

Raises interesting questions about idea of doppelgangers. But real message here is that movie portrays a rather ordinary, interesting, likable African American family with no strings attached -- which is very welcome. Also promotes idea of the depth of a family's love.

Positive Role Models

The family members (including kids) do what they have to do to survive, including killing doppelgangers in very bloody ways. They rise above an unexpected challenge, but their survival is largely about luck and brute force. A villain's voice is based on the disability known as spasmodic dysphonia, which has caused some controversy.

Violence & Scariness

Very scary (jump scares, etc.); also lots of blood and gore. Blood splatters, pools of blood, dead bodies. Characters bash doppelgangers with blunt instruments (baseball bat, fireplace poker, golf club, etc.). Doppelgangers killing humans by slicing or stabbing them with sharp scissors. A character is ground up by a boat motor. Character hit by car. Choking with chains. Character's leg injured by baseball bat. Female character handcuffed. Boy with burn scars on his face. Boy on fire. Children in peril.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A man is affectionate toward his wife, kissing her, hinting that he's going to have sex with her, and arranging himself on the bed to try to seduce her.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "ass," "anus," "goddamn," and "Jesus Christ" (as an exclamation). In one scene, song "F--k tha Police" by N.W.A. plays, with brief, incessant language, including the "N" word. "Bulls--tty" spoken by a young boy.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Secondary characters drink a lot (wine, whiskey, beer, etc.) to comic effect; no hangovers or consequences. Character says he's "going for a smoke."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Us -- a shocking, inventive, often funny horror movie about doppelgangers starring Lupita Nyong'o -- is writer/director Jordan Peele 's follow-up to his enormously popular Get Out . While this film isn't likely to have the same cultural impact, it's still quite good. It's also very scary and violent. There are jump scares, plus many attacks and killings with blood and gore. Characters use blunt objects on doppelgangers, and doppelgangers slice and stab people with sharp scissors. A woman is handcuffed, and children are sometimes in peril. Language is also strong, with many uses of "f--k" and "s--t." The "N" word is heard in a song ("F--k tha Police" by N.W.A.), and a boy uses the word "bulls--t." A man kisses his wife and makes silly comments and gestures to indicate that he'd like to have sex, but it doesn't go any further. Secondary characters are seen drinking heavily in a comic way, without consequences. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (47)
• Kids say (139)

Based on 47 parent reviews

some violence, a song plays the "N-word"

What's the story.

US begins with young Adelaide enjoying the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents in 1986. While her father is distracted, she wanders off and winds up in a house of mirrors. The power winks off, and she finds herself standing next to what looks like her own reflection ... except that it's not a reflection. Flash forward to the present: Grown-up Adelaide ( Lupita Nyong'o ) is now married to Gabe (Winston Duke), with a teen daughter, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and a young son, Jason (Evan Alex). While the family vacations at their summer home, Gabe suggests going back to Santa Cruz; though the idea terrifies Adelaide, she reluctantly agrees. Jason is briefly missing, but otherwise the day goes well. But when they get home, they discover a strange family of four standing in their driveway. And they look a lot like the Wilsons ... except that they don't seem friendly.

Is It Any Good?

Jordan Peele 's horror shocker can't compete with its sensational predecessor Get Out , but it doesn't have to. Made with precision, intelligence, and humor, Us is inventive and wildly entertaining in its own right. It can be said that Us has something to do with doppelgangers, but just how far the story goes and what it all means is best left to individual discussion. It's like a carnival ride of crazy ideas -- it's startling and also actually sometimes funny. While Get Out had little pockets of comic relief inserted into strategic places, the laughs in Us , based both on ironic jokes and on the happy feel of relief and release, are scattered throughout. Any character in this film can earn a laugh.

Since Peele -- well known as part of the comedy team Key & Peele -- understands the primal, bodily sensations of both laughter and fear, he approaches the filmmaking in Us with supreme confidence. His camera never shakes but rather moves in such a way to hide or reveal information for maximum impact. He's as precise here as Hitchcock or Kubrick. He also understands the use of music and sound, merging back and forth between a chilling, chanting orchestral score and pop songs, each adjusted at just the right volume or tone. It's an undeniably well-crafted and brutally effective movie, but where Get Out created a sharp, satirical commentary on race relations, this one very simply presents a positive portrayal of an African American family.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Us . Do the blood and gore seem over the top? Do the violent scenes help tell the story in an effective way? Is it shocking or thrilling? Why? Does exposure to violent media desensitize kids to violence?

Is the movie scary? What's the appeal of scary movies ?

What is a doppelganger? Do you think they exist in real life? Could there be a "good" and "evil" version of a person? Why or why not?

How many movies have you seen that portray an average/regular African American family? How did this one compare? Why is the family's ordinariness notable?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 22, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : June 18, 2019
• Cast : Lupita Nyong'o , Wilson Duke , Elisabeth Moss
• Director : Jordan Peele
• Inclusion Information : Black directors, Female actors, Black actors, Latino actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Horror
• Run time : 116 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : violence/terror, and language
• Last updated : March 5, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Movie Review: Us (2019)

• Floyd Smith III
• Movie Reviews
• --> March 22, 2019

Fans of Jordan Peele’s incomparable societal critique “ Get Out ” can rejoice as the horror-auteur swings for the fences in his newest horror-thriller Us , and for the most part, hits it straight out of the park. Piggybacking off of the inquisitive, yet cynical, tone of his directorial debut, Us follows the Wilson family as they attempt to blow off some steam with a family road trip following the death of the children’s grandmother.

Heading this family is the ideally cast Winston Duke (“ Black Panther ”) as the father Gabriel, who not only handles a great deal of the films comedic relief but serves as the most easily relatable protagonist of the film considering the quirks of the rest of the family. Next to him is the timid, yet strict wife and mother Adelaide (Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o, “ 12 Years a Slave ”). Adelaide acts as the driving force for the film’s supernatural arc, introduced to viewers when she is a child who experiences a traumatic event that has lasting effects even relatively far into her motherhood. Her children, Zora and Jason (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex, respectively), are accustomed to their mother’s outbursts and tenderness, but still question the validity of her concerns.

The first act of Us portrays a thoroughly heartwarming introduction to this modern family, each character of course dons some of not only the horror genre’s typical character tropes but of family films in general such as the daughter being a bit of a smart-ass and the son being labeled “weird” just because he likes to make sandcastles and play hide and seek. Peele offers a decent dose of nuance to the audience, however, most emphatically in the interactions between Adelaide and her son Jason. The two seem to have a lot of the same isolating tendencies along with feelings of being misjudged. Even rolling over into the second act, Peele’s pacing is exacting as we’re given time to feel like a member of this family. This fun and relaxed immersion can easily cause one to forget it’s a horror film they’re watching . . .

But of course this is a misdirection by Peele, who gathers the audience’s comfort and curiosity before laying down a heavy dose of surrealism and twists that would make even “The Twilight Zone” a bit jealous. I use this reference not only because it is a show that Peele is currently resurrecting, but also because it’s what he has labeled an inspiration for the film’s narrative (I’ll let you all discover what episode on your own). Soon a quartet of people who look a lot like the Wilsons invade the home throwing the proceedings into abject tumult. It’s also around the end of this second act, the audience learns of the potential depth of the film’s plot and that there are in fact grander implications than the film’s jokes, jump scares and general creepiness would suggest.

Rather than spoon feed the audience the message like his previous film, in the last act he gives the audience a little more wiggle room to discern and unravel the societal perspective themselves. Beyond the dopplegangers and the apparent chaos they’ve unleashed on the family, lie concerns about introspection and social turmoil, the liabilities of human processing, and the overall lack of reflection and sensitivity in modern culture. Upon reflection, these communal breakdowns are nearly as horrific as the goings-ons at the Wilson’s lake house.

With Us , Jordan Peele has refreshingly delivered not only a bonafide frightener, but also a movie that presses his audience to dig deeper to not only dissect the many layers of a torn societal structure but also the many layers of ourselves. And though Us doesn’t quite reach the heights attained by “Get Out,” its message certainly does and it’s one that may stick around for a much longer time.

Tagged: home invasion , mask , relationships , supernatural , twins

A journalist and alumni of the Film Theory & Criticism graduate program at Central Michigan University; Floyd Smith III is a cinephile whose written for multiple publications including moviepilot and RadioOne and has a background in news writing for the independent publication The North Wind. Studying film since his time as an undergrad, he began officially reviewing films and reporting on entertainment in 2014. Smith joined CMC in January of 2016 and enjoys films of the science fiction, comic book, and horror genres.

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• Jordan Peele’s Us — and its ending — explained. Sort of.

The new movie’s conclusion is one elastic metaphor after another. That’s what makes it frustrating. And brilliant.

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Share All sharing options for: Jordan Peele’s Us — and its ending — explained. Sort of.

Guess what? Spoilers follow!

First things first: I’m going to give this article a headline that’s something like, “ Us ’s ending, explained” or “ Us ’s ending, dissected,” and I should tell you upfront that I’m not going to explain Us ’s ending. I can’t.

Jordan Peele’s second film has an ending that dares you to bring what you think to it. Where the ending of his first film, Get Out (for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), was a series of puzzle pieces snapping into place, Us ends in a way that causes the film’s structure to sprawl endlessly. It’s five different puzzles mixed up in the same box, and you only have about 75 percent of the pieces for any of them at best.

But I found that approach incredibly engaging. The audience leaving my screening the other night seemed sharply divided on the film — and its last-minute twist — but I plunged deeper and deeper into it because of that messy, glorious ending.

So let’s talk first about what happens in that ending and how we could read that ending, and then try to find a way to synthesize all of these ideas.

What happens at the end of Us

Us breaks evenly into a classic three-act structure. The first act is all unsettling setup — first with a flashback to our protagonist, Adelaide ( Lupita Nyong’o ), as a young girl, meeting an eerie mirror version of herself, then to the first few days of a family vacation that she takes with her husband ( Winston Duke ) and kids as an adult. The second act follows Adelaide’s and her family’s actions after being menaced by horrifying double versions of themselves — played by the same actors — over the course of one long, gory night.

The second act — roughly the middle hour of the 116-minute film — is pretty much perfect, the kind of expertly pitched horror comedy we see far too rarely. And all along the way, Peele is seeding in exposition, like when we learn that Adelaide and her family aren’t the only ones being menaced by their doubles (who are called “Tethers” in the film, because they’re tethered to their mirror images), and the film cuts away to the vicious murder of two of their friends ( Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss ) by the friends ’ doubles.

Some of this exposition is stated outright, as when Adelaide’s double, Red, explains exactly who she is and who her compatriots are. Other exposition is mostly implied. (Pay close attention, for instance, to whom the Tethers kill and whom they just maim.) And still other stuff is probably just me reading my own opinions into the movie.

Anyway, the third act begins when the family finally makes it to daylight, having killed two of their doubles, with a third double falling right at the top of Act 3. The only Tether left is Red, who absconds with Adelaide’s son, Jason ( Evan Alex ), and races with him down into a gigantic complex of tunnels that exists beneath the Santa Cruz, California, boardwalk and — it’s implied — the entire country.

The tunnels have the feel of an abandoned military facility more than anything else, and they’re filled with rabbits, which have been set free from cages. (The bunnies are the only food the Tethers get.) This vague military feel tracks with something Red tells Adelaide when the two finally face off in what seems to be a classroom. The Tethers were created by a nebulous “them” to control their other selves.

But the experiment was abandoned for unexplained reasons, leaving the Tethers belowground, mimicking our every movement up here, and living lives where they have no free will, lives entirely dictated by our choices. (The long expository monologue where Red basically explains all of this is the movie’s weakest section and kills its momentum. This was also true of the long expository monologue in Get Out !)

The status quo held until Red and Adelaide met as young girls, and the two begin a fight that’s almost a dance but still recognizably a fight. (Peele intercuts this with footage of the teenage Adelaide — a great ballerina — dancing beautifully as Red replicates her actions in a weirdly grotesque mirror belowground.) Finally, Adelaide overcomes Red and kills her. She finds Jason and exits the tunnels.

But aboveground, the many Tethers have joined hands together in a mirror of Hands Across America , the 1986 event meant to raise money and awareness of hunger, which stretched a 6.5 million-person chain (almost all the way) across the Lower 48. The presence of this massive chain of Tethers should hopefully clue in viewers to the film’s final twist. An ad for Hands Across America is one of the last things little Adelaide sees before she goes to the Santa Cruz boardwalk with her parents — which is where she meets Red and (the final scene reveals) is forced to take Red’s place in the Tether world while Red comes up to ours.

The movie never makes clear whether this is long-buried trauma that Adelaide is resurfacing as she and her family ride off into the new, post-apocalyptic landscape of a world where seemingly millions have been murdered by their doubles and a chain of those doubles stands athwart the continent, or whether it’s something she’s pointedly avoided referencing throughout the film. You can make an argument for either.

The movie leaves you with the twist: Adelaide was Red, and Red was Adelaide, and they switched places as young girls. Jason, somehow, seems to realize this in his mother’s eyes, and he looks worried as the scene cuts to the camera tilting over the hills surrounding Santa Cruz — where a long chain of Tethers stretches, presumably from sea to shining sea.

What’s it all mean?

There is no single meaning to the conclusion of Us , and the beauty of it is how elastic its metaphor is

One of the reasons Get Out took off so readily with online theorists was that every single piece of it was crafted to add up to the film’s central revelation about elderly white people literally possessing the bodies of young black people. It was a potent commentary on racial relations, yes, but Peele seeded hints about the big twist into the plot as well. He had clearly thought through every little detail of the movie’s world.

You can’t really say the same for Us . Every time you think you’ve got the movie pinned down to say, “It’s about this!” it slips away from you. Its central metaphor of meeting a literal evil twin of yourself certainly can be read as a commentary on race, but it’s also a pretty brilliant commentary on class, on capitalism, on gender, and on the lasting effects of trauma or mental illness. You can probably add your own possibilities to this list.

All of these concepts keep informing one another. If you want to read what happens to Red and Adelaide as a commentary on how differently traumatic incidents weigh on children of means versus children who grow up with little money, doing so can support both an interpretation of the film as being about mental illness and one where it’s about class.

What’s more, Us doesn’t seem to want to be read as social commentary in the same way Get Out was. That middle hour is so fun precisely because it never really bothers to stop and make you think about the movie’s deeper themes. It’s too busy killing off Tethers by chewing them up in a boat’s motor.

Now, granted, my experience of Us was pretty different from a lot of folks’ experiences (at least from the people I’ve talked to), because I guessed from the first flashback sequence that Red and Adelaide had switched places as kids. I assumed the movie wanted me to figure this out, because it was essentially the only way the movie’s larger plot — the idea that everybody has a Tether, and not just this specific family — could make any sense. Something had to have caused this breach in reality, and the connection between Adelaide and Red seemed the most likely culprit.

Yet it’s honestly remarkable that the movie works as well as it does when you figure out its big twist early on, because Peele does a terrific job of teasing you in ways that make you think maybe you didn’t figure it out, or that the twist is something else entirely. ( Get Out , after all, didn’t really have “a twist” in the way this movie does, only a reveal that happens before the ending.)

Still, set the twist aside, and let’s take Red at her word when it comes to the origin of the Tethers. Some strange experiment produced them, and now they’re a kind of national id, a barely checked shadow self that every American has. (At one point, when asked who she and her family are, Red croaks, “We’re Americans,” which ... fair.)

The natural pushback to this is — it’s preposterous. By giving so much information but still so little, Peele creates a situation where it feels like he’s going to answer all our questions and then just doesn’t. (Credit where it’s due: I love how accurately the whole third act replicates the experience of falling down a particularly disturbing Wikipedia hole at 3 am, right down to somehow finding yourself reading about Hands Across America .)

And yet ... is the twist that preposterous? I don’t literally have a shadow self, but there’s some other person out there in the country right now who could have had my life and career but, instead, has some less comfortable one because he grew up with parents who didn’t have enough money to send him to college, or because he grew up some race other than white, or because he was born a girl, or ... fill in the blank.

Taking Red at her word means believing in an idea that seems self-evidently kooky, but it’s also an idea that drives much of modern society. Capitalism demands that we cling desperately to what we’ve got, and the fear that some dark underbelly might come and rob us of what little we have is always present.

Yet the very idea of society means we’re all tethered together somehow, and the actions of those of us with power and money often make those without either jerk about on puppet strings, even if we never know how what we do affects our doppelgängers.

And all the while, “they” — whoever “they” are — get richer and richer and more powerful.

Thoughts on a universal read of the ending of Us (with apologies to Stanley Kubrick)

But Us isn’t really “about” capitalism, unless you (like me) want to read that into it. The movie’s metaphor is so elastic that you could easily mount a read of the film that says it’s about climate change or the 2016 election or zombies. (In the scenes set in the underground complex especially, Peele plays off the familiar images of zombie films, like legions of people shuffling about, shadows of some life they should otherwise be living.) And I also want to be clear that if you just want to watch Us as a super-fun horror comedy, it is absolutely possible, and you should do that.

But I think you can get to a kind of universal understanding of Us, one that drills down into what the film is about at its core while still leaving room for the elasticity that allows you to read as much or as little into its central metaphor as you’d like. To get there, we have to look at the hall of mirrors that first brings Adelaide and Red together as kids.

In 1986, the hall of mirrors features a stereotypical painting of an American Indian that sits atop its entrance. The art is offensive in the way all thoughtlessness is. Nobody cared who might be hurt by this painting; they just went ahead and painted it. Peele isn’t digging into one of America’s original sins here in the way he alluded to slavery in Get Out , but the evocation of a terrible genocide is at least there .

In 2019, the hall of mirrors has now, clumsily, been converted into one for Merlin the wizard. The inside is the same. Most of the outside is the same. But the painting of the Indian has been replaced — not particularly convincingly — with a painting of Merlin that’s seemingly just been mounted over the old American Indian one. It’s a really good joke, honestly; it’s a spin on how willing modern America is to gloss over the horrors in its past in the name of simply coming up with some other story entirely.

It’s also key to the movie’s more universal read. The hall of mirrors was constructed in the first place as a distillation of tropes around a racially charged stereotype. Just because it’s now ostensibly about Merlin doesn’t mean that it’s no longer built around those darker ideas. You can’t simply scrub away the darker past by putting a more palatable face on it.

America (okay, this is, like, 99.9999 percent on white America) likes to pretend it’s a country without a grim history, that its self-proclaimed exceptionalism makes it free from anything too dark. But, of course, that’s not true. The hall of mirrors was constructed with an American Indian atop it because whoever built it could be reasonably certain no one would care if it was offensive. Those who might care are mostly sequestered on reservations or died generations ago. And you, if you’re an American, live on the land you live on because they died.

(Sidebar: This could also be a really elaborate riff on Peele’s part on The Shining , another horror movie that is occasionally read by some of its hardcore fans through the lens of America’s general inability to deal with the genocide lurking in its root system. Peele has been dressing like The Shining ’s Jack Torrance on the press tour...)

Now consider Hands Across America. The movement did raise some money for hunger — around $34 million — but much of that was eaten up by operational fees, leaving $15 million to be donated to the actual cause. That isn’t chump change, but it’s a drop in the bucket of the problem of actually trying to fight hunger. Is there anything more American than thinking you’ve solved a problem by creating a gigantic spectacle that accomplishes less than you’d think? Again — something dark is covered up by something glossy, and we celebrate the glossy surface.

Us put me in mind of a book I read recently. In The City in the Middle of the Night , the new novel by science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders, the protagonist, Sophie, meets members of an alien species whose telepathic links mean that they are essentially forced to remember everything that has ever happened, stretching back into their distant past. Even when one member of the species dies, that member’s memories are carried forward by those who knew them, and those memories become part of the collective consciousness.

Anders not only shows just how hard this could be for those who don’t quite feel at home in the collective (those who are dealing with huge emotions that they need to understand privately, say), but she also keenly contrasts this species’ long memory with humanity’s short one. Sophie carries the burdens of decisions made millennia before she was born, back on the massive spaceship that brought her ancestors from Earth to this new planet. Those ancestors were shaped by the decisions that you and I are making right now, even as we’re shaped by decisions made hundreds of years ago, and so on. And many of those decisions are now half-remembered dreams.

It is hard to really deal with this, maybe all but impossible. To really sit and think about all of the ways that you are a product of human history, floating through the immense sweep of time and space, rather than someone who can take control of their life and make a difference, is so dispiriting . So we try to gloss over all of that. We put up paintings of Merlin where once paintings of an Indian stood, and we smile and say, “That’s better.” But the painting is still there, underneath the surface. If the aliens Sophie meets in Anders’s novel are doomed to remember, then we, perhaps, are doomed to forget, to pretend that we are more powerful than we are, simply because we’re alive.

This, I think, is why both Anders’s novel and Us spoke so profoundly to me. To try to escape the past is to try to escape yourself. But to try to escape the past is also deeply, deeply human, because to make any progress, we have to find a way to excuse, forgive, or ignore our own faults, to lock them up in a subterranean basement and hope we don’t remain tethered to them forever. But what a fool’s errand that is.

And this reading of the film’s ending, that it was always about the perils of trying to ignore inconvenient truths when they’re looking right back at you in the mirror, is one that unites every other possible reading of the film, too. Race, gender, class, trauma — they’re all covered by the idea that you can have a great life and be a good person but still unknowingly be causing so much suffering.

All of which is to say, when Jason looks at Adelaide late in this movie, seeing, for the first time, his mother’s true self, he’s not realizing that she’s Red, or that she’s Adelaide, or anything like that. He’s realizing that she is, and always has been, both.

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In This Stream

Jordan peele’s new movie, us, is out in theaters.

• Us’s Jason/Pluto theory, explained and debunked
• Us is Jordan Peele’s thrilling, blood-curdling allegory about a self-destructing America

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‘Us’ Explained: When the “Why” Is Far More Interesting Than the “How”

If you’re trying to “solve” Jordan Peele’s new movie, you’re going about it the wrong way.

Spoilers ahead for Us .

For the most part, movies are not puzzles. They may have mysterious aspects that lead to an answer, but if your movie just asks you to “solve” it, then the film dies upon its resolution. A far more interesting and lasting picture doesn’t ask for solutions, but instead looks for interpretations. When it comes to Jordan Peele ’s new movie, Us , I can understand the temptation to solve how the doubles work, how they relate to the people above ground, and so forth. But these questions miss the more interesting and engaging subtext the doubles convey.

The text of the doubles is ultimately unsatisfying because it just leads to more questions . The “how” of it is pretty basic. There was a government program where everyone got a double and these doubles lived underground in tunnels. These doubles were created to control the above-ground population, although how this was supposed to happen is never explained. The doubles lived off rabbits (a food source known for its vast replication) and then the program was abandoned. They were given a new purpose by “Red” ( Lupita Nyong’o ), who led an uprising where everyone was set to kill their double and then join hands across America, inspired by the real 1986 benefit event, “Hands Across America”.

A family's serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgängers appear and begin to terrorize them.

Jordan Peele's 'Us' Gives More Questions Than Answers

Of course, this just raises more questions. How did they feed the rabbits? Where did they get their clothes? Where did they get the scissors? And even if these questions had answers, they would be unsatisfying because the text, itself, is a rabbit hole that doesn’t lead to the more interesting aspects of the film , which is the subtext presented by the doubles.

We’re told that the tethered don’t have souls, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “everyone’s dark side”. Rather, it’s the darkness we choose to ignore . It’s not simply a matter of inverses. It’s not like sociopaths have well-rounded people wandering the tunnels. So why have it uniform? Because it’s far more terrifying that our individuality is an illusion and that there’s nothing special about our brutality. Furthermore, if the doubles are soulless, then they can’t know individuality. However, they’re still tethered to us . Their actions are tied to ours, which isn’t explained. Again, any explanation would probably be unsatisfying, bu t they don’t get any of the benefit of our uniqueness, regardless of the fact. They live sad, hollow lives, and it’s hard to blame them for being a little stabby.

Jordan Peele's 'Us' is a Social Statement

You can also look at the various social reads on this. It doesn’t seem to really work as a slavery or indentured servitude metaphor, because the doubles don’t produce anything and no one seems to rely on their labor. Instead, I see a parallel in how we let our dark sides out . In our interpersonal relationships, we keep things polite and cordial. But in our anonymity -- that is , the uniformity that denies the doubles any individuality -- we lash out. And just as the doubles rise and link hands across America, so too are we becoming far more comfortable expressing hatred and violence and letting that darkness unite us. This can be evidenced by any social media commentary.

'Us' Blu-ray Details Promise Six Deleted Scenes & a Bounty of Behind-the-Scenes Features

There will be those who get hung up on the “how” of Us , but the “why” is far more interesting. Additionally, while we can critique Peele for what he doesn’t do, we shouldn’t miss what he is doing. If he chooses not to paint inverse personalities for the doubles, then we should look at why he chooses to make them largely uniform with only minor variations. In Us , our dark sides are not a fully realized totality. Instead, they are a potent but fractional part of ourselves. The fear comes if we let them out and run wild.

Us is available for streaming on Netflix in the U.S.

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The launching pad for Bertrand Bonello ’s new picture “The Beast” (“La Bete”) is a 1903 short story by Henry James called “The Beast in the Jungle.” Seen by some James scholars as an autobiographical expression of rue for a life of inaction, it treats the case of John Marcher, who confides in his acquaintance May Bartram that he lives in fear of an unnamable catastrophe that could upend his life, and the life of anyone close to him. She claims to get what he’s talking about.

“‘You mean you feel how my obsession — poor old thing — may correspond to some possible reality?’

‘To some possible reality.’

‘Then you will watch with me?’”

And so May does. And Marcher’s fear translates into a passivity that compels him to hold May at arm’s length for the rest of his life. At the end of the story, he mourns a love he never allowed himself to have and understands that the catastrophe was his own fear.

In Bonello’s film, the fear belongs to the popular Parisian concert pianist Gabrielle Monnier ( Lea Seydoux ), who, around the time of the great 1910 flood of France’s City of Lights, confesses this fear to Louis ( George MacKay ), a young Englishman with whom she soon begins a tentative liaison. But the trouble they encounter has nothing to do with Gabrielle’s reticence to enter into a romantic relationship with Louis—although that does exist.

Bonello’s not here to tell us that the only thing to fear is fear itself. He’s here to tell us to be afraid—be very afraid. What he delivers is not just a densely packed art movie but the most potent horror picture of the decade so far. A vision of three (actually four) nightmare times, all of them in the same vexed world.

The cataclysms that fall upon Gabrielle—played by a superbly controlled and often heartbreaking Lea Seydoux—aren’t spiritual or conceptual (well, of course, at first, they are), they’re “real,” or Real. They’re corporeal/physical, or simulations of the corporeal physical. And they’re unavoidable. Boy oh boy can you not stop what’s coming. Close that browser window, rewind that video, press mute on the sound system, reset the house alarm, none of it will do you any good. Not even an alteration in the fabric of reality itself—and this seems to occur at least a half dozen times in the picture—will stave off horror. The beast isn’t in the jungle, it’s in the house, and it’s in the air we can only barely breathe when the movie gets to 2044. It is in us; it is us.

Sounds cheerful, right? Well, what can I tell you? Bonello has a way of throwing us into an enhanced vision of the degrading noise of contemporary life that’s all the more engaging for being so even-handed and deliberate. I mentioned three timelines that are actually four—the movie is framed, kind of, by a green-screen session in which Seydoux, possibly playing Gabrielle, possibly playing herself, is coached through paces for a scene in which she actually apprehends “the beast” and lets out a blood-curdling scream. The image degenerates into a gorgeous abstract mural of pixels. Digitization is here both a source of ravishing sights and sounds and an Excedrin headache of aural and visual glitch. The movie then bounces through three time periods: 1910, 2044—where Gabrielle’s character seeks to abolish her reincarnation torment through a “DNA purge”—and most terrifyingly, 2014, wherein “Gabby” is housesitting in L.A. and targeted by the angry incel version of MacKay’s Louis—Louis Lewansky, who’s 30 and never been with a woman despite his “magnificence,” and who’s now getting ready to avenge himself.

Dolls are a recurring motif here—there are old-fashioned ones made for fans of the pianist Gabby, and unhelpful talking doll in the Hollywood house, and a walking, talking A.I. helper (played by Guslagie Malanda , as impressive here in a relatively small role as she was in the lead of 2022’s “ Saint Omer ”). An electrical fire figures in the 1910 sequence; a malware attack on a laptop is one of the insane blowups in the 2014 scenario. There are bits and pieces here that feel Lynchian, especially in the Los Angeles scenes, during which Gabrielle is fascinated/repulsed by a TV singing contest show that feels like it might have sprung full blown from the creator of “Twin Peaks.” Then there’s the fact that the love song recurring throughout shows up at the very end, sung in its original version by, well Roy Orbison. But unlike Lynch, Bonello has a decidedly un-obscure point to make. Mainly about how the pursuit of the authentic in life is invariably thwarted by roadblocks of humanity’s own making. (Although one supposes that the eighth episode of the 2018 “Twin Peaks” season treated that theme in a relatively unambiguous way.)

“There must be beautiful things in this chaos,” Gabrielle tries to reassure the movie’s scariest version of Louis at one point. Bonello, and this movie’s, greatest dread is that someday a terrible order will emerge, one that will make whatever beauty remains disappear. 

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Sam Taylor-Johnson's jazz-meets-rock-star drama exerts an authentic fascination, even as its dysfunctional-addict love story keeps us at a distance.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ Back to Black ,” the 2006 album that the new Amy Winehouse biopic takes its title from, is a record built on an exquisite contradiction. The music has a crispy delicious retro-bop bounce, a quality that extends to Winehouse’s voice, which takes the growling-cat stylings of jazz legends like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday and kicks them up into something playfully ferocious. Yet when you tune into the lyrics, they’re as dark as midnight. “Rehab,” the album’s showpiece track, must surely be the jauntiest song ever recorded about an addict who turns the refusal to help herself into a stance of rock ‘n’ roll defiance.

We meet Amy in her relatively polite and decorous youth, when she’s got a pierced upper lip but before she’s found her trademark look (winged mascara, over-the-top beehive). A Jewish teenager from the Camden district of London, she’s devoted to her Nan Cynthia (Lesley Manville), a former ’50s nightclub singer from whom she’ll ultimately lift that poufy period hairdo. Yet Amy is no more a “nice Jewish girl” than Lenny Bruce was the male version of same. From the start, she has an insolent, jutting-toothed, sensually hungry, the-girl-can’t-help-it grin that expresses her raw appetite for life, as well as a tough working-class accent (“together” comes out as “togevuh”) that signals she’s not taking any prisoners.

But the edge is there too. In an episode that provokes a chuckle, but also suggests the lack of boundaries that fuels her art, Amy attracts the interest of Nick Shymansky (Sam Buchanan), a potential manager, when she performs “Stronger Than Me,” a song that basically disses her boyfriend as an emasculated wimp (in the initial meeting with Nick, the boyfriend learns that he’s the dupe of the song and stalks out). Amy, at one point, says that she’s not a feminist because she likes boys too much. But the truth is she’s the incarnation of a new brand of womanly assertion, like Courtney Love reborn as a proudly dissolute jazz diva who has come through the looking glass of hip-hop. The measure of her feminism is that she does whatever she wants; she’s drawn to extremes of hedonistic self-expression, whether it’s how much she drinks, the tattoos she gets on a whim (far more of a novelty and a statement 20 years ago), or the fearless emulation of her jazz heroines. “I’m no fuckin’ Spice Girl,” she tells Nick. That would seem obvious, though it’s a lesson she’s going to keep proving even if it kills her.

Amy records her first album, “Frank” (2003), as a knowingly out-of-time jazz record. She keeps saying that she doesn’t care about making money. The album is named after her idol, Frank Sinatra (though the film never clues us into that), which means that she wants to do it her way. But that’s easier said than done once you’ve climbed onto the record-industry ladder. She meets with the executives, who have a few ideas based on the fact that the album wasn’t very commercial. They’d rather not release it in the U.S. (they want to wait for her follow-up album). They think she should stop playing the guitar onstage. Amy’s reaction to all this is to tell them to fuck themselves, and to say: I need to live to write songs, so I’m going to take a major break before I make my next album.

What living turns out to be is falling for the man who’ll be the love of her life, because he’s as charged an addict as she is. The extended sequence in which Amy meets the sexy, indomitable Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) at a pub is a bravura piece of mutual seduction in which the film’s director, Sam Taylor-Johnson , shows off her chops. Blake is not an emasculated wimp; his confidence is complete, his suavity bordering on the toxic. Jack O’Connell plays him as a kind of throwback — he’s like a late-’60s British matinee idol (think James Fox or the Michael Caine of “Alfie”) playing a jock with a lightning brain. He knows Amy’s record by heart; he also introduces her, on the jukebox, to the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack,” lip-syncing to it with gender-blending glee.

She spins the album “Back to Black” out of how shattered he left her. And it’s a sign of where the film’s priorities lie that we see her recording the irresistibly heartbreak-hooked title track, yet there’s little to no sense of how Winehouse’s masterful second and last album was created (the producer Mark Ronson gets a name-drop, the producer Salaam Remi gets an image drop, and that’s all). The album is a huge hit, making Amy a celebrity stalked by the paparazzi. And Blake takes the album’s message of melancholy as a signal that she’ll take him back. So he calls her, and they get married (basically a Vegas wedding in Miami Beach), and then they’re breaking up all over again.

“Sid and Nancy,” I’m afraid, this is not. We don’t swoon over the dysfunctional passion, the spectacle of two lovelorn addicts who are destined to bring out the worst in each other. Yet without that burning romantic core, “Back to Black” plays out what feels like an authentic but rather clinical version of amour fou.

What about the songs we love from “Back to Black”? Abela’s in-concert renditions of several Winehouse classics have a dilapidated splendor, and her performance of “Rehab” at the 2008 Grammy Awards is perfection, as is her version of “Tears Dry on Their Own” during the closing credits. Abela did all her own singing; she gets every soaring and scat-souled nuance. But while the songs keep popping up, they’re not in there in a way that feels, at each moment, like they’re expressing something so emotionally necessary that it becomes cathartic. Amy, contrary to her mythology, does end up in rehab. Near the end of her life, she gets clean, as Janis Joplin did. But that isn’t enough to keep her from becoming a member of the cautionary club of pop stars who died at 27 (Janis, Jimi, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain). Her self-destruction is on full display in “Back to Black.” Yet the film presents it, even revels in it, without giving you the sense that it fully understands it.

Reviewed at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lower Manhattan, New York, April 8, 2024. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 122 MIN.

• Production: A Focus Features release of a Monumental Pictures production, in association with StudioCanal, with the participation of Canal + Cine + M6 and W9. Producers: Alison Owen, Debra Hayward, Nicky Kentish Barnes. Executive producers: Anna Marsh, Ron Halpern, Joe Naftalin, Sam Taylor-Johnson.
• Crew: Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson. Screenplay: Matt Greenhalgh. Camera: Polly Morgan. Editors: Martin Walsh, Laurence Johnson. Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Amy Winehouse.
• With: Marisa Abela, Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan, Juliet Cowan, Sam Buchanan, Lesley Manville.

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