Review of Us (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

Us is the first salvo of what is shaping up to be an excellent year in horror (cf. Pet Sematary‘s remake this weekend, the sophomore film for It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, and–fingers crossed–the Mutants movie stumbles out of what is sounding like post-production hell to name a few). Jordan Peele’s work is part of a movement afoot to make films that reflect the diversity of the audiences that go to see these movies (check this Toni Morrison-type response to whether he’ll ever have a “white dude” star in one of his films). At the same time, he’s part of a new generation of Silver Age filmmakers who are interested in paying homage to the genre’s canon while also forging a way forward for new perspectives and new stories.

There have been a lot of think pieces (here are some of my favorites as of last week, n.b. spoilers, even in just the photos under the lead line) about this “social horror” film in the news for two weeks now, and rightly so, and a lot of comparisons to last year’s Get Out. I saw this with Friend the weekend it came out and then sat on it and read anything I could find that discussed the questions at the end of the film. So below is me just beginning to get in the weeds about this movie. I’m sure we’ll revisit later.

Us is a film concerned with granting agency to its victims, agency that empowers not just the protagonists but also the audience. When the would-be victims of the horror genre find new and inventive ways to outsmart their demons and transcend genre tropes, this also changes the audience’s relationship with the director and their experience of the story. The presence and thoughtfulness of characters’ agency puts Us into a category of horror separate from the slasher flick and the gore porn subgenres. Its interest in defining itself through metatextual references to other classics allows it to critique and transcend genre tropes.

I’m not sure I’ve written about horror films a lot in the past year since we started this project, but a couple of the things I’m always on the look out for when I see something scary is 1) flexible metaphors and 2) cuckoos. Kendall Phillips wrote (and others I’m sure!) in Projected Fears about the way in which each decade was defined by its monsters in its horror films. (Paraphrasing to the point of ruining the intent of the book) Dracula reflects the fear and fantasy of the overly aggressive, seductive, experienced male, endowed with wealth beyond his years, his beauty preserved for all eternity. Later generations took this metaphor and developed it for their own purposes: the 80’s fascination with blood in the midst of the AIDS crisis and the 00’s interest in emphasizing the aspects of forbidden love for a new crop of young adult readers (Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam devote a chapter to the evolutionary explanation for this kink in their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts). This is just to say that I’m interested in the way in which the metaphorical device which moves the action of a horror film acts as a vessel for the present moment’s social and political anxieties. The more flexible the device, the more it can be used in fresh ways in a story and the more often it can be used to connect different kinds of experiences with one another.

To address the other thing I’m looking for in horror films, it’s my contention that just like previous decades defined themselves with an infatuation with a particular monster (vampires, werewolves, demons, and ghosts), the past twenty years of top tier horror in print and on the screen have featured a new kind of monster, the Cuckoo. A cuckoo is a kind of creature that adopts the characteristics of a person familiar to the protagonist in order to hide in plain sight, with the express intention of feeding off of its new host. For me, a lot of the best new entries in the genre are films that feature cuckoos, like the monsters of Neil Gaiman’s The Game of You from the Sandman (which explicitly call them this), or Coraline, or Ocean at the End of the Lane, and films like It Follows, the terrifying German indie, Goodnight Mommy, that’s mentioned in Vulture’s excellent article at the top, Del Toro’s luminous canon of work, and more recently genre-busters like Personal Shopper. Us is deeply interested in the concept of the cuckoo. A lot of my confusion with the film right now has to do with trying to decipher just what kind of commentary the film has on cuckoos and what issue it is examining with the concept of “tethering” and the peculiar(ly impotent) form protest that the untethered resort to.

Hopefully we can dive into this more soon. I really want to hear your perspective and theories. I think there are a lot of rocks to turn over on these questions.