Film Review - Us (2019)

Us is the new film written and directed by Jordan Peele who made Get Out in 2017 and this time Winston Duke and Lupita N’Yongo play a married couple who take their 2 children to Santa Cruz for a beach holiday but back in 1986 Lupita’s character had a traumatic event at that same beach and one night 4 people who look exactly like them invade their home and darkness ensues.

Us for the most part worked for me and the first big reason is Jordan Peele’s overall craftsmanship of the movie, he does a great job using the night sky with its low light lamps, black skies and moody cinematography to really create a sense of dread and mood throughout those scenes in the film and it worked so well that when the film went back into the daytime those scenes didn’t work anywhere near as well for me and sapped some of that same tension away from the movie.

And also Ms N’Yongo is crazy good here and she does so much with her facial expressions and her eyes and that weird voice she does when she’s playing her red suit self that at times sounds a bit like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget that in both sides of her roles you really fear for her when she’s playing the terrified mother and eating up every scene when she’s playing the red suit captor, this lady has been due for a great role in a movie since her Oscar win for 12 Years a Slave and its great to see her get 2 in one movie hopefully more are to come.

But sadly this movie falls over big time in the third act as the mystery of the red suits starts to come more into focus and unfortunately a comparison to M Night Shyamalan came into mind as it has that type of feel to it and not in a good way now some of Shyamalan’s twist endings do work such as in his best films Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Split but here it didn’t quite work as well here for me.

And lastly for a Horror movie I wasn’t all that scared much sure there are a lot of misdirects in the edit and loud noises on the sound mix but they didn’t really get me scared all that much sure they make you jump but it feels like a sugar hit to keep the fear factor up when I personally prefer the slow burn style of Horror.

And so that was Us, a film that works for the most part and has a great performance by Ms N’Yongo but fell apart for me in the third act, 3 out of 5.