Film

Here’s What All The Critics Are Saying About Jordan Peele’s Terrifying ‘Us’

Many are calling it a "colossal achievement".

by Joseph Earp  28 March 2019
Lupita Nyong'o in the new film from Jordan Peele, Us

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There’s no greater hurdle for an artist than a follow-up to the biggest success of their career. But Us, Jordan Peele’s next project after his Oscar-winning, box office smash Get Out, isn’t just a capable follow-up; it’s a genuine triumph, capable of standing on its own two sturdy feet.

That’s according to the popular consensus (and the opinion of this writer, who has seen the film). Somehow, despite the odds stacked against him, the one-time comedian and Key And Peele co-star has done the impossible, and certified himself as a legitimate horror director, capable of making a film that rakes in a staggering US$70 million in its first weekend alone. Add to that the fact that the film is an original project, based on no pre-existing property, and it feels like a genuine marvel.

But Us isn’t just a commercial powerhouse — it’s already proven a critical one too.

Us is a ‘colossal achievement’

The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody, a famously picky critic who tends to operate on the snooty side of things (he wrote an entire book about your pretentious first boyfriend’s favourite director, Jean-Luc Godard, and he tends to pooh-pooh studio efforts seemingly out of principle) adored Us.

In his glowing, densely-written review, he singles out Peele’s horror literacy. “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,” Brody writes.

Indeed, many critics have focused on how fully fledged Us feels as a horror film. Get Out, for all its praise, did strike some as a cynical use of horror tropes, utilised to smuggle in social satire. Us does no such thing. An accomplished work of horror filmmaking on a technical level, the film is a genre exercise first and foremost — its satire comes later in the piece, and is significantly less heavy handed than that deployed in Get Out.

In his glowing review of the film, David Sims of The Atlantic singles out the opening of Us, which sees a young girl trapped in a terrifying funhouse, as “a perfectly taut piece of virtuoso horror filmmaking.” He goes on to praise the film for the places it ends up, which he describes as “complicated … outrageous, and in a lot of ways, more daringly funny and topical than its predecessor.”

That ending

Admittedly, some critics have expressed worry about the ending of Us, the less about which is said the better for the sake of avoiding spoilers. K. Austin Collins of Vanity Fair, in a mostly positive review, picks apart what he sees as a trend of grandiosity in the film. According to him, it has “a few too many ideas, a little too much social commentary, motifs that don’t add up, answers that only raise more questions.”

But, for other critics, that selfsame ambition is exactly what makes the film’s final third the triumph that it is. “Much like Peele’s previous film, the layers of Us don’t really reveal themselves until you understand the game being played, and then … symbols start locking into place,” writes Scott Wampler in Birth. Movies Death, going on to call Peele’s two-film streak as “horror history happening in real time.”

Whether or not Us manages to replicate the commercial and critical streak of its predecessor remains to be seen, of course — Get Out went on to win an Oscar, and earn a whopping US $255 million at the box office. But even if his second film doesn’t meet that impossibly high bar, one thing is still certain — Jordan Peele is rapidly evolving into one of the most important genre directors Hollywood has.