{"id":21793,"date":"2019-03-22T20:31:58","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T20:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.anfocal.ie\/?p=21793"},"modified":"2019-03-23T18:04:55","modified_gmt":"2019-03-23T18:04:55","slug":"us-review-peele-outdoes-himself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anfocal.ie\/index.php\/us-review-peele-outdoes-himself\/","title":{"rendered":"Us Review: Peele Outdoes Himself"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Mike Finnerty<\/strong><\/em><\/a>
\nHorror has always been a genre that\u2019s a trojan horse for social commentary.<\/p>\n

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is an allegory for McCarthyism-era paranoia, Night Of The Living Dead serves as commentary on race relations in 1960s America, and now over 50 years later, Jordan Peele\u2019s Us is a profound comment on identity and in the late 10\u2019s.<\/p>\n

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Jordan Peele paying tribute to George Romero upon his death in 2017.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jordan Peele\u2019s debut Get Out landed in the film world in early 2017 with the force of an asteroid, and now two years later and a screenwriting Oscar under his arm, he makes a film even better than his debut.<\/p>\n

Everything comes together in Us.<\/p>\n

The directing and writing is top-class, the suspension-building and daylight horror sequences evoke the very best of the horror genre like Craven or Lynch before him, and returning Get Out composer Michael Abels serves up yet another haunting and unsettling score.<\/p>\n

Us is anchored by a herculean lead performance from Lupita Nyong\u2019o.<\/p>\n

Jamie Lee Curtis and Jodie Foster have always been considered the gold standard for lead performances in horror-thrillers, but that crown now truly belongs to Nyong\u2019o.<\/p>\n

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Tour-De-Force: Lupita Nyong’o elevates Us to new heights.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Without wishing to spoil too much, Nyong\u2019o burrows deep into the human condition, and when the film starts asking a lot of its actors, she effortlessly takes it in her stride.<\/p>\n

If anyone else but Nyong\u2019o is on the Oscar stage next February, there will have been a travesty of justice.<\/p>\n

Props must also go to Winston Duke who acts as the audience surrogate of sorts.<\/p>\n

Duke is a fantastic audience surrogate as his reactions and initially flippant response to the slowly-unraveling situation he finds himself in is exactly how you or I would act in that situation.<\/p>\n

The majority of the film\u2019s jokes come from him and delivers them with aplomb.<\/p>\n

The best joke of the film, however, involves an incredibly funny needle drop that reminds you that Peele was one half of Key and Peele before he became the best horror director of a generation.<\/p>\n

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Golden Touch: Before he was re-writing the horror genre, Jordan Peele won Emmys for his work on Key and Peele with Keegan-Michael Key.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The real star of the show however, is Peele.<\/p>\n

This is his film from first frame to last.<\/p>\n

The screenplay is incredibly tight, there\u2019s a liberal usage of the Chekhov’s Gun trope but he finds uses and pay-offs for them in the least expected of places.<\/p>\n

The story has Peele has conjured up for the audience this time is as whip-smart and as on-the-pulse as Get Out was, but as mentioned up top, to spoil any more would be doing you, the reader, a great disservice.<\/p>\n

Us is best experienced without any prior knowledge, and the trailer that released on Christmas Day does a good job at keeping the audience in the dark.<\/p>\n

While Peele won the screenwriting Oscar for Get Out, he was also nominated for directing.<\/p>\n

In any case, Peele has evolved as a director for his second outing, employing more directorial flourishes such as whip pans, mirror shots, tracking shots, wide shots, spatial geography within a scene and all little tricks that help make every scene feel as energetic and dynamic as the last.<\/p>\n

If there was one criticism that could be levelled at the film, not every plot element is tied up quite as succinctly as Get Out was.<\/p>\n

However, on the other side of the coin, explaining and solving every last plot thread is what ended becoming M. Night Shyamalan\u2019s undoing in the mid-2000s.<\/p>\n

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Aliens that are allergic to water invade a planet that is over 70% water in Signs. Great job there, M. Night.<\/strong><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the golden rules of film making is “show, don’t tell” so leaving some of the more ambigious elements of the plot up in the air makes the film that much more effective.<\/p>\n

Us is a stunning piece of cinema, one that asks uncomfortable questions of its viewers and holds a mirror up to the fractured world we live in today.<\/p>\n

Jordan Peele is here to stay, now let\u2019s pray he isn\u2019t tapped to direct a superhero or a Star Wars movie.<\/p>\n

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By: Mike Finnerty Horror has always been a genre that\u2019s a trojan horse for social commentary. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is an allegory for McCarthyism-era paranoia, Night Of The Living Dead serves as commentary on race relations in 1960s America, and now over 50 years later, Jordan Peele\u2019s Us is a profound comment on […]<\/p>\n

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