… After spending a tense beach day with their friends, the Tylers (Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon), Adelaide and her family return to their vacation home. When darkness falls, the Wilsons discover the silhouette of four figures holding hands as they stand in the driveway. Us pits an endearing American family against a terrifying and uncanny opponent: doppelgängers of themselves… (Rotten Tomatoes). (Doppelgängers: an apparition or double of a living person, Mid 19th century from German, literally ‘double-goer’).
Asked who she and her fellow-invaders are, she replies, “We’re Americans.” … That is the most frightening line in the film. It marks the point at which Peele, with great deliberation, steps beyond the confines of the horror flick. He did the same in “Get Out” (2017), but “Us” travels further and deeper, with a more resolute sense of adventure. The indictment of racial prejudice in the earlier movie was blistering stuff, but “Us” spares nobody, regardless of color, age. … The doubles in “Us,” though, are a hundred times harsher, craving payback for having been tamped down. They represent the nation’s id, or, in the profoundest sense, its underclass, and Marxists and Freudians alike will have years of fun with this movie. … “Us” is political filmmaking of the most spirited sort, and it sets up quite a fight: the Hydes come to visit the Jekylls, and the Jekylls hit back. Whom you cheer for, in the long run, is up to you. (The New Yorker, best review, in full here).
Scary movie, of course, but not just horror. Not only horror, here the genre is used to visually represent the Jekyll’s side of the American – Western – civilization, with its class gaps, its class rage and its sneaking violence everywhere: that is very horrific. Marxist movie? Let’s not be foolish…