Review Roundup: What Did the Critics Think of Jordan Peele's New Film, US?

SXSW presented the world premiere of Jordan Peele's Us as the Opening Night film for the 26th edition of the SXSW Film Festival on Friday March 8, 2019. After sending shockwaves across contemporary culture and setting a new standard for provocative, socially-conscious horror films with his directorial debut, Get Out, Academy Award®-winning visionary Jordan Peele returns with another original nightmare.

Set in present day along the iconic Northern California coastline, Us, stars Oscar® winner Lupita Nyong'o as Adelaide Wilson, a woman returning to her beachside childhood home with her husband, Gabe (Black Panther's Winston Duke), and their two children (Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex) for an idyllic summer getaway. Haunted by an unexplainable and unresolved trauma from her past and compounded by a string of eerie coincidences, Adelaide feels her paranoia elevate to high-alert as she grows increasingly certain that something bad is going to befall her family. 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 to discover the silhouettes of four figures standing in their driveway. Uspits an ordinary American family against a terrifying and uncanny opponent: doppelgängers of themselves.

Let's see what the critics are saying...

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Matthew Monagle, Film School Rejects: Us draws on an incredible cast to play both the Wilson and their neighbors, but much of the movie boils down to the battle between Adelaide and her Untethered counterpart. Of all its strengths, this is by far the biggest: Ushas at its center two incredible performances by Lupita Nyong'o. From the early scenes of creeping anxiety to the polarizing final conflict between human and duplicate - a literal dance of violence that contrasts the poise of one against the brutality of the other - Nyong'o creates two unique personas with endless depth. But she's not alone: newcomer Shahadi Wright Joseph provides the film's other standout performance, culminating in a sequence where Adelaide is forced to consider her daughter's wounded double with something approximating tenderness. Us belongs to its female cast members; these performances are absolutely essential in making the Untethered more than just a Twilight Zone-esque gimmick.

David Crow, Den of Geek: Indulging in a greater genre aesthetic than Get Out, Us plays with the type of mythical storybook-like logic of many of the horror films Peele grew up watching in the '80s. Peele still wears his influences on its sleeves-the opening shot includes a VHS copy of C.H.U.D., and in the scene where Jason wanders off on a beach, his shirt not-so-subtly features the visage of a great white shark. However, the film also features a greater sophistication in its inspirations, particularly of a 1970s paranoia variety, which underscores a desire to suggest macroaggressions on a historic, allegorical scale.

Justin Chang, LA Times: Like "Get Out," "Us" is an experience of extraordinary dread-soaked momentum, even if Peele is still learning to differentiate between his "A" jolts and his "B" jolts. There are one or two moments when the terror and the comedy don't fuse so much as fight each other, as Peele (knowingly) pushes his characters' panic beyond the limits of what we might call reasonable horror-movie stupidity. But beyond the jittery mechanics of attack and pursuit, what lingers is the unnerving intimacy of the whole situation, the terrible and mysterious sense of kinship that binds the Wilsons to their malevolent alter egos.

Monica Castillo, Roger Ebert: Like "The Shining," there are a number of different ways to interpret Jordan Peele's excellent new horror movie, "Us." Every image seems to be a clue for what's about to happen or a stand-in for something outside the main story of a family in danger. Peele's film, which he directed, wrote and produced, will likely reward audiences on multiple viewings, each visit revealing a new secret, showing you something you missed before in a new light.

David Griffin, IGN: With Us, writer-director Jordan Peele proves that he's no one-trick pony after the success of his Oscar-winning Get Out in 2017. Where Get Out is a racially-conscious thriller, Us is less concerned about social commentary and more horror-focused, with an ample amount of comedy sprinkled throughout. The one aspect the two movies have in common - a credit to Peele's skill as a storyteller - is that both are difficult to pin to one particular genre.

Tasha Robinson, The Verge: It's a hell of a heady experience while it's running, but it leaves behind a lot of baffling questions. Compared to Get Out, Us feels like more conventional modern horror. It follows a familiar storytelling pattern - initial scare, a drop back to calm and familiar scenes that set up the characters, a series of foreshadowing events and fake-out scares, a sudden escalation of tension. The leadup sometimes feels frustratingly slow and repetitive, especially when the audience isn't really learning anything new about the characters, apart from the fact that Gabe is oblivious to Adelaide's past trauma, and that Zora and Jacob don't particularly get along. And the transition into real horror is so abrupt, it's almost comical - until it isn't.

Erin Carson, CNET: One of the inevitable questions people will ask about Us is whether it's scarier than Get Out. Peele gets the dread machine going in the first scene at a beach-side amusement park, and the tensest moments include the Wilson family trying to figure out why people outside are trying to get in. And that old horror staple, the ominous Bible verse, will never not be creepy -- in this case, Jeremiah 11:11. You can see the uncomprehending terror on Lupita Nyong'o's face as she stares at her Tethered counterpart, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Peter DeBruge, Variety: Like the "sunken place" Peele invented for "Get Out," this sinister domain offers a visual allegory for the darker aspects of our own socialization - which, if the film were more successful in its final stretch, would force us to confront the monsters within each of us.

Eric Kohn, IndieWire: Peele has somehow developed an uncanny ability to explore how past cultural events can take ominous new dimensions in the present: The leitmotif of faceless Americans joining hands in an endless show of empty solidarity is a provocative setup, but Peele's script keep digging into its ramifications. "What are you?" Adelaide asks her double, and the answer comes in eerily straightforward fashion: "We're Americans."

Eric Vespe, Collider: Us is a different kind of film than Get Out. It's not a rehash of the same messaging and lofty ideas of the first film, but because Peele made it so quickly after Get Out it shares some of that film's underdog energy. There are similarities, but it's by no means the same experience and I honestly can't predict how the masses will respond to it. Will they embrace it for the good film it is or will they want something more like what he did before?

Emily Yoshida, Vulture: Peele has said in interviews that Us is meant to be a more straight-ahead horror film than the social-horror of Get Out. This may disappoint some fans of the latter, but it's not an overt racial or social theme that's missing from Us, so much as a coherence of its internal mythology. The first two thirds of it plays out as a home invasion thriller with each character splitting off to battle their own Tethered double. But when the explanations and revelations start coming down the pipeline, none of it seems to click in that "ah hah" way that the best genre movies do.

Kevin Fallon, The Daily Beast: But the film, which debuted at SXSW to a crowd that was living for every second, succeeds because of the almost Spielbergian glee it takes in being a traditional, jump-scare, laugh-out-loud, horror movie. It's the ways in which it's not "The Next Get Out" that make Us so remarkable.

Randall Colburn, AV Club: As a horror movie, it's deeply satisfying. After a soupy first act, the film roars like a rocket, with quick shots of burgeoning chaos-Peele remains so, so good at finding the uncanny in public behaviors-serving to disorient in ways that nullify the need for gore. It helps that his cast is so game. Nyong'o is incredible, as effective in battle as she is in moments of drama. Joseph and Alex are also compelling, each giving their doppelgängers a fierce edge that never veers into the "creepy kid" template pervading modern studio horror. Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker, meanwhile, each get to flex heretofore untapped muscles as the family's sousy, self-loathing pals.

John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter: Perhaps Us is making the obvious point that, whether we're black or white, it's people who look just like us who've made our world a disaster we cannot escape. Maybe we're doing the same, both of us creating a living hell for someone, likely without even knowing it. Maybe we're Them and they're Us. Maybe every happy ending is somebody else's catastrophe, and therefore, no horror film is ever really over.

Matt Patches, Polygon: Us is a bigger movie than Get Out, and the twisting road of the story gives Peele a chance to bounce from Brutalist camera work worthy of Kubrick to the compassionate darkness of Jennifer Kent's The Babadook and even a bit of Amblin-esque wonder. Bright colors shrouded by shadow create a constant dream logic that stretches from the vistas of California's umbrella-speckled beaches to a cramped closet where Jason plays with matches, lighting the room with a single flicker of flame. Every ounce of Us is a choice that speaks to the bigger picture, and Peele isn't afraid of the grotesque; finally, a movie splatters blood across a pristine, white Alexa.

Rafael Motamayor, Gamespot: If Get Out was a victim of the "is it really horror?" question, Jordan Peele made sure Us wouldn't fall for the same trick. This is a horror movie through and through, full of references to everything from Friday the 13th and Night of the Living Dead to more recent fare like Black Swan. Like Hereditary last year, the best scares come from simply being able to glimpse something in the dark corners of the screen. The home invasion sequences will make you want to cover your eyes, but the craftsmanship at hand will prevent you from looking away. However, Peele doesn't shy away from making you laugh, with a perfectly balanced mix of horror with humor that doesn't feel out of place.

Lindsay Romain, Nerdist: If Get Out was Peele's horror introduction,Us is his meditation on the possibilities of the genre. It's a strange, hilarious, fearsome beast of a movie that always keeps you five steps behind Peele's next brilliant twist, questioning the film's intentions until they are slowly, brutally relayed to you. There's nothing quite like it. It'll haunt not only your dreams, but your psyche.

Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair: Peele's overarching social commentary is clear, but he also said that he wants every individual to tailor their interpretation to their own experience. As with Get Out, this film certainly has plenty to do with the black experience in this country. One of the biggest, most uneasy laughs of the night went to Nyong'o when, in full monster mode, she responded to the question "who are you?" by croaking, defiantly, "we're Americans." But Us is never just one thing. It's a masterpiece of doubling, layering, and tethering. It's also a movie packed to the brim with horrifying iconography-the red jumpsuits, vacant-eyed bunnies, and always those slicing shears-some of which has obvious meaning, while Peele is disinclined to break down the rest the way he did with Get Out.

Brandon Katz, Observer: Following the shocking success of Get Out both critically and commercially, no director in Hollywood had more pressure to replicate success than Jordan Peele. Perhaps that very compulsion-the literal idea of replication-is what spawned Us, which sees a family's serenity turn to chaos when a group of mirror doubles terrorize them on vacation. Thanks to a smart script and great performances from the main cast-notably a prowess-unlocked Lupita Nyong'o and a wonderfully loose Winston Duke-Us is both laugh out loud hilarious and disturbingly eerie all at one.

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