Jordan Peele’s Us Proves That Sometimes Atmosphere Is More Important Than Plot
Actor and comedian Jordan Peele made his directorial debut in 2017 with the Academy Award-winning Get Out, a horror movie about an African-American man named Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) who makes several disturbing discoveries when he visits his Caucasian girlfriend's (Allison Williams) family home. Get Out is brilliant for many reasons. It's original, funny, and crucially, genuinely scary. With its premise being a bunch of rich white people using Black people in insidious ways, it also carries a deeper message, acting as a social commentary about racism, privilege, and America at large. Chris's discovery that the Armitage family have been making hosts out of Black people through some twisted brain transplant procedure is an apt reflection on the fetishization of Black bodies: the Armitage family desire Black hosts because of their supposed physical superiority.
Peele's second horror movie Us has a looser plot, but its social commentary is razor-sharp, and its unsettling atmosphere is even greater. The movie begins in 1986 with a young girl named Adelaide (Madison Curry) at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents. Wandering off alone, Adelaide finds herself in a house of mirrors where she bumps into a girl (Red) that looks exactly like her. Initially, audiences aren't shown the full interaction between Adelaide and Red, but they can assume the experience was traumatising for the former as she loses the ability to speak and appears to be suffering from PTSD.
The First Official Trailer For Jordan Peele's Nope Has Arrived
In the present, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) is a grown woman living comfortably with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke), and children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex). On vacation, Gabe suggests
Read more on gamerant.com
