When she was a little girl, Adelaide got lost in an amusement park and found a double of herself in the house of mirrors. In the present, Adelaide is married to Gabriel and has two kids, Zora and Jason. They make a trip to Santa Cruz. One night, four dark silhouettes appear outside their house. The strangers breaks inside and are revealed to be the identical doubles of the family, just wearing red hoods. Only Adelaide's clone is able to speak, with a strange voice. They play games with and chase the family, until Gabriel kills his clone in the sea. Gabriel, Adelaide, Zora and Jason escape and flee towards their friends, the Tyler family, but find them killed by their respective clones. Across the country, clones appear to attack people. Adelaide follows her clone to an underground basement where she tells her they were cloned by the government, but the experiment failed and they were abandoned, so they now seek revenge. Adelaide kills her. Back on surface, Adelaide escapes with her family in the car, but it is revealed that she was exchanged by her clone when she was still a little girl in the amusement park.
Jordan Peele's follow-up to his surprise hit "Get Out", "Us" is a somewhat better film since it plays out almost as a pure horror without pretentious social issues, instead presenting these social issues in a much more subtle, genuine and unobtrusive way. The freaky story of a family attacked by their own clones builds its disturbance factor on the typical element of the horror genre where people are faced with the unexplainable that is a mysterious threat, but Peele also adds some neat questions about identity and chance, which he even mentioned in an interview: "For us to have our privilege, someone suffers. That's where the Tethered connection, I think, resonates the most, is that those who suffer and those who prosper are two sides of the same coin." Truly, if the family lived on the surface, and their clones underground, questions are posed about what would happen between two identical people, one living a normal life, the other a life full of hardship, similar to Mark Twain's novel "The Prince and the Pauper". There are references to Carpenter's "The Thing" and fears of an intruder taking one's place, but Peele's direction is at times sadly too conventional and routine: the first 30 minutes are boring; the plot holes are significant (why didn't the clones attack sooner? What were they waiting for all this time? Why did the clones "play" with Adelaide and her family, allowing them to escape, but somehow the clones of the Tylers were killed instantly? How were the people cloned? And how many were cloned, since it is implied that all of America has clones, which is too far fetched); and he is not able to create a truly inspired scary mood, as some other horror directors did. However, the twist ending is great, and the creepy concept is sufficient to engage the viewers.
Grade:++
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