This is really unfortunate, but I think that we need to have a conversation about expectations before we talk about the movie itself. Many of us, myself included, were really excited to see Us because it’s the second movie to be made by Jordan Peele. Peele surprised audiences in 2017 with his breakout hit Get Out, which many people felt to be one of the best horror movies in years. Hell, it even got nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and that hardly EVER happens for horror movies. Because of all of this, I think a lot of us winded up getting it in our heads that Jordan Peele is just this auteur of movies that was wasting his time doing comedy when none of us ever knew that he could make something as good as Get Out. Regardless, though, because of how much people loved Get Out, many of us were looking forward to see what would come next from Jordan Peele, and now we finally have our answer with Us. The unfortunate news though…it’s a bit of a disappointment. I think part of that problem lies with us, though, because it’s really hard to strike lightning twice, and yet that’s what many of us were expecting from Us. The thing is, Us is actually a pretty decent movie…it’s just nowhere near as good as Get Out.

The movie opens with a backstory scene showing a young girl getting lost at a carnival. She enters into a funhouse and winds up seeing herself in there. This sticks with the girl, but she eventually grows up, gets married, and has two kids. This family is now going on vacation, but things take a turn for the worse when some strangers show up at their house at night. They soon discover that the people that have arrived are weird, dark, doppelganger versions of themselves. And so, the family winds up being hunted by themselves, and they must figure out a way to fight back.

This probably sounds like a pretty intriguing and fun concept, right? Well, yes. It was easy to think that Us would be as good as Get Out, because the trailers showed us something fresh and different once again. However, what we don’t see from the trailers is the final third of the movie, and this is where the movie goes off the rails. But up until that point, for the first two-thirds of Us, I thought it was great. It has a really cool concept, and there are some genuinely fun scares that are scattered throughout most of the movie. The doppelgangers are really neat and terrifying, and so during these scenes of hunting each other, the movie is really interesting.

The movie’s big problem comes in its payoff. I’m beginning to think that Jordan Peele’s specialty is coming up with interesting ideas, but that his weakness lies in not being able to give satisfying conclusions to these mysteries. To an extent, I felt this way with Get Out (although I seem to be in the minority on this), where I felt like the movie’s answers to all of the paranoia just weren’t satisfying and didn’t feel to line up with many of the themes of the movie up to that point. However, I thought that it was good enough that it didn’t ruin the rest of the movie for me, so while I didn’t feel like Get Out stuck the landing smoothly, it was still amazing. Us doesn’t quite work that way. Its payoffs barely make any sense, and as such it winded up tainting my view of the rest of the movie. There are a LOT of logical inconsistencies here, or at the very least a lot of elements that just aren’t explained well in the movie. Like I said, the set-up is all very well done and is a really fun ride, but then when we start getting answers to the movie’s big questions, things just fall apart. This is the kind of movie that honestly made me mad, because I felt that it had such a great premise that didn’t pay off.

Us is one of those movies that’s just more frustrating than anything else, because I wanted so bad to love it, and it could have been so much more amazing than it actually is. There’s still a lot to enjoy in the movie, and if you’re like me you’re probably going to have a really fun time with it for most of the movie. The acting is great, the aesthetic looks really cool, and there’s just a high level of quality here for a horror movie. Jordan Peele really excels in all of this, but unfortunately the ending winds up tainting the rest of the experience. Us definitely isn’t a BAD movie, its just disappointing considering how great it could have been.

3.5/5