I must have been facing the wrong direction. I saw the premiere at SXSW and I thought it was dull and nowhere near as neat and twisty as Peele's first, "Get Out". Hamfisted political allegories and nods to other, better horror films do not an original make.

I do not care what you think.

Alas, not here.

Enjoy the ignore button.

Credentialed reviewer.

Not a bad home invasion movie, but it has been done better by others. Get Out is superior.

I will say the dialogue and casting were very good. Lupita Nyong'o is very talented and so beautiful. I just cringed when I saw the scissors against her face imaging her skin being scared.

Red's exposition on what is happening really doesn't hold together very well. I look at her as more like an unreliable narrator.

Still I think Jordan Peele is one of the best up and coming directors out there right now, and I am looking forward to his future work.

He is directing the rebooted Twilight Zone, and I am very excited for it.

You can't talk me out of my opinion.

Maybe I will get something more out of it on my second viewing. It does deserve a rented BluRay viewing in the future. I am not unhappy about seeing it.

I have pretty high standards when it comes to horror movies.

I saw her in two movies at SXSW, this and "Little Monsters." Both didn't quite reach what they intended to achieve and she was better than the material.

SPOILERS.


NO REALLY!

I agree it's not quite as electrifying as Get Out, but expectations were so high that's to be expected. After some thought, I realized that Us is a parable of alt-right paranoia, and the fear of being replaced - you know the South Park joke "THEY TOOK 'ER JERBS!" about immigration, and those polo-shirted tiki torch dudes shouting "Jews will not replace us?"

The most chilling line when the doppelgangers are asked "who are you?" the answer is "We're Americans." And they're looking to take the place of their topside alternates to get all the "good things" they're afforded by privilege - and a view of the sky. The tethered share a soul and are compelled to act out a weird counterpart of what their double does underground...

But the twist - the mother (Lupita Nyong'o is stunning as Adelade and her terrifying counterpart, Red) hasn't been afraid because she escaped so many years ago, it's because she is the doppelganger who switched places with her topsider counterpart as a child and isn't interested in going back. The character we've been rooting for is one of the ones we've been made to assume are the enemy, and the only difference is privilege of being able to live somewhere with a view of the sky.

I get that it was, in retrospective, set up by the movie (Red is the only one that can talk, Adelaide not being able to initially talk).

But, I don't think it added much and it felt cheap to me. It's not explained why Red was the only one to...wait for it...get out.
Plenty of folks went into that house of mirrors, why didn't one of their dopplegangers come up.

The whole sharing of a soul thing was a bit silly.

I don't think it was a bad movie. I certainly was interested as I was watching it, which means to me a movie has done it's job if it does that...but not sure I would remotely categorize it as "amazing" as the OP did. Worth watching, and perhaps thought-provoking to some extent...but still flawed.

I can understand why people don't appreciate it.

I guessed the twist early in the movie. but it was great the way it played out. The mother son eye exchange at the end. wow.

I have written screenplays, so my author-brain reflexively tries to figure out how I would plan any scenario for maximum impact.

I actually hypothesized that Jason - the son - was going to get switched during the movie and that was the point of the mask, to hide the scarring until it was revealed. I thought the attack on the little girl as shown in the trailer was going to be the initial prologue incident and that whatever lab/hospital shown was specifically trying to capture children as fodder for tests and for genetic material to gear up an underground cloning business whose intention was to fix and replace "damaged" and dead loved ones for the wealthy - similar to how some parents will replace children's small pets like rabbits secretly without informing them. That was how I interpreted the rabbits in the trailer: low-attachment, easily-replaceable pets. I thought all the people in that hallway were the leftover lobotomies like in Get Out.

Or the entire family except Adelaide was going to get switched out over the course of the movie one by one but continue along and her terrifying scream at the end of the trailer was one of betrayal - the realization in the finale that they ended up saving the clone, changeling-style, and that would have turned out to be actual Jason in the car-burning fire. And that was the purpose of the jumpsuits and the scissors: quick deceptive clothing swap.

Then when I saw it and the movie cut away and held back the reach through the mirror shown in the trailer, I knew they were saving it for a reason, and it all made sense why Red's speech was so broken and why the others didn't talk.

Lupita Nyong'o is AMAZING though (as is the entire cast) and it was all worth it, including the shivery implications of that very last moment. I'm considering going back to see an evening showing to experience it with a more responsive and hopefully clueless audience!

Why the twist was obvious perfectly..the hold back of the mirror scene.


Later...red's dancing away from her counterpoint.. Red was the superior dancer..showing she was the original non shadow little girl

Trailers are notorious for spoiling...but that was such a good one and it had more fun momentum than the movie, as trailers do.

I suspect they liked the trailer so much and the plot is so genuinely twisty that they didn't suspect people like me would love it and play it over and over and analyze the images. They created the trailer knowing what went down in the movie and didn't realize seeing trailer then movie would spoil the Act 3 suprise on subsequent view.

That, or they planned that to be a kind of lock-key puzzle for observant viewers who know how movies work. I had the correct visceral reaction when I prematurely realized the finale in Act 2, but that just subtracted a bit from the reveal at the end which would have been momentous as The Sixth Sense if they'd been a little more conservative in the trailer edit.

I didn't read a thing about it. I just loved "Get Out", so I went on the strength of that.

this is based on a Twilight Zone episode where doubles are taking the place of humans, I only hope
they start with the White House.

Great, popcorn munching scary movie. I still like Get Out more, but Us was great.

I'll leave it at that. The eye glance at the end. . .