I’ve been having a conversation with a friend about the role of metaphor in horror films, around the degree to which the supernatural threats in a horror film are “real” within the context of the film. It’s kind of a complicated question, at least for me, and after some time trying to wrap my head around how I actually feel, what I’ve sort of landed on is that supernatural threats are almost always metaphor for real-world fears of one type or another, and the degree to which they’re diegetically “real” varies. If the narrator is unreliable, what we’re seeing may not actually be happening in the world of the film, but I also think that having supernatural threats that are diegetically real potentially adds another layer of fear, especially if we sympathize with the protagonists. If we’re rooting for them to die, I’d argue that’s not really horror. It’s bloodsport, and part of why I don’t really rate slasher films, for the most part.
I bring all of this up because Us is one of those films that invests heavily in both aspects of its antagonists. And the result is an unnerving, inventive balance of the frightening and the comic made with verve and a unique, impressionistic vision.
The film opens with a title card stating that there are miles of tunnels underneath the continental U.S. - sewers, abandoned subway lines, and tunnels that seem to serve no known purpose. There is, this card seems to say, a world beneath us. Cut to Santa Cruz, California, in 1986, and Rayne, Russell, and their young daughter Adelaide. Things seem strained between Rayne and Russell as they take Adelaide down the Santa Cruz boardwalk, playing games of chance and eating candy apples. Rayne needs to find a restroom, but Adelaide doesn’t want to come with her, so Rayne asks Russell to watch Adelaide while she goes. Russell says he will, and then promptly returns to his game of Whac-A-Mole. Adelaide, of course, wanders off. She wanders off to a remote stretch of the beach, and a hall of mirrors attraction. “Find Yourself,” the sign says. Inside, she gets lost, turned around inside the hall of mirrors, surrounded by her reflections.
One of the reflections doesn’t move as she does, and Adelaide notices.
Years later, in the present day, Adelaide is married to affable Gabe Wilson, and they have two children, Zora and Jason. They’re in the car, on their way to their summer home near Santa Cruz. Gabe embodies big dad energy, goofy and affable and just out of touch enough. The kids are appropriately surly and uninterested in the things their parents enjoy. It’s clear this trip wasn’t their idea. And Adelaide is uneasy, her mind still on those events of so long ago, her discovery after being lost, and the struggle to adjust. Gabe mentions meeting some friends of theirs at the beach in Santa Cruz, and she’s immediately resistant. She doesn’t want to go back there. It’s clear that whatever happened to her as a child was traumatic and she doesn’t want to revisit the place where it happened. But they go, and it’s fine, and they come back to the summer house that night.
And that night, they are visited by a family - mother, father, and two children - who stand wordlessly in their driveway. They’re wearing matching red jumpsuits, and they’re carrying big, shiny pairs of scissors.
And they look just like the Wilsons.
Us begins as a siege film, as this mysterious family - led by an Adelaide look-alike who speaks in strained, halting English - terrorizes the Wilsons to an end that isn’t really apparent right away. But the Wilsons are surprisingly resourceful, and soon enough the scope of the film widens to describe something much larger than the typical siege scenario. The end product is probably best described as one of deep uneasiness. Even before things really pop off, there’s a sense of everything being slightly wrong- silences stretch out just a beat too long, there’s a stillness to everything, even where it seems like there should be energy and activity. Sudden sounds are a little too loud, there are a lot of shadows at the beach house at night, and the beach itself during the day is a little too bright. It’s no one thing you can put your finger on, but it’s all just slightly strange, and then the strangeness overwhelms us, engulfs us, surrounds us, and it’s all we can do to keep up.
Alongside the horror runs a strong vein of comedy - rooted mostly in family sitcoms at first (look at the crummy boat Dad bought! It has a cassette player in it! Kids don’t like to get off their phones!) but getting increasingly darker and sharper as the film moves on, without really getting any less funny. This is one of the few horror films that’s had me both on the edge of my seat and laughing out loud at the same time, without one undercutting the other (though the balance is tipped maybe a little too far toward comedy at points in the third act). Normally I don’t like horror comedies - often the comedy is at the expense of the horror, or typically horrific things are played for comedy - but by and large this film manages both in a way that makes the comedy punctuation for the horror, rather than undermining it. It felt like I was laughing as hard as I was as much to release the tension I was feeling as because the comedy was really well-done. And at points, the humor is almost acidic in how it contrasts to and underlines the protagonists’ situation. Some of the gags would be funny even if they didn’t accompany someone bleeding out, but that they do makes them the best kind of satire - astringent, a little painful. The best satire stings a little, because that’s how you know the wound is getting cleansed.
So there’s a strong diegetic threat, rendered in striking, singular imagery, and underneath, a metaphoric narrative arguably about the privilege of class. The Wilsons have a good life - we don’t get details, but they’re doing well enough to have a summer home in northern California, which ain’t nothing. You get the sense that most of them take their lives for granted to a degree, though Adelaide begins the film with an edge of wariness, as if her childhood experience means that she doesn’t. Gabe and Adelaide’s friends Josh and Kitty (and their twin daughters) are complacent to the point of near-inertia, so assured in their privilege that they don’t even see it. The antagonists come across like a dark mirror-world version of the Wilsons, alike in body but…broken somehow. Except for Adelaide’s double, they do not speak or communicate only in grunts and howls, and Adelaide can only manage broken, halting English, describing a nightmare life of extreme hardship. Adelaide’s double feels entitled to something, stating that it’s “their time now.” Even before all is made clear, you get the sense that these mysterious doubles feel that they have suffered a great injustice, and seek to redress it.
This is not a film that overburdens us with explanation or backstory, and that’s absolutely for the good - we’re handed just enough to let us observe what’s going on, and forsaking some complicated technical explanation in favor of letting haunting expressive imagery do the hard work - imagery that, however disparate and strange it might seem initially, actually tells us way more than we realize. I’m reminded of films like Hereditary or Asmodexia in that here, again, we have all the information we need almost from the beginning, we just don’t know it until the end. There are miles and miles of tunnels honeycombing the United States, the opening card tells us, many to no known purpose. Early on, when Adelaide asks their antagonists who they are, her double replies “we’re Americans.” There’s a lot we don’t know about what going on beneath us, the film seems to say, and we remain ignorant at our peril.
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