In director Jordan Peele’s new thriller Us, two families vacationing on a lake are terrorized by people who appear to be their duplicates. Home invasion is a familiar action premise, but Peele expands hostile incursion into a larger social metaphor. In this way, he delivers on two things audiences love in a horror film: being scared out of their seats, and trying to figure out what it all means. Get Out works on two levels. On the one hand, ‘Get Out’ was a warning to Chris Washington that, if he didn’t want to be lobotomized, he had better escape his girlfriend’s house. It was also good advice on how to survive in a racist society. Us is also double-faced: the title is both a description of the creatures who double as humans and ‘us’ as in ‘all of us.’ Our veneer of middle class respectability glosses over the volatile reality of a disenfranchised population, desperate and seething. Us is a comic-horror allegory about the revolution of the underclass.
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