In the Flesh: Us

Rich, buttery golds, washed-out blues, dried-blood reds and sepulchral greens. Us, Jordan Peele's sophomore horror feature, is one of the most richly colorful movies I've seen in recent memory. The sound isn't slacking either. Its hair-raising soundtrack by Michael Abel, the best in horror since Mica Levi's score for Under the Skin, is revolutionary, mixing high-pitched choral music with hide drums and whimsical chimes to create a kind of demented, primal throb of fairytale violence. Us is lushly sensual and immersive, a full-bodied experience even before it deploys its razor-sharp conceit. 

And what a conceit. From the initial reveal of the doppelgangers to the tantalizing whiff of their origins to a final-act twist which recontextualizes the entire film with brutal efficiency, the whole thing is searing. In the Wilson family's material jealousies and upper-class comforts, Peele digs into the uncomfortable twining together of race and class. When the doppelgangers first appear, Wilson family patriarch Gabe (Winston Duke) attempts to scare them off by adopting a more stereotypically "black" voice. The setting itself, a summer lake house, is the quintessential American leisure class dream, and the only friends of the family we meet are rich, white, and insufferable. The tension between the family's blackness and their wealth is profoundly uneasy.

The doppelgangers themselves are chilling, fluidly physical with lank hair and monstrous grins. Kitty's (Elizabeth Moss) copy is a particular delight, sharklike and self-destructive, and Nyong'o as Adelaide's copy, Red, is ghoulish and disturbing, her voice a ghastly croak, her eyes huge and fixed. Her incredible depth acting opposite herself is a once in a decade feat, the kind of thing that looks so natural you don't realize what an absolutely monster home run it is until the curtain drops. There's an action sequence between Red and Adelaide that feels like watching someone rip herself apart, like the bifurcated halves of one woman performing a disjointed dance while trying to climb into one another's skin.

Peele's direction is gorgeous, his shots of the beach recalling Jaws in their fisheye confusion, his interiors sinuous and shadowy, his violence clear and legible without ever feeling staged. The screenplay is intriguingly ambiguous, its mysteries glimpsed only in discrete snippets, its revelations dropped like seismic charges on each new iteration of normalcy within the film. Us puts its audience face to face with the rotten, grinning soul of America, and by the time we realize what's really going on it's far too late to look away. This is not something to miss.