US: A Scary Mind-Boggler!

This is Writer/Director Jordan Peele’s follow-up film to “Get Out,” and it doesn’t disappoint!  Multi-layered, filled with symbolism, and with numerous ways to interpret many aspects of the film, you will be thinking and talking about it long after you leave the theater.  This is one movie I wouldn’t see alone – you’ll have a wide variety of questions and interpretations which will be fun to share with others.  This is the first “MUST-SEE” film for 2019, and I’m pretty sure it will receive multiple AA nominations.

This film begins in 1986, the year of the “Hands Across America” campaign.  A bible quote – Jeremiah 11:11, “This is what the Lord says: I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape.  Although they cry out to me, I will not hear them” – portends that bad things will inevitably happen, despite the best of intentions.  Young Adelaide is at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz with her family until she wanders off into a “Hall of Mirrors” fun house and sees a doppelganger (evil twin) in one of the mirrors.  It is obvious that the twin is not some sort of weird reflection.  Adelaide is psychologically traumatized by the experience, and bears a marked change for the worse in her personality.

The film then shifts to the present day.  Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) is now a woman in her late thirties or early forties.  She is married to Gabe (Winston Duke) and has a son. Jason (Evan Alex), and a daughter, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph).  They seem to be a happy, likeable family that instantly draws you to their side.  They are on a week’s vacation in Santa Cruz and go to the same beach where the above incident occurred years ago, which has filled Adelaide with trepidation and dread.  That night, a family of four – looking exactly like them – invade their home.  It is apparent that have have not come for a friendly “game night!”

I can’t say much more about the plot without spoiling it, but the film is awash in symbolism, with the number “11,” rabbits, scissors, and fire, among others.  The movie is not for the squeamish, since there is plenty of violence, such as stabbings, and people getting smashed in the head with blunt objects such as baseball bats and fire pokers.  The film references “Alice In Wonderland” and the old “Twilight Zone” TV series, among others.

The are many possible interpretations of the film, both socio-economic and psychological.  Being a psychiatrist, I view it as a metaphor for intra-psychic conflict.  Jungian theory has the concept of the “shadow self,” which is the part of ourselves which has the repressed, unacceptable, aggressive, and sexual impulses.  The film may be saying that if we don’t face and “integrate with” our inner demons, we may make a mess of our lives.  Perhaps, on a socio-economic level, if we don’t treat the disenfranchised of society better, we may eventually face a revolution.

As Pogo would say, “We have met the enemy, and he is US!”