Us (Dir Jordan Peele, 2h1m)

Horror, undeniably, is an allegorical genre, from its very birth, with Frankstein and Dracula echoing the fears of playing God at the dawn of the Enlightenment, and female sexuality in the Victorian age, to Night of the Living Dead (race, though its subsequent sequels critique everything from consumerism to television) Alien, (childbirth) and The Exorcist (mental illness and the failure of faith in America). Jordan Peele's filmography is no exception, with Get Out already a classic of the genre, an allegory about race-and indeed, the supposed post-racial state that America finds itself in, the dark underbelly of suburbia and an increasingly fractured and fractious America With Us, these themes are expanded upon, and, twinned with a plot that takes cues from everything from ant-themed B-Movie Them to slasher home-invasion flicks to literary works such as Dostoevsky's The Double and H.G. Wells' Morlocks, Peele creates a stark tale of an Afro-American family caught in the middle of the arrival of vengeful duplicates seeking revenge.

At the centre of the film is Lupita Nyong'o's Adelaide. Prefaced with a veritable Chekov's gun of an opening text around the thousands of tunnels under the US, many of which seemingly have no purpose, the film's opening scene, pivots perfectly between nigh perfect recreation of the suburban 1980s, and a claustrophobic, nightmarish scene in a hall of mirrors, worthy of Hitchhock, in which Peele neatly allows our own minds to fill in the gap, to suggest, rather than show what traumatises her so badly, in a classically nightmarish, and uncanny mirror image. Jumping to the present, via a positively Omen-esque, omniously scored credits sequence that will make you never see rabbits the same way again, Adelaide has grown, despite attempted therapy, into a nervous, and overprotective parent, as she and the rest of the Wilson family unwillingly returns to her family home, with husband Gabe (Winston Duke), and children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex).

From here, as the mundane holiday unwinds, with Gabe buying a boat, to the family going to the same beach where Adelaide's trauma occurred, to meet the vacuous and shallow Tylers and where the temporary disappearance of the hyperactive-coded Jason leaves Adelaide fractious, her fear growing of something approaching, an unbidden fear launched by too many coincidences as she confides in her trauma to Gabe. So far, Peele plays neatly on the psychological thriller, on the idea of an encroaching, Exorcist-style evil, brought closer and closer by coincidence, whilst building a biting social satire-the Tylers are a mixture of awkward and unlikable, and one almost feels Peele neatly playing on expectations of how he approaches race in the beach scenes. The lasting image, and one that haunts Adelaide in a drawing, that starkly echoes her own experience, is that of Jason in front of a blood handed man, present in her own childhood, whose biblical quoting sign only piles on the religious imagery.

And then, the film takes a right turn. In a scene that cranks up the tension, minute by minute, a family appears on the driveway, and soon prove to be hostile. Peele sidesteps us into the home invasion, slasher, B-Movie genre, as, in arguably the film's most shocking scene, the quartet of invaders reveal themselves to be Adelaide and her family. This other family, of corrupted, violent, and quasi-feral copies and duplicates of the Wilsons, led by matriach Red, are the best thing about the film. Alex twists Jason into a bemasked, twitchy, fire-obsessed feral creature whose mask reduces him to inhuman, a Jason or Leatherface-esque snarling quadruped, whilst Joseph turns Zora into a slasher-grinning violent unstoppable figure, her face as masklike as her brother's covering. Duke's guttural growling enforcer, is, however, nothing compared to Nyong'o's Red.

Rarely have we had a female antagonist in horror like Red, a dangerous, calculating, scheming reflection of Adelaide, and, in a film where Peele pulls superb performances out of practically every actor in dual performances, Nyong'o's is the best, as, through a hissing, scratchy voice, and an utterly compelling performance, beginning with her motive for attacking the family, in a fairy-tale-esque story of an entire caste of people forced to watch their better halves, to which they are but shadows, enjoy their lives, as emotion overcomes both Red and Adelaide. Through here, there is everything from unresolved female trauma to the evil twin (the film later aludes to this even more strongly with the Shining-esqueTaylor twins), to a pure and furious refraction of the self, the id made vengeful flesh.

 From here, the film jumps gears as the Wilson family attempt to make their escape, as both they, and seemingly the entire of America come under attack from their violent doppelgangers, as carnage, trauma, and everything from our heroes dispatching themselves in jet-black comic scenes to a scene of sudden bleak catharsis in which Adelaide is forced to remind herself that, in a sense, they are killing themselves, building to a visually striking and psychologically harrowing finale that mixes science fiction, horror, and thriller as few films before have managed to.

On the surface, as with Get Out, one can read Us as pure entertainment, and Peele is clearly not adverse to this reading-there's a sly, self-referecial sense to some of the scenes-one, after all, cannot take dopplegangers murdering their original selves cut to God Only Knows by the Beach Boys entirely seriously, nor some of the more on-the-nose homages to other films, or the "what's Home Alone?" riff that made its way into the trailer. Heck, even in the eventual, peak-1980s plan of the underground people, or "Tethered" as they eventually reveal themselves, one isn't sure whether to find it disturbing or funny, nor the rabbit imagery sinister, or a slightly better shot Night of the Lepus.

But scratch the surface, as you can scratch the surface of any classic horror movie and find a motive to the bloodletting, the violence, the scares, and underneath Us's red slasher-psychological-supernatural skin, Peele's common themes come into sharp relief. In Red's guttural pronouncement that "We Are Americans", the film practically opens up a void, a pit of pure horror, beneath itself-a gutpunch of a line. America is violent-the Manson-esque slaying of the Taylors in which camera, like ersatz Siri is impassive, the violence with which the Wilsons dispatch their other selves-the film holds up a mirror to our gung-ho glee at the violence and jump scares of the slasher genre, of a nature born from, and beholden to, violence of what modern horror has become, and makes us feel ashamed of ourselves.

In a way, Peele echoes Childish Gambino, just as Gambino referenced Get Out in This Is America. This is America. We are Americans. As Gambino turned his eyes upon gun violence, upon the subjugation of Afro-Americans, pulling in references to everything from Jim Crow to the glass ceiling keeping Afro-Americans down in less-skilled jobs, in rougher neighbourhoods, so Peele's literally subterranean Tethered are a lower class, a throw-away, a failure. In short, they are a 21st Century answer to H.G. Wells' Morlocks, themselves based on a racial group in 16th Century Eastern Europe, a lower-class primitive people who prey upon a naive America above-a reference to a loose adaption of The Time Machine , C.H.U.D. in Us only compounding it more.

But it perhaps signifies more than this-this is an America tearing itself, quite literally, apart in a search of unity-if Get Out was emblematic of the racial undercurrent in a supposedly post-racial America, a heralding of the arrival of the end-product of a country sleep-walking into the Presidency of Donald J Trump, so Us is a reaction to the division he has spread across the country. Nowhere is this seen better than in the very nature of the Tethered, and their eventual plan-which, despite its naivity, its childish refraction of an historically flawed, eventually unsuccessful charity event-is an attempt to find purpose, to heal a fractured America. Yet, even in this division, which one could read as anything from class to background to purely some unspecified Other, there remains intersectionality, of race. Peele, as the best horror directors do, tells tales personal to himself and coloured by his background, and it is a voice that cinema, of any genre, needs.

Us is a film about identity-about being American, about being black, about being a mother, a trauma survivor. But it is more than that-just as Peele plays on the audience's fears, digging deep into the very nature of fear personal and universal, so Peele plays upon the identity of the audience itself-Us is a mirror to its audience, and, as few films have done before, so Us reflects back exactly what we give it-in the most horrific, bleakly funny, thrilling way possible, Us is about us. And with it, Peele becomes a new titan in his genre.

Rating: Must See