Us A Massive Letdown From the ‘Get Out’ Director

Us

Starring Lupito Nyong’o, Winston Duke

Directed  by Jonathan Peele

Rating: **(2 stars)

To say  director  Jonathan Peele’s second feature film is  a letdown  would be  erroneous. His first much-feted  fear-jerker Get Out had left  me cold. While most learned critics across the world found it inventive and witty, it struck as being singularly stupid, and  racist  in an inverted  kind of way.

 Race and colour  are not an  issue in  Peele’s  new  film.Thank God for small mercies!  This time he is on another trip as his  wholesome Black African family is  attacked by ghouls  who are spitting images  of  each member  of  our wholesome family.  So the  ghoul attacking  the  wife looks exactly like the  wife, the  one  attacking the  husband  looks like his  mirror -image. Ditto the children.

All this  could make  for an entertaining humour-horror hijinks like , say, our own Stree. But Peele  is on to a far bigger gameplan. He  brings in issues regarding governmental  intervention in  citizens’ lives and the  violation of privacy.Long after  we are sick of our Wholesome Family caught  in  miserably compromised  situations  during a vacation that could put you off seaside resorts  for all times to come, the wisdom of the all-knowing filmmaker  kicks in.

Much of Peele’s  first  film was about a  Black man running from his  White attackers. Here again the  premise  of  the horror-raising event  is  the same except for the fact that  the race is no  consideration. Black or white,  no  one is spared as  a community  of  ghoulish attackers  go on a rampage.

Miraculously  the  family of  4 remains  intact.The  protagonists seem  to get a hang of how to overcome their  otherworldy  attackers  in time  at  all. The very beautiful Lupito Nyong’o  takes  the  lead in  subduing the  sickening  spirits. Like all horror movie queens she is constantly  running screaming  knifing and  bludgeoning . The  difference is, the one she attacks looks  exactly like  her.

 Inventive, no?  Not quite  the  pathbreaking horror charmer that Jonathan Peele’s fans expect, Us  leads  us  to believe  there  is  life after death. Only to  pull the  rug from under  our feet by  showing that  life itself  can turn miserable  enough to rival death.