People familiar with Jordan Peele's career in comedy may have been surprised when it was first announced that his feature directorial debut was going to be a horror movie, but Peele's move into the horror genre has certainly paid off for him. His first movie, GET OUT, made over $250 million at the global box office and was nominated for multiple Academy Awards – with Peele himself taking home an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. His second film, US, is now in theatres, and has become a huge box office success as well. As of this writing, US is about to cross $220 million in worldwide earnings. So now that Peele has two horror hits on his hands, let's put them up against each other and see what happens when GET OUT and US Face-Off.
The quest for eternal life has reached a whole new level in the suburbs of upstate New York, where a secret society has discovered how to place a person's consciousness into the body of someone else. It's called the Coagula procedure, and it involves some hypnosis to trap the consciousness of the reluctant body donor in a dark void called The Sunken Place before the consciousness of the other person is placed in their body through some brain surgery. As the new consciousness takes control, the original person will remain in the Sunken Place, a passenger in their own body, able to do nothing but observe. Peele gives us just enough information to make it clear that being a Coagula donor is an awful thing. The idea of being stuck in the Sunken Place for any amount of time, let alone for the intended decades, is deeply disturbing.
There are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the continental United States, and these tunnels are inhabited by the Tethered, clones of the people on the surface. The government created these clones with the hope of being able to use them to control American citizens, but it didn't work out. Now the Tethered are just stuck underground, forced to mimic the movements and lives of the people on the surface, given nothing to eat but raw rabbit. While this is an interesting idea, I have trouble suspending disbelief when it comes to the Tethered because the information provided about them in US brings up a lot of questions that go unanswered, and what we see of their underground lives comes off as silly. The Tethered are great when they're killing people on the surface, but their underground history is tough for me to buy into.
Daniel Kaluuya earned an Oscar nomination as Chris Washington, a young black man who accompanies his white girlfriend Rose Armitage to her parents' place in upstate New York, unaware that they have Coagula plans for him. Although he notices strange things around the Armitage household, Chris tries to remain as calm and rational as possible because he doesn't want to upset anyone. Eventually things do become upsetting. Along the way we see that Chris is harboring a lot of pain over the loss of his mother, who was killed in a hit and run incident when he was a child. That trauma plays into some of the choices Chris makes in the film, and when we see Chris think back on the night when he lost his mom it is very emotionally effective.
Adelaide Wilson (Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o) had an encounter with her own double when she was a young girl. That encounter, which took place in a hall of mirrors, had a huge impact on both Adelaide and her Tethered clone. More than thirty years after the event, Adelaide is still haunted by it, living with a fear that the "mirror girl" is going to come after her someday. Nyong'o conveys her character's unease over returning to the area where the event happened, while flashbacks show how much it affected her. The "mirror girl" fear isn't relateable, but Nyong'o plays it well. Adelaide is scared but strong, a caring mother, and in the midst of fighting the Tethered even shows some sympathy for the doubles killed by her and her family.
The Armitages seem like a fine bunch of people at first. Rose (Allison Williams) and Chris are in love, and she is shown to be a very supportive and protective girlfriend. Her parents – neurosurgeon Dean (Bradley Whitford) and psychiatrist Missy (Catherine Keener) – happily welcome Chris into their home. Rose's brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) is a bit odd, but that's expected from siblings. The Armitages are very deceptive, though, and are secretly up to some terrible things. As evident from the bodies Dean's parents are living in. Any likeability the Armitages had is out the window by the end of the film, by which time it's clear that these people are monsters.
The villainous family in US are the doubles of the heroic family. Abraham (Winston Duke) is the hulking, brutish double of Adelaide's husband Gabe. Umbrae (Shahadi Wright Joseph) is the fast, smiling, psychotic double of their track-running daughter Zora. Pluto (Evan Alex) is the masked, burn-scarred, fire-obsessed double of their son Jason. Adelaide's double Red is the only member of the Tethered who can speak, and Nyong'o turns in an awards-worthy performance as this character, who has suffered a great deal during her life underground. Most of the Tethered are just homicidal maniacs, but Red has a depth that makes her an unforgettable character.
GET OUT takes the psychological approach, this isn't a slashfest with a high body count. Aside from an opening scene where a character gets knocked out, it saves its violence for the climax – after it has spent most of the running time focusing on paranoia and strange behavior. When the violence hits it's quite satisfying, because it's directed toward characters who deserve some comeuppance. Heads are bashed and stomped, people get stabbed and impaled, there's gunfire and regular fire… And all of this is likely to make you cheer.
A lot of this film's running time is taken up by sequences of above-grounders being attacked or threatened by Tethered clones, running from them, or fighting back against them. Victims of the Tethered get stabbed and slashed with the scissors they all carry around, while there's more variety to the ways the Tethered are dispatched. Characters arm themselves with a baseball bat, a golf club, a fireplace poker, a heavy decorative object. Cars, boat motors, a flare, and flames are also put to use in this fight for survival.
Some humor in GET OUT comes from the uncomfortable situations Chris finds himself in with Rose's family and the African Americans he encounters who have elderly white people in their heads, but the majority of the humor comes from the comic relief character Rod, Chris's best friend. TSA agent Rod is able to basically deduce what's going on with Rose's family from the information Chris gives him through phone calls; he thinks people are being brainwashed into being sex slaves, which is close enough. Rod is played by comedian Lil Rel Howery, who is fully in comedy mode here, and I find his performance to be a bit too comedic for this type of movie.
Doppelgängers are rising up from the ground to slash their look-alikes with scissors, but the event isn't entirely devoid of humor. The Wilsons and their friends still have humorous interactions while running and fighting for their lives. Some of the laughs come from the absurdity of the situation and how ill-equipped the characters are to handle it, while other laughs come from exchanges like the one where the Wilsons compare the count of how many clones each of them has killed. Some attempts at humor fall flat (I wasn't into Tim Heidecker hamming it up as his Tethered character), but for the most part US finds a good balance between horror and laughs.
The outcome of this Face-Off was a surprise to me, as I went into it with the feeling that GET OUT was going to win. I enjoyed US and found it to be a well made semi-apocalyptic slasher movie, but I also had issues with it that I didn't have with GET OUT. But as it turns out, US has enough going for it that it managed to tie with GET OUT in this competition. I may not be able to completely go with the idea of the Tethered and don't connect with US's Adelaide as much as I do with GET OUT's Chris, but US has some good violence, I prefer its brand of humor over Lil Rel Howery's part in GET OUT, and Lupita Nyong'o was really awesome as Red… So it's a tie.
Do you agree with the tie outcome, or do you think one of these films should have trounced the other? Share your thoughts on Jordan Peele's horror offerings in the comments section below.
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