The Wilson family owns a vacation house near the beach in Santa Cruz. Adelaide, the wife in the family, had an experience at that beach when she was a little girl and has no desire at all to revisit the place. Her husband convinces her to go there, however, together with the Tyler family to have a good time. Things don’t go as well as planned for, and back at the vacation house that night things turn even worse. Four mysterious people dressed in red appears outside the house, breaking in and terrorizing them. What’s even worse, is that all of these strangers look exactly like themselves…
“Us” is the second horror film directed by Jordan Peele, who made a name for himself with his debut horror movie “Get Out” in 2017. Not unexpectedly, the expectations regarding “Us” has been pretty high, but fortunately Peele shows us that he’s not just a one-time-hit director. “Us” manages to balance suspense, creepiness, social commentary and even a bit of comedy very well, just like he did in “Get Out”. “Us” is more of a straight-forward horror movie, with a higher level of suspense and creepy scenes. With Mike Gioulakis as the cinematographer (who was also the cinematographer for the very suspenseful horror movie “It Follows”), it should come as no surprise that this is a movie that will keep you at the edge of your seat for the most part.
“Us” is a movie that is best seen when knowing as little as possible about it, and I personally recommend avoiding any spoilers prior to watching it. It’s very hard, even impossible, to venture much further into the movie’s plot without spoiling things. There are a few plot holes that might leave you scratching your head in confusion, but fortunately not too much to ruin the experience.
Now let’s look forward to what Peele’s next entry into the horror world might be!
Director: Jordan Peele
Country & year: USA, 2019
Actors: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon, Madison Curry
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt6857112/
Danvers State Mental Hospital is an old asylum that has been empty since 1985. An asbestos team lead by Gordon (Peter Mullan) and Phil (David Caruso) is hired to do the preparations for the renovation of the old building. With a bonus payment of 10.000 dollars hanging over their heads if they get the job done within one week, the working environment becomes filled with stress and bickering. This is nothing compared to what the asylum has in store for them, however…
Tree Gelbman, a young college student, wakes up in a guy’s room, hungover as hell and barely no memory from last night. On top of it all, it’s her birthday today, a day she is not too fond of for reasons later revealed in the movie. She leaves the guy’s room with a pissy attitude, and we see pretty quickly that this is a girl that tends to make bad choices in her life, and treat people around her like crap. At the end of the day, she gets chased by someone wearing a mask, and ends up being killed. And then she wakes up in the guy’s room again, repeating the day all over again. In a desperate fight to reveal the identity of the killer, and try to figure out how to avoid being killed by him/her, she relives the day of her birthday and murder over and over…
Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a young medical student whose fiancee, Elizabeth Shelley, gets overrun by a lawnmower at a backyard party and gets shredded to pieces. The only thing left of her is her head, which he puts in the freezer. He’s determined to get her back in some way, and arranges his garage into a typical “mad scientist” lab. Then he drives around New York’s dark streets to pick up the finest hookers to assemble body parts for his new girlfriend.
«The Devil’s Candy» is an indie horror movie written and directed by Sean Byrne. I found out about this movie while watching some horror trailers on Youtube, and thought “an indie horror film that actually seem to have a high visual standard, and doesn’t look like it’s made out of 90% close-up shots? Let’s see what this is about”.