I was recommended this movie to watch recently and after all the hype of Get Out I was really looking forward to it…did it live up to my expectations?

Us follows a family who are at a vacation house near Santa Cruz. The mother of the family used to go to Santa Cruz a lot but had an experience there one day where she went into a house of mirrors and met a girl who was the spitting image of her.

One night the family are disturbed by another family who are their doppelgängers. This family has certain quirks about them that are different to the main family but yet they are them.

It turns out that this family isn’t the only one that has doppelgängers as we see as the movie progresses a lot of people in America also have them. It turns out that these doppelgängers were experiments made by the government that were abandoned many years ago and finally they have decided to uprise against their real-world counterparts.

Over the course of this movie we see how the doppelgängers work and what they are doing and we begin to learn how they came to escaping the life that was set out for them. For me, while I really enjoyed this movie and found it quite fascinating, the underlying story and point of it was lost on me and I did have to give it a Google.

What I can deduce in my own opinion is that the storyline looks at the rich/poor divide in America and how if you’re born into the ‘real world’ and are not from the doppelgängers world you are more likely to succeed and do wonderful things with your life. But if you’re born as a doppelgänger not only are you tethered to a person in the real world so you have to go through everything that they go through but in a much worse way, you are also less likely to break out of this oppression. People in the real world get to have way more opportunities then those born into the doppelgängers’ world.

I found the ending quite interesting but also it was pretty obvious what was going to happen with the doppelgänger and the real world mothers having been switched when they met in the house of mirrors. I see it as this is why the uprising was able to happen, and that it shows that if this switch never happened then the doppelgängers would still be stuck underground in this facility where they have nothing, and the real world people would go on as if nothing was ever different.

That almost tells me that you have to be born into the right sort of society to be able to make it somewhere in your life and the only reason that the doppelgängers were able to get out was because the leader that helped them with the uprise wasn’t one of them. She did not come from the doppelgänger community, from the poor community, she came from the rich side and knew of a better life and so went after it. So talking about being born into a poor family this means you’re most likely going to stay poor, while being born into a rich family you’re more likely to stay rich. But a rich person becoming poor is able to become rich again due to the privilege that they did used to have and know about.

It was a fascinating movie that had some great cinematography and the final fight/ballet scene was gorgeous to watch. I loved the soundtrack and the little quips and jokes that it had to it. It wasn’t all horror and thriller, it was comedy too and I really appreciated that. It wasn’t as on the nose as Get Out but was still a great thought piece that really makes you appreciate what you have in your life and also the struggles that people who are less well off then you have. I think it’s terrible in the society that we live in that poor people stay poor and the rich will get richer and maybe a movie like Us can show people a glimmer of hope that maybe one day they can get out there situation and create a better life for themselves.

What did you think of Us?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding