'Us'(2019) movie - Review by Naga

'Us' movie by Jordan Peele

Discover Card by SNL

Rating: 3/5

 I usually spend most of my Sundays trying to catch up some of the  funny skits on YouTube put out by Saturday Night Live(SNL). Today going over the videos from last night one after the other, I bumped into a skit made on discover card. It was deeply unsettling and I couldn't really follow the script. We see a young couple(perhaps recently married) seated at a breakfast table on a sunny morning(could be Sunday). The husband is busy going through his Facebook feeds on his iPad. He is a black man with a friendly face wearing horn rimmed glasses, a thin line of mustache over his upper lip and along his jawline. He is a bit stout and stocky in frame. His wife sitting next to him is a thin, tall woman with shot cut curls parted midways on her head. She was browsing her credit card account history and noticing something odd with her recent transactions, makes a call to the Discover Card customer service. As the husband Keenan warns her she would be hooked up to a robot, she says with Discover Card ' you get to speak to a person who is just like you' - apparently one of the marketing lines from the company's sales team. The person who picks up the call looks strangely similar to the caller. Wearing a bright red jumpsuit, dark circles under her eyes, face clear of make up, she looks more dead than alive. Visibly speaking in a horse voice with a difficulty in articulating , she says she is willing to help with the identity theft concerns the caller has. As the wife reads off a list of items that she didn't buy but appeared on the transaction list - some giant scissors, a thousand rabbits, a bunch of red jumpsuits - the first shock comes seeing those items in the possession of the  agent woman with a malicious smile on her cadaverous face. She begins to tell a story about a girl once upon a time..which is barely audible and the wife cuts off saying her family needs to go. The agent warns the wife to be careful and says that 'while you are on vacation, I sit in a cave'. What did she mean by sitting in a cave? Doesn't she have a job to work for? Well. She walks off the phone hanging in the air and the husband takes it to glean whats going on. Out of no where a man appears looking exactly like the husband, wearing the same red jumpsuit screeching and moaning into the phone. This is where the skit ends leaving viewers to grasp at its meaning.

I didn't understand any of it. It felt like I was missing a piece of the puzzle and wanted to check out what the comments read. Many of them lauded the brilliant effort by the makers of the skit and I had to scroll down a bit until I read that this plot is loosely based on the movie 'Us'. Intrigued and not having anything else to do, I decided to watch the movie online. The quality of the video is poor as it only CAM version. I wouldn't say it is the best watching experience i have had since most of the movie was in the dark. I am sure i must have missed many of the key scenes due to the poor quality and would definitely like to re-watch in future.

A family of four - father,mother, a teen daughter and young son - go out on vacation to a place which the mother visited when she was a child. Left to the care of her father who is playing a game, the child wanders off into a house of mirrors. She encounters another child in the closed space who looked exactly like her and scared she runs back to her family outside. She never forgets the other child and is haunted by memories of the incident. Her parent teach her ballet dancing to get her mind off of whatever traumatic experience she had suffered in that house.  The memories and subconscious fears start coming back as they set up their temporary stay at the new house and she refuses to go to the beach without explaining why. The husband persuades her to go anyway. She tells him her desire to leave the place as she senses something dark hanging over her head. She also tells him the story from her childhood which she hid from everyone else. He tries to make a joke out of it but seeing her grave face stops. Then the lights go out, back up generator doesn't kick in as it should. The son comes into the room announcing the presence of a family of four people in their driveway. They try to lock the doors, warn the family off and call the cops. But the family breaches their front door lock system and take them hostage. The woman from the family starts telling a story and it is apparent she is only one who can speak. The others have cadaverous faces, soulless eyes and moaning for speech. She tells how once upon a time there was a girl who was a shadow to another girl. When the girl got hungry, she got to each rich cooked food but when the shadow got hungry, she was forced to feed on live rabbits and drink their blood. As the girl grew up, got married and became a mother, the shadow was forced to do the same. The purpose of their visit is to untether the bond that existed between the wife and her (the girl is the wife and the shadow is the woman). The family held in hostage overtakes the other and escapes to their friends' place. Meanwhile many similar "shadow people" come out from where ever they were coming from (the gutters and sewers as the police say later on) and kill the friends taking over their home. Walking unknown into the trap, the family manages a narrow escape killing the red clothed shadow people. By this time it becomes a full fledged national issue of concern and the police fail to establish the source of these people and why they look very similar to the humans they are trying to kill. As the story unfolds, we reach the end real quick. The woman doppelganger at the end before getting killed by the wife tells her the story of  why they are the way they are.

Apparently, long time ago humans manage to make their clones and fail to make copies of soul too. So a single soul of ever human is to be shared with the "tethered" ones. Two bodies one soul. The tethered ones were designed to be put in underground cellars and used as controllers to the untethered ones above. But the tethered ones were forgotten and hence live trapped for a long time. Until on that chance meeting which brought the woman and the wife together as children. The woman understands that there is a world beyond the walls of their caves and starts planning retribution. She becomes the leader to the other shadow people and orchestrates a massive come back. They would probably have taken over the human race( stronger because of the long time planning and ruthless barbaric natures possessed by the shadows) -  but once the leader(the woman) gets slaughtered by the wife, it ends and peace reigns once more.

I certainly didn't think the family is in any sort of danger. The thread of suspense and thrill caused by the 'Why' holds on till the end. One soul shared by two bodies has been a concept I have been chewing on for sometime now. I first came across it listening to one of the lectures from Evolutionary Astrology. A soul after having evolved for a long time splits off into two when it is faced with two equal and diametrically opposite desires. It doesn't know how to handle the situation and how to reconcile one end to the other. It is of course not what is conveyed in the movie. It is more sc-fi than science where humans learn to make clones which share the same soul as the original. It wouldn't be bluffing if i say the skit from SNL is more chilling than the movie itself. Because it is obvious from the start that the family is going to get away from this nightmare unscathed.