Lupita Nyong’o

Us (2019)

André Crous

Jordan Peele’s second feature film, Us, is a serious horror production that surpasses his début, Get Out, in style if not in substance. 

Us (2019)USA
4*

Director:
Jordan Peele
Screenwriter:
Jordan Peele
Director of Photography:
Mike Gioulakis

Running time: 120 minutes

For the film critic, the problem with twist endings is that it is frowned upon to dwell on that final revelation, despite their importance to the experience. Even just mentioning that there is a last-minute information dump that causes us to rethink the entire film is often too much for the reader to handle. It’s a fine line to walk, but neither the critic nor the reader/potential viewer should be overly sensitive, particularly if it is made clear why such information is included.

Jordan Peele’s Us ends with a labyrinthine flashback that seems to tell us everything before turning our whole notion of the story’s past upside down and then, for good measure, twisting our collective nuts one last time before the credits roll. But while the film does contain traces of this shocking development throughout, most notably in the form of a tune that is whistled, the character concerned simply does not embody the skeleton she has in her closet. The traces seem planted, while the central performance is almost unaffected. The actions do not bespeak a closely held secret, and therefore, the film will not be much more interesting the second time around. And that’s worth a mention in a review such as this.

It all starts out very peculiarly and then gets weirder and weirder until the climax in a subterranean, rabbit-filled lair. In 1986, a young girl named Adelaide visits the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents. At some point when they aren’t paying attention, she wanders off and into a mirror maze (in a dark twist of humour, it entices the customer to “find yourself”). She looks around for a way out but doesn’t find one. Someone appears behind her – a stranger who is as tall as she is, wears the same clothes and has the same hairstyle. But before we can see their face, the film cuts to the opening credits sequence, which involves a multitude of white lab rabbits.

Peele’s second film is a far cry from his first, Get Out, the global smash hit that somehow managed to induce in the viewer the anxiety of a psychological thriller while very clearly poking fun at supposedly liberal white Americans’ racial prejudices. In Us, whose title hints at a link with the United States (a link that is ultimately very weak if not altogether obscure), he is much more interested in making a genre film than in making a statement about contemporary society.

In the present day, an adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is just settling in for holiday with her family at a cabin. Husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is happy-go-lucky, seemingly without a care in the world, and is particularly excited about taking his children to the nearby beach in Santa Cruz. This news, a close-up reveals, hits Adelaide like a ton of bricks. But she puts on a brave face for her children, Zora and Jason.

The same night, after the visit to the beach, a mute family of four appear in their driveway. But it’s not just any family – it’s their doppelgängers: four individuals who have features very similar to theirs but are wearing crimson-coloured clothing. In addition, each of them is armed with a golden pair of scissors. Only one of them speaks, albeit with great difficulty and a voice that sounds like someone who is always being strangled: Adelaide’s alter ego, Red, who is quickly revealed to be the mastermind behind an uprising from the underworld.

This underworld consists of underground walkways alluded to in the film’s epigraph, which informs us of “thousands of miles” of tunnels beneath the continental United States. The characters down below mostly behave in a way that mirrors their above-ground counterparts (although, curiously, that is not always the case). This intimate relationship means they are “tethered” to each other. Plato’s cave, but with sentient shadows, would be an eerie but apt comparison.

Except for the epigraph, the first real foreshadowing we get of this tethering is a stunning image at the beach, where the camera hovers straight above the action to capture the family walking in a straight line, barely visible, while seemingly attached to their giant shadows that are lifelike but take on a life of their own as animate shadows. National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz is famous for a similarly striking composition he made with camels in 2005.

Following the initial home invasion, we quickly realise that the uprising is not just limited to the family of four but extends to the entire United States. Somehow, as is all too often the case with disaster movies, the rest of the world is unaffected. The family sticks together, trying to learn from each other how best to kill the impostors, until the final act, when Adelaide races (all alone, for reasons unexplained) into the underworld to find one of her children, who has been abducted.

This is where things take on a real mind-bending dimension as we have to put all the pieces together when the film climaxes in brightly lit hallways that could very well be tethered to the hotel room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Peele hits us with the climax, then knocks us off our feet with a bombshell surprise before delivering a second body blow. It’s the Sixth Sense of horror films, but the unexpected double twist vaults the film into a league all its own.

And yet, whereas M. Night Shyamalan’s famous blockbuster both made immediate sense and elicited admiration for blinding us to something that was in plain sight the entire time, Us conceals more and thereby reveals less, even on a repeat viewing. In his effort to shield the truth from us, Peele varnished over all the details that would have contributed to a richer fictional world, even at the risk of unveiling too much.

Even if it seems much more complex than it actually is, this is an original and stunningly crafted horror film.

Black Panther (2017)

André Crous

Not Ryan Coogler’s best work, but Black Panther’s mixture of big-budget special effects, intimate mythology and a yearning for what might have been is much needed.

Black PantherUSA
4*

Director:
Ryan Coogler
Screenwriters:
Ryan Coogler
Joe Robert Cole
Director of Photography:
Rachel Morrison

Running time: 135 minutes

Oakland, California, is where the revolutionary Black Panther Party was born in 1966. It is also where Oakland native Ryan Coogler, whose first two features – Fruitvale Station and Creed – are modern-day masterpieces, starts his superhero movie adaptation of the famous Marvel Comics character, in 1992, before moving to the present. But in a majestic, visually striking opening sequence, he tells the story of Wakanda, a nation hidden in the heart of Africa and endowed with limitless sources of the supermetal vibranium that have ensured the country’s financial survival and technological prowess despite its isolation.

The presentation of this history lesson calls to mind the opening minutes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, but the work of Coogler’s director of photography, Rachel Morrison, is much more sophisticated, as we appear to swing through time in an unbroken take whilst time unspools in the valleys below. Connecting Wakanda with Oakland is also the job of the camera, as it eventually swoops into the opening scene over a basketball court and settles on a young boy, who looks up and sees a space ship hovering above his apartment block. The links that Cooger and Morrison establish between past and present, poverty and technology, are a continual source of wonder because it is unusual to see this level of care taken in constructing a superhero film.

The titular Black Panther, king of the Wakandans, is played by Chadwick Boseman. Also known as T’Challa, he is the son of the former King T’Chaka, portrayed by South African veteran actor John Kani, and South Africa features everywhere in Black Panther. Not only is Wakandan really the Xhosa language (Nelson Mandela’s mother tongue and the second-most widely spoken language in the country), but one of the story’s main villains, Ulysses Klaue, is a white South African whose speech drips with an Afrikaans accent. Finally, the name T’Chaka is, of course, an unmistakable reference to one of the greatest military leaders the world has ever seen: Shaka, king of the Zulus.

But just as Shaka’s heirs could never match his acumen for waging battle, T’Challa does not do well in a comparison with his father, T’Chaka. This much is evident in his pitiful display of brawn shortly before his investiture: What is expected to be a coronation turns out to be something much more uncertain, as four of Wakanda’s tribes agree to T’Challa’s status as the new sovereign, but one tribe rejects him. This tribe, the Jabari, re-appears after centuries in hiding and have had no part in Wakanda’s development as an ultra-modern civilisation filled with technology that goes far beyond anything else on Earth, never mind the rest of the African continent. They are sceptical of the Wakandans’ talk of unity, particularly when they are themselves hiding out from the rest of the world.

This uneasy unity, of being one while being many, is an issue South Africa has sought for decades to address, even dubbing itself the Rainbow Nation. But for all the utopian idealism such metaphors inspire, it takes hard work for peace to be sustainable, and the tension is evident in Black Panther, too. Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), who is a Wakandan spy in Nigeria and helps to save a group of women from an unnamed terrorist group (clearly Boko Haram), continually pushes T’Challa to share Wakanda’s knowledge and riches with the less-developed world instead of hoarding it for itself.

The same thread runs through the film’s most complex vein, as its powerful male characters struggle to decide whether to help the world’s vulnerable or to turn inward and be selfish with the endless vibranium resources. While T’Challa is reluctant to find a solution, the arrival of Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), a US war veteran and covert operations specialist who knows how to bring down a foreign government, forces him to face reality.

Although he is clearly the villain, Killmonger’s past (he grew up an orphan), justified feelings of betrayal (his father, N’Jobu, was T’Challa’s uncle, and he was killed by his own brother, King T’Chaka) and sense of purpose (he wants to use Wakanda’s technology to give power to the world’s disadvantaged black populations), not to mention his extraordinary good looks, all make him a complex character whom we empathise with even as we root for his enemies.

Such complexity is a welcome change from the standard big-budget and superhero fare. But it’s a shame T’Challa isn’t seen to be struggling with this issue more seriously. In fact, the ruler of the world’s most technologically advanced nation is surprisingly ill-prepared for the throne and the duties that come with it.

Just like Eddie Murphy’s Akeem Joffer in Coming to America, T’Challa seems to have skipped any and all discussions in the royal household about the road to being a king. His friendly demeanour endears him to most of his people, but he is clearly uncomfortable as regent, and his decision to change Wakanda’s approach to the outside world, well-intentioned though it may be, seems to be made without him realising how difficult it will be.

One of the film’s first scenes take place at the “Museum of Great Britain”, which houses artefacts looted by the British Empire over the centuries. There is a nagging question throughout as to whether things will change for Wakanda once it opens up to the world and its riches are discovered. Will it suffer the fate of fellow African countries whose resources have been plundered through outside meddling? Or will its mixture of tradition and advanced technology (not unlike a religious superpower such as the United States) protect it against the onslaught of an aggressive globalisation?

Although by far one of the best superhero films out there, Black Panther nonetheless never veers too far from the well-beaten path of its predecessors, and the good inevitably triumphs over the bad without much of a scuffle. The film raises many issues that will require a thorough probing in a sequel, however, and if these issues are addressed head-on and in keeping with the rules of the real world instead of those of superhero fiction, it will easily clear the bar set by this first instalment.