Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 18 March

Us (Peele, 2019)

Back in July 2019 – just as Jordan Peele’s Us was being released to home enter­tain­ment – I wrote this com­pil­a­tion of crit­ic­al responses to the film which I called “Overthinking Us”.

Peele’s hor­ror story about a middle-class Black American fam­ily haunted by mys­ter­i­ous dop­pel­gängers, was ripe for alleg­or­ic­al inter­rog­a­tion and I wasn’t the only one who was interested. 

In the art­icle, I sur­vey online reviews and essays from Esquire, Wired, io9, New York Times, Film School Rejects, Popmatters, Grapevine and even my col­league at RNZ, Simon Morris, to show how reward­ing it can be to go deep on a subject.

It frus­trates me how in this busi­ness we have to pri­or­it­ise dis­cuss­ing enter­tain­ment value – because the pro­duc­tion line is relent­less and a con­sumer report is what most out­lets want – but rarely get stuck into what a work of art means. Us is a ser­vice­able slasher/horror on the sur­face but lit­er­ally under­neath is where it gets so inter­est­ing and so rich.

Maybe I should have pur­sued a career in aca­demia so I could spend my days up to my eye­balls in this sort of arcana, but I like being read and listened to and – hope­fully – my reviews occa­sion­ally offer that extra dimen­sion that makes you go, “that’s inter­est­ing, I nev­er would have thought of that”. There are a lot of obser­va­tions in the art­icle that did that for me.

Here’s my final quote from “Overthinking Us”:

And finally, at Esquire once again, only Matt Miller (in an art­icle about the import­ance of Jeremiah 11:11) makes the dir­ect con­nec­tion between the two let­ter title and the coun­try the story is tak­ing place in. I thought that was abso­lutely crit­ic­al, to be honest.

“It’s also worth not­ing, if you did­n’t notice, that Us could also quite lit­er­ally be U.S.”

Where to watch Us

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix

Australia: Streaming on Netflix, Binge, Paramount+, Stan or FoxtelNow

Canada: Streaming on Netflix, prime Video or Paramount+

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Netflix

India: Streaming on Hotstar

USA: Digital rental

Further listening

Last Friday’s chat with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights is worth a listen. We talked about Soderbergh’s crowd pleas­ing Black Bag, Asura on Netflix (reviewed here on Friday) and my free selec­tion was the slow offi­cial release of the Henson Company’s clas­sic fam­ily sci-fi show Farscape on YouTube.