Us (2019)

For the final movie of the semester, I had to watch Us by Jordan Peele, a new director focused in the horror genre. This movie was about a family that moved to a new house not knowing that there were doppelgangers of themselves that were there. It starts out with a young girl named Adelaide where she went to a fair on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and wandered off into a house of mirrors, where she found a doppelganger of herself. Now, as an adult, she is hesitant to go back with her family because of her haunted past, but goes with Gabe and the rest of her family. When they get back, they find that there are doppelgangers that look just like them and have to fight them off.

This movie definitely shares elements with a lot of the movies studied throughout the semester. While it does not have similar plotlines, the main cast is similar to the main cast of Do the Right Thing, where the main characters are African American. It also shares similarities to The 400 Blows, where both Antoine and Jason share similar character traits with each other. Both characters are children that like to be mischievous in some way, where Antoine ditches the day with his best friend, while Jason likes to play tricks using his lighter.

Similar to many of the postmodern films that were studied, this film also deals with one of the main characters going through trauma and having a messed up past. Like Teddie, Georges, Diane, and Shosanna, Adelaide deals with a traumatic past during her childhood, where she finds a doppelganger of herself in the fun house on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk while wandering off by herself. Another similarity to this movie and the other postmodern films is that there are dual identities. In Us, each of the family members and all the people had doppelgangers that wanted to untether themselves, similar to the dual identities in both Shutter Island and Mulholland Drive. Using many of the main themes that were used during the postmodern movies, it may be a new turn for film where the main character or one of the main characters has a form of trauma and they have to figure out a way to deal with it.