For the love of God, the last thing I was expecting in a film like this was the most forced inclusion of the sliding-motorcycle shot from Akira (1988) and it just happened with no warning, out of the blue, and as cringe as it was, I loved every frame of it!!

People are calling the director’s current trajectory as the “Shyamalan effect” and with reasons of concern: “The films are starting to become ambiguous: What’s the point?”. This understandable, yet incorrect approach is one of the modern viewer’s symptoms that helps the industry to mass produce films with linearity and simplicity: “Just sell me the argument and go straight to it! I don’t want exposition. I want a good thriller/action/horror film; screw the rest, like the pseudo-philosophical takes of the characters or their unappealing ideological / spiritual spheres.”

I find this approach extremely disturbing, but Peele just doesn’t give a flying hoot. By no accident, his third film is an alien invasion film that takes tints of a western and crosses it with Spielberg’s top masterpiece: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); Shyamalan’s third film was Signs (2002) and, reportedly, Peele took that film as an inspiration, just like The Sixth Sense (1999) played an important role for the cast and crew to create the desired ambience in Us (2019). The tropes, action and suspense come straight from Hollywood and nowhere else, but when the sources of inspiration are mainly blockbuster renaissance watersheds, there is little room of criticism.

I’m 99.5% sure this is unintentional, but the opening shares an uncanny resemblance to Peter Weir’s masterful The Last Wave (1977), a film that opens and ends with ambiguity, but the plot’s development is fueled by bad dreams, premonitions, sky sighting and a weather so terrible that it makes polluted rain from Shanghai look like drinkable water. The western and sci-fi references are clearer this time, but beneath this, the episodic storytelling creates a sense of uneasiness in crescendo. As the human sight beholds more and the menace is more visually abstract, when imagination has less room to function, the stakes are increased and now the uncertainty comes from how to defeat a still incomprehensible menace.

For some reason, I find this film to be the most accessible of Peele’s works with Us as a contender, and the one that has been understood the least, not plotwise, but where it wanted to head. Beyond the unmistakable nod of the film industry looking to “film the unfilmable” or “the impossible” like the protagonist in King Kong (1933), there are many direct commentaries made by Peele that addresses modern film-watching philosophy without breaking the fourth wall and how it affects the progression of the traditional genres.

What? Do you want me again to… Ok….

-Nope (1983)
-I Said Nope (1983)
-Nope Way (1986)
-Aw, Hell Nope! (1988)
-Nope Wayp, Joséyp (1996, with less than 1,100 votes in IMDb)

88/100