"While watching Us I really wanted to be scared. Horror movies are my favourite genre of cinema. I’m comfortable there. It feels like home, but the genre doesn’t really scare me. So what is the usefulness of horror movies for me? I could say that I can work through my past history of being abused in a safe manner by watching these movies and having some level of agency and control over what I’m experiencing passively, but I’m unsure if that’s the entire story. I probably don’t know the real answer, but there is one scene in Us, that really works for me. It hit a little close to home, and made me feel something I recognize in my own body. Lupita Nyong’o is an incredibly physical performer dating back to her Oscar-winning performance in 12 Years a Slave (2012). She makes you ache for what is happening in her body at any given moment, especially when it brushes up against violence. She has the capabilities to really emphasize even under-utilized parts of her body like when she clicks her teeth together and the way she clasps her face in her hands, and in an unraveling, galloping motion her fingers fall like dominoes across her cheeks. All of this pulls you into her physicality. It minimizes distance and Peele is smart enough to use close-up rather generously to emphasize what she’s doing. At one point in this movie, we see her looking out of a window. We can only see her back and she’s clasping herself for protection. It’s body language I’m familiar with immediately. I do it all the time. She begins to tell her husband about a horrific experience she had as a child on a beach where she saw someone who looked exactly like her, and this doppelganger attacked her. She’s been afraid of this other version of herself coming after her every day of her life. It lingers. During this scene, she shakes a little in the mirror. Her entire body convulses for a second, before she resettles and the aftershocks of that initial convulsion find their way down to her right arm, where she’s still clasping hold of herself. The movie gestures toward PTSD as a horror storytelling device in a few spots here and there, but it is mostly only realized in bits and pieces of Nyong’o’s body language. For a moment during that scene, I felt unsettled, because I thought the movie was going to go somewhere uncomfortable, but as Peele tends to do, that scene’s book-end is a joke. A funny one, but it’s there so you don’t feel so scared that the movie loses its fun. Jordan Peele holds your hand. Most horror films do, and this is ultimately fine, but the truly great ones leave audience’s stranded in uncharted territory. "

A lot of my close friends have told me recently that they found "Us" completely terrifying. I investigate why I wasn't and wrote a little bit about the subjectivity of being scared by horror movies. ($1 patrons)
www.patreon.com/posts/25972575