"fuck the police, coming straight from the underground"

i love doppelgangers, home invasions, jungian synchronicity, carnival funhouses & hollow earth/hidden tunnel theory but HATE when personal/compartmentalized horror scales into global world war z disasters and movies that start with a flashback you gradually learn over time didnt show the most important part of the flashback so this was a mixed (mostly good) bag for me

expanding on themes tim heidecker explored when he adopted the impoverished son of reggie the toilet paper man to raise as his own, peele's eager, bighearted mess of a movie is more fullblooded slasher than GET OUT and while i dug the relentless gore & brutality it never really imprinted that queasy, demonic sense of wrongness i got from the big reveal in that movie. lupita kills it & the middle of this just WORKS (everything from driveway to "good vibrations" id be surprised if i see a gnarlier setpiece this year) but starts to fall apart towards the long, complicated end with uncalled-for (studio-urged?) exposition (unfair to compare but possession '81 nails this theme with zero explanation which is both scarier & allows the metaphor to breathe without getting buried in wondering "so, did a trump double walk up to the white house and stab him???") still its hard to focus on cliches & fumbles which theres so much to love about this: i see movie dudes comparing peele to ice-cold weirdos like kubrick or hitch when his heart & empathy & class/social insight spiked with love of absolutely scaring the shit outta people is 100% wes craven (+ a lil hooper, romero, larry cohen) and as somebody too young to have experienced going to the movies when these guys were in their prime its exciting to be alive for this now

one question tho WHY was lupita supposed to be in her 40s??