Double Trouble

Jordan Peele follows his directorial debut Get Out with Us, a terrifying doppelgänger movie that dares to face the terror within. Total Film speaks to Hollywood’s hottest filmmaker and his starry cast about America’s nightmares in a damaged brain.

- Jamie Graham

What I can say is…” Pause. “Hmmm, what can I say?” Nervous laughter. “How can I answer that without giving too much away?” Silence.

Interviewing writer/director Jordan Peele about Us, his highly anticipated follow-up to Get Out, a horror movie so radical it was granted its own genre-tag of ‘social-thriller’, is a suitably tense experience. Don’t get us wrong, he’s a lovely guy, friendly in tone and quick to laugh. But he hasn’t toiled for years (“I had pieces of the story, images, certain ideas, before Get Out, but I started understanding the film in a new way a little over a year ago, and that’s when I wrote it”) only to blurt out his sophomore movie’s secrets before viewers can subject themselves to its mysterious mindscapes and insidious scares.

His cast are equally schooled in the art of shtum. “I can’t tell you that,” laughs Lupita Nyong’o. “I need to be as cryptic as possible to save you the experience…” explains Winston Duke. “We’d better leave that one,” advises Elisabeth Moss.

But before you roll your eyes and flip past this article to get to a feature that can actually tell you something you didn’t already know – that is, after all, why you buy the mag, right? – let it be known that Peele and his principal players are also masters in knowing what they can say. And trust us, it’s enough to establish Us as one of the must-see movies of 2019.

THE HORROR, THE HORROR

“This is a home-invasion film,” says Peele. “It’s about a family who come face-to-face with a family that is a bad, or evil, version of themselves. I wanted to contribute my own film to the sub-genre of doppelgänger horror films.”