The Beast Within

“Us” and “Roll Red Roll.”

Most of Jordan Peele’s new movie, “Us,” is set in and around Santa Cruz. The town is as warm as Amity, in “Jaws”(1975), and you have to go back to “The Birds” (1963) to see such enthusiastic gulls. Hither comes a happy family, the Wilsons, who have a summer home not far away—a calm and bucolic spot, beside a lake. Gabe (Winston Duke) is bespectacled and easygoing; his wife, Adelaide, or Addie (Lupita Nyong’o), finds the going a little harder, but runs a steady ship. They have two children, a teen-age girl named Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), who prefers the company of her smartphone, and her younger brother, Jason (Evan Alex), who likes to wear a mask, as if every day were Halloween. What the Wilsons encounter, in the course of the plot, is harrowing and outlandish, but they have too many wits to be frightened out of them, and it’s the very normality of the family that sees them through. If Pixar made an animated version of “Us,” it would be called “The Credibles.”

One day, Gabe wants to go to the beach, but Addie is none too keen, and we know why. The movie has a prelude, set in 1986, when Addie, as an inquisitive girl (Madison Curry), went to the amusement park at Santa Cruz Beach, with her parents, and wandered off, bearing a candy apple like a beacon. Alone, she entered one of the attractions, which bore the legend “Find Yourself,” and walked into a wilderness of mirrors. There, as forewarned, she found herself, reflected all too well. Why she has never told Gabe about this incident and why, despite its lingering effects, she now agrees to head back to the beach with him and the kids is hard to grasp. People as smart as Addie do foolish things, of course, but there’s more at stake here. Can she not stay away from the scene of the trauma? Did part of her never leave?