Jordan Peele makes horror out of the moment a polite person notices something is wrong and cannot yet say so. Get Out trusts that moment, so the fear and the jokes arrive together; Us stops to explain it, and the fear thins.
Fi1m perspective
The Peele character is the one who has noticed something is wrong and has not yet decided what to do about it. On Key & Peele it was Peele himself, playing the president with a face that would not move while Keegan-Michael Key's Luther stood beside him and shouted what he actually meant. In Get Out (2017) it is Daniel Kaluuya's Chris, uneasy from the moment he arrives and unable to say why without seeming rude. Everything Peele has made turns on that gap between what a person can see and what he is allowed to say about it.
He came up through improv, at Boom Chicago and The Second City, then spent 2003 to 2008 on Mad TV. The sketch programme he created with Key for Comedy Central, 53 episodes from 2012 to 2015, is where the method was worked out. Some of those sketches were not comedies at all. Two men being polite on a street would end somewhere close to horror, and the picture changed before the writing did: the light dropped, the lens got longer, and Monsour's cutting went back to Peele's blank face exactly when we wanted it. Then came the films, all written and directed by him: Get Out, Us (2019) and Nope (2022), with Monkeypaw Productions, which he founded in 2012, producing BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Candyman (2021) in between.
Get Out is the one to see first. Its white liberals take their own decency for granted, and Peele understands how exhausting it is to stay polite under that kind of attention. We sat through Chris's weekend with our shoulders up, not because anything had happened but because every friendly remark at the house asked him to prove he was not offended. Kaluuya makes each of those small encounters carry weight, and the jokes never leave; they are the same scenes as the frights. Only a few of the supporting performances are broader than they need to be.
Us shows the habit that lets him down. The premise, someone with your face wants to hurt you, needs no explaining, and at first Peele does not explain it. Lupita Nyong'o gives two performances, both unsettling, and the switches between family comedy and terror are quick enough to catch us out. Then the script starts telling us how much the doubles are meant to stand for, and the more it accounts for, the more we doubted. We found ourselves checking the logic when we should have been worrying about the Wilsons. The reviews so far of Nope divided on similar lines, admiring the scale and less certain the ideas held together.
Peele has said, "I feel very strongly I just cannot give people the same thing. That's just not the point of filmmaking." Fair enough. We would only ask that whatever the next thing is, he trust it the way he trusted Chris on the doorstep, and leave the explaining to us.
Biography
Jordan Peele is an American actor, comedian and filmmaker. He joined the cast of the Fox sketch comedy series Mad TV in 2003 and remained until 2008. With Keegan-Michael Key he created and starred in the Comedy Central series Key & Peele, which ran from 2012 to 2015.
Peele wrote, directed and produced his feature directorial debut Get Out (2017). He produced Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman (2018). He has since written and directed the films Us (2019) and Nope (2022).
