Us (R)
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It's hard for me to decide what category of horror movies to put this review under. It has a central concept that's sort of supernatural OR sort of sci-fi, but neither one feels quite right to me. It's also something of a psychological horror movie, but the threat is sort of too unrealistic for that. (Not that I don't have some unrealistic movies already listed under psychological horror, but... whatever.) Ultimately what I think this most resembles is a monster movie, it's just that the monsters are sort of human. They're also similar to zombies in a way, and so many other monsters, like vampires or werewolves, are at least somewhat human. So why not doppelgangers? ...Oh, what the heck, I'll list it under both "monster movies" and "psychological horror".

Here's the story: In 1986, a little girl named Adelaide (or Addy) is at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with her parents. She wanders off alone, and enters a strange funhouse, where she encounters a doppelganger. We don't get to see what happens next, until the end of the movie. That turns out to be a major plot twist, but I saw it coming from the very beginning, and I'm not sure how much it actually matters to the story.

We then flash forward to the present (the movie came out in 2019), when Addy (Lupita Nyong'o) is married to a man named Gabe Wilson, and they have a teenage daughter named Zora and a younger son named Jason. Gabe decides they should go on a vacation to Santa Cruz, which Addy doesn't want to do, but finally relents. (She's never told Gabe what happened to her when she was there as a kid.) When they get there, they go to the beach and meet up with friends of theirs, Kitty Tyler (Elisabeth Moss), her husband Josh, and their two daughters (whose names I never learned and aren't very important to the story). Later that night (at least I think it was that night, I'm not actually sure how long they were at their vacation home) Addy tells Gabe she wants to go home, and finally explains what happened to her, and how she's felt about it ever since. Then a family of four doppelgangers of Addy, Gabe, Zora, and Josh appear outside the house. They soon break in and terrorize the Wilsons, though only Addy's doppelganger speaks (in the raspiest voice ever). The Wilsons eventually escape and seek help from the Tylers, but they've already been killed by doppelgangers of their own, who now attack the Wilsons.

So, there's a lot of fighting mixed with a lot of escaping. I'm not sure what else to say about that. However, the news reveals that doppelgangers have been attacking people all over the country. The interesting central concept of the movie is the nature of the doppelgangers, who I guess live underground in various abandoned tunnels and like subways or whatever. They're "tethered" to the humans who live above via shared souls, and until Addy organized them, they didn't seem to have any control over their actions, merely mimicking the actions of their human counterparts. Because they seemed so mindless (and speechless) is why I compared them to zombies. Now they're trying to break free of the tethers. Anyway, the movie has various symbolic themes, like our unrecognized privilege that comes at the expense of others, and the fear of the dark sides in all of us, and... stuff. I'm not sure how much of the symbolism went over my head, but the things I did understand, I found interesting enough. Mostly, though, I look at the movie on more of a surface level of monsters against humans... where the monsters look exactly like us. That aspect of the movie was probably more resonant with me than the messages the movie imparts about society and human nature. But, either way, I thought it was a pretty good movie, even if I didn't find it truly great (as I did writer/director Jordan Peele's previous movie, Get Out). But it's not really fair to compare the movies. Each one stands on its own, and does its own thing. And at least I can't say I found this movie disappointing at all.