Jordan Peele’s Us opens for the Easter holidays on numerous screens, as suits a film that is at the same time a genre horror with nods to Don Siegel, Steven King and Wes Craven and a powerful metaphor of the age of Trump and Brexit.  In 1986, young Adelaide King (Lupita Nyong’o) watches a TV commercial for the charity event ‘Hands Across America’, which enlisted 6.5 million people to form a coast-to-coast human chain to oppose poverty.  She visits a boardwalk funfair with her parents and is traumatised by meeting a mirror-image self in a deserted fun house.  Returning thirty years later to the area with her husband Gabe and children Zora and Jason, she and her family are attacked in their guesthouse by four uncanny doppelgängers in red jumpsuits, armed with giant scissors. These are ‘the Tethered’, an underclass condemned, like the Morlocks in H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine (filmed in 1960 by George Pal), to live underground deprived of the life chances of their surface-world contemporaries. These, however, are not so much ‘other’ as the same.  During a night of threat and violent conflict, a terrified Adelaide asks her alter-ego Red who the Tethered are. Red answers, ‘We’re Americans.’ And, in a poignant twist, it is finally revealed that Adelaide is in fact Red, who took her place that night in the funhouse. As the family drive away, the Tethered spread across the country in an an echo of ‘Hands Across America’.

The film has moments of unexpected humour.  During the fight, someone screams at Ophelia, an artificial intelligence like Apple’s Alexa, to call the police: she responds by playing the track  ‘Fuck the Police’.  In a brief break from conflict, Gabe references Home Alone; the children have never heard of the film, and Adelaide tells her husband that conveniently placed electronic toys won’t stop the doppelgängers.  More portentous is a resonant reference to Jeremiah 11:11 (‘I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them’).  As no-one has hearkened to them, the Tethered have risen against structural deprivation.