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After the runaway success of GET OUT (2017), American comedian-turned-filmmaker Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature proves that it is not a fluke, US, superficially drawing on the well-worn home invasion thriller stereotype, is set in the present day and homes in on a middle-class African-American nuclear family Gabe and Adelaide Wilson (Duke and Nyong’o), their two kids Zora (Wright Joseph) and Jason (Alex), who are vacationing in their beach house in Santa Cruz.

But an ominous prologue set in 1986, when a young Adelaide (Curry) coming across with a doppelgänger in a derelict funhouse in Santa Cruz beach boardwalk, suggests something insidious has transformed her, and now she is reluctantly back to face it. Adelaide is ruffled from the very start, and after a sojourn on the beach (with a fiendish tease of luring Jason to the same funhouse), the same night, they are attacked by a quartet of their red-robed doppelgängers, and seemingly, only the ringleader, Adelaide’s ringer Red is capable of articulation (although barely intelligible), and after a series of clumsy scuffles, the family manages to retreat together, then another bout with their white friends’ doppelgängers results in more casualties, during which, witnessed by Jason, it seems that Adelaide begins to relish in the taste of blood, also Peele’s comic bent often slips in unexpectedly when the tension maxes out, predominantly at the expense of Winston Duke’s emasculated paterfamilias athwart his thick-set, towering physique.

After the third-quarter of the Wilsons dispatches their respective ringers, the climatic face-off between Adelaide and Red takes place in the underground tunnel led by the funhouse, a scissor-wielding Red goes out of her way to deliver expositional details (mostly lost on foreign ears, but Peele punctuates the bloodbath with delirious dancing montages and aural enchantments that dilute the on-screen violence), and temporizes a coup de grâce to finish the wounded Adelaide, only to let the table be turned on a predictable fashion, the Wilsons emerges as the ultimate winner, but there is a final reveal, that could change audience’s entire perspective, although one can hardly admit it is totally unexpected.

While sweepingly omitting the minutiae concerning those doppelgängers (or “tethered” shadows), for instance, we are not apprised how grand the initial experiments are, Peele’s script stays closer to their superior counterparts, and tantalizes bums on seats with its allegory message bearing on a bigger milieu, if GET OUT nails the racial issue right on, US seeps into the entire mindset of the Americans, (it is the declaration “We are Americans!” elicits most laughter during this reviewer’s screening), and in hindsight, it is a failed crusade for someone who is spoiling for reclaiming her stolen, legit identity.

Still, it is impossible to not feel short-changed with the blatant missing pieces of what has happened to them during the interim years between 1986 to the present, how could those enclosed, brain-dead, secondary carbon copies can be turned into an army of rebellion, one can only relies on the Hands Across America reference, which a young Adelaide watches in the beginning of the movie, to connect the dots in one’s headspace.

Every main cast is requested to showcase the duality of being terrorized and terrorizing, and credibly, they all prove to be more than competent, with Lupita Nyong’o shines incandescently with her go-for-broke resolution, a heroine/anti-heroine uses all her might to protect her family, and Elisabeth Moss devilishly basks in the drastic about-face despite of being shoehorned into a peripheral role, but all in all, it is Madison Curry's centralized gaze that stays longer in the afterimage, almost a supernatural expression that is indwelt in Peele’s rather science-based if detail-shirked (open up for a sequel?) practice, who is so astute in conjuring up innovative contemporary man-made horrors which are like gold dust in this day and age.

referential entries: Peele’s GET OUT (2017, 7.3/10); Ari Aster’s HEREDITARY (2018, 7.6/10).