I ’m greedy about my stars. There’s usually never enough of the good ones. Take Lupita Nyong’o. This woman can make a perfume ad worthy of the Louvre. She can turn a red carpet into the Yellow Brick Road. But I also like my stars onscreen. And she’s just not there very often. How can the fashion world be treating an Oscar winner better than the movies? I’m not the only person who wants to know. Jordan Peele appears to have been so determined to intervene that he cast Nyong’o in his horror-thriller “Us” — not once but two times, as a clone and her biological counterpart.
One is “sane” and the other is “evil,” meaning Nyong’o alternates, terrifyingly, between poles of psychological extremity. Sure, that in itself is a feat. But it’s merely the most obvious thing to applaud. The rigor of her achievement is that it won’t stop revealing itself. For the movie’s first third, what she’s doing might seem rather unremarkable. She plays Adelaide Wilson: bright, upper middle class and on vacation at her California ranch house with her goofy husband and their two children. Her biggest worry appears to be her teenage daughter’s decision to quit the track team. But you can sense her gathering fear that some terrible event is on its way; it’s dimming her glow as it heightens our anticipation.
The event, of course, is the other Nyong’o. This one is credited as Red, and has made her way up from deep underground to Adelaide’s house, on a mission to exterminate the planet’s current inhabitants so that her people — all clones — can take over. As Red, Nyong’o stands with the bearing of certain dictators — crimson jumpsuit, shoulders back, nose up — but moves as if she was reared by Alvin Ailey (if his dancers also carried water in a Japanese teahouse). Red looks prepared to bellow. But Nyong’o makes Red’s voice thin and gasping, the sort of sound that makes you want to call an E.N.T., even as it brings you to the edge of your seat to get closer to her mouth.
Maybe Nyong’o had a pre-existing model for this character. (She has mentioned that Peele prompted her with words like “regal” and “co*ckroach.”) But I’ve never seen anything like what she’s done here. Just the flick-flick flitting of her hand to command her troops to attack scared a year off my life. The movies are rich with textured villainy. But it’s not villainy that Nyong’o is acting here. It’s having been irrevocably wronged. And the woman who wronged her, decades ago, is 10 feet away, trembling on the sofa.
Jack Davison for The New York Times
The first time you watch “Us,” it’s Red generating the gravitational force. But after you understand the nature of Red’s aggrievement, the second viewing is about her injurer, about Adelaide. You’re watching to see what kind of unease, guilt and deviousness Nyong’o has installed in her bearing. This is actually the trickier role because it shouldn’t call too much attention to itself. Under every circ*mstance that does not involve this movie, Adelaide seems as if she would be a fine boss, wife, bridesmaid. But here, she’s quietly unraveling. Years of presumably studious repression begin to fray. Whatever it is that Adelaide’s been keeping at bay wants to disinter itself. Not too far into the film, Adelaide enters a room in her house and envisions her young self standing at a ballet barre, when this wicked look comes over her. Nyong’o takes a moment to savor it, as though it might have been missed. Nyong’o owns the fruit of that old bad seed, and it’s exhilarating watching her turn even a drop of its juice into what seems like a gulp.
It probably takes a third viewing for the performance’s harmony to hit you. That’s when you can appreciate (and recoil from) the psychological grisliness that undergirds the climactic violence between Adelaide and Red. It hurts to see them whack at and impale each other. But somebody has to lose. The movie that Peele wrote upends pure victimhood as easily as it does absolute villainy. Nyong’o’s job is to make the uncanny human in two differently tortured souls, one of whom might not have a soul at all. And locating that balance allows her to be as ornate, funny, frightening and weird as she’d like, as some of us have spent half a decade hoping she’d get to be.
Nyong’o won an Oscar five years ago for playing a plantation laborer named Patsey in “12 Years a Slave.” The part needed somebody who could wring herself out — somebody who could act her way through the whipping and pummeling and every other agony the film inflicted. But she was being acted upon as much she was acting. For a black performer, it’s an old career conundrum, the fictional plantation. There are ancestors. There are ghosts. There are pitfalls. The most dramatic (and lauded) parts for black actors often involve either enslavement or domestic servitude. It’s an American entertainment pathology.
I watched Nyong’o endure the psychosis of antebellum racism, and thought, God, if she’s this good here in oppression, how great would she be in a movie that frees her to thrive? She was there in “Black Panther,” battling and bantering with alluring ease. But it’s been small, or smallish, parts otherwise. Motion-capture stints and voice work — as a creature (in the “Star Wars” galaxy), as a wolf (in “The Jungle Book”). Nyong’o speaks English, Spanish, Swahili and Luo. She’s a Yale School of Drama graduate. So you’d better believe her ancient, shriveled-up, goggled space smuggler in those “Star Wars” products is truly the most exquisite talking raisin you’ll ever see. But Nyong’o is also a Kenyan, whose skin is a deep, refulgent brown that American movies have never liked.
Racism is ever ready to thwart some darker-skinned person’s advancement. And I’ll bet that Nyong’o knows that as well as anybody. Her fame has been a conscious crusade against being thwarted. Every magazine that places Nyong’o on its cover still feels as though it’s engaged in a kind of radical correction. The happiness of seeing Whoopi Goldberg and Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer and Nyong’o star in a movie is that the movies never meant for them to. And yet Hollywood remains a stubborn frontier. “Precious” announced Gabourey Sidibe as a woman of devastating, Oscar-worthy talent. It has been 10 years, and no movie has centered her since. Nyong’o, meanwhile, has been photographed far more than she has been cast.
This is all to say that it was smart to put her in this part. We don’t yet know anything about her, not really. Peele has gleaned that, as a star, her scarcity has made her valuably mysterious, and trusts that, as an artist, she can build a mystery. So why not take advantage of how little we know in order to mount a sneak attack? Race is not one of its big ideas. American disconnection is. Still, the movies have always been superficially visual before they can get emotionally deep. And there’s a power in watching one built around a person whose very skin brings with it a disturbing history of cinematic abuse. American popular culture has held, at the very best, a bemusem*nt for dark-skinned women.
“Us” whispers that it doesn’t care. Adelaide spends the movie with her hair in microbraids: tight, hanging tendrils that take hours to get done and function here like roots to some secret past. There’s nothing repressed, by comparison, about Red’s hair. It branches up and out, like a tree, but also like what we’ve come to think of as the “pickaninny,” a stereotype whose lasting embodiment is Topsy.
Jack Davison for The New York Times
In the middle of the 19th century, minstrel stage performances of the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” were all the rage. And for a time, they seized on the character of Topsy as much as they did Tom. Fun with the novel’s white heroine was supposed to lighten Topsy’s enslavement. Her plaited hair and gamboling came to epitomize a nappy-headed, dark-skinned playmate, one who’s still haunting black women (and the men too afraid to date them). Minstrel advertisem*nts featured Topsy as an otherworldly enticement. Sometimes they featured two.
Maybe it’s outrageous to see Nyong’o in “Us” and think about any of that. It’s not as if I watched Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio murdering Manson kids and got hung up on Simon Legree, the cruelest of Uncle Tom’s owners. American entertainment was born rigged for the Pitts and DiCaprios to be able to perform unencumbered. (Even when DiCaprio’s playing a Simon Legree, that’s all he’s doing: playing.) It was born rigged against a Lupito Nyong’o, rigged to ensnare her in our low expectations. In other words: I couldn’t help thinking about Topsy. But that’s the strength of the work Nyong’o does in “Us.” It won’t be cowed by our brainwashing. It demands that we be just half as audacious in our consumption as she is in her commitment.
I had been waiting for someone to unleash Nyong’o, waiting for the rare occasion that a movie imagines a black woman whose black womanness is to be neither survived nor sermonized. “Us” isn’t about the experience of black women. It’s about an experience between two black women. A story as opposed to a history. Identify at your own risk.
The trouble with Topsy is that so many lifetimes of her might have scared serious black artists from going as gonzo as Peele and Nyong’o do. They’re having a ball. When Red moves, Nyong’o gives her a gloriously revenant militarism. On one of the nights I saw “Us,” somebody got a load of that trot and blurted: “Why she gotta walk like that? She know that ain’t right.” It’s the relentless gait of many a boogeyman forebear. But Nyong’o discards the lumbering of Michael Myers and the “how’d he get in there” ubiquity of Jason Voorhees. Adelaide and Red — they’re dancers. So damn, if Nyong’o doesn’t appear to be on her toes, not rounding corners as much as gliding into turns. Precision footwork to play boxers or tennis pros or fencers, sure. But killers? No one this deadly has also been this Juilliard. She’s the marching dead. She’s a one-woman choreopoem.
You can feel Nyong’o’s enjoyment all over this performance. She pops her eyes, deadens her face then brings it back to alarming life. No actor capable of this kind of sepulchral electricity should ever go wanting for meaty work. All you can ask from centerpiece acting is right here in her: somebody who can be the stuff of nightmares, while throwing herself a private party.
Wesley Morris is a staff writer for the magazine, a critic at large for The New York Times and co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.” Earlier this year, he received the Roger Ebert Award from the African American Film Critics Association. He last wrote for the magazine about black theater and Tyler Perry. Jack Davison is a British photographer. His work has been featured in British Vogue, Modern Weekly China and recently in the magazine with a cover photograph of Glenda Jackson. His first book, “Photographs,” was published by Loose Joints earlier this year.
Stylist: Brian Molloy. Hair: Nai’vasha. Makeup: Nick Barose. Manicure: Sonya Belakhlef. Clothing: first photograph, dress by Valentino; other photographs, dress by Loewe.
Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.
