SPOILERS DOWN THE PATH; THE DISCUSSION BELOW WILL NOT BE COMPREHENSIVE WITHOUT IT.
TREAD CAREFULLY. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
Jordan Peele's follow-up to his horror film catalogue after Get Out is Us; a doppelganger thriller. As a director, the man for sure knows how to build and handle tension effectively. He doesn't mind taking risk, an instance would be the fairly long dramatic premise sequence of the little girl wandering away from her parents. Whistles, mirrors reflections and alike scares were really well done.
Characters were definitely smart. Winston Duke as Gabe was a key humor anchor. Lupita Nyong'o did a good job too, both as the mother and Red. Despite having many awkward character interactions and elementary level monologues, the overall picture was creepy with most of the escape attempts being engaging. But the major turnoff of Us was caused by the extremely made up (the same can be said about the musical score) nonsensical concept the movie's based on.
Yes, cinema is make-believe, but the string in Us that linked abandoned tunnels and copies of humans were unfathomably forced, thus turning out to be feeble at best, disintegrating the Willing Suspension of Disbelief easily. The lore didn't make a single sense! For example, if the Tethered version of the personas would imitate the exact movement of the originals, why was it so hard to annihilate the former? And why were the clones mimicking the originals' motions only at selective times? These uncertainties and ambiguity appeared lazy without much meticulous thought behind creating it.
Writing wise, most of the tensions were fake. Jordan Peele has clearly established that no fatal harm will ever come to our 4 main characters as the doppelgangers will never attack or attempt to kill them. But when it comes to the side characters, immediate death is guaranteed. Can anything get faker than this? Children and parents were shown committing murders but there weren't any remorse or shock aftereffect, although this was partially forgivable since the filmmaker may have wanted to treat this comically, reflected through the death count dialogue among the family members. Kids being kidnapped / lost and recovered repeatedly displayed no steady worsening of events from first Act to the last. With an ending revelation you could see from a hundred miles away that completely invalidated most of everything that happened prior, Us is a perfect example of not all original ideas will work.