Now, I know there are many people raving about this film, but I’m afraid I am NOT one of them. Having seen Get Out and loved it, I was waiting with bated breath for the next offering from Jordan Peele. I was very disappointed. This film is nowhere near the standard of Get Out.
The opening credits show hundreds of caged rabbits, setting the scene for something which would probably be an experiment of some sort (which it was), but this is soon forgotten as the story unfolds and we see a young Adelaide Wilson coming face to face with her doppelganger, after wandering away from her arguing parents at a funfair.
The film cuts there and jumps forward several decades to Adelaide returning to Santa Clara with her family, the ghosts of the past still troubling her. Her fears come true when four masked strangers appear in their driveway and force their way into the Wilson’s home. If that isn’t scary enough, the strangers have another shock in store for the Wilson’s when they remove their masks and reveal themselves to be the Wilson family’s alter egos, so to speak.
Adelaide’s counterpart explains that they are the shadow side to the Wilson’s and that whatever the Wilson’s experienced in life, they experienced it far worse.
At this point, I found this to be an extremely interesting story and started to think the film was depicting the two sides to our personalities – light vs dark, good vs evil etc. – with a battle ensuing to see which side would win out. I saw it as a way of ‘explaining’ why some people follow a virtuous path while others follow a path of sin. This idea cemented itself when I saw that it wasn’t only the Wilson’s that were affected, but the whole country, with the shadow people sometimes winning over the normal people, thus adding weight to my theory.
Sadly, I was wrong, and the real meaning of these shadow people is actually some sort of government experiment, which made no sense whatsoever to me. The link to the ‘Hands Across America’ event passed me by as well.
This film could have been sooooo good, but the reasoning for these shadow people made little sense and hence ruined the film.
The film also didn’t seem to have a proper ending, which is a huge ‘no-no’ in my book.
I’m not going to say don’t watch it, I’m just going to warn you to be prepared for confusion.