Us review – Jordan Peele's brash and brilliant beach holiday horror

An almost erotic surge of dread powers this brash and spectacular new horror-comedy from Jordan Peele, right from its ineffably creepy opening. It’s a satirical doppelganger nightmare of the American way, a horrified double-take in the mirror of certainty, a realisation that the corroborative image of happiness and prosperity you hoped to see has turned its back, like something by Magritte. And though this doesn’t quite have the same lethal narrative discipline of Peele’s debut masterpiece Get Out, with its drum-tight clarity and control, what it certainly does have is a magnificent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o, who brings to it a basilisk stare of horror. The musical score by Michael Abels has the same disturbing “Satan spiritual” feel of his compositions for Get Out.

This is a Twilight Zone chiller with something of John Frankenheimer or George A Romero. It opens with a playful borrowing from the spirit and the letter of Spielberg’s Jaws and there’s a horribly prescient invocation of Michael Jackson. The title is of course ambiguous: meaning either the snugly inclusive “us” or the US itself. (An RSC group-devised play about Vietnam in 1966 directed by Peter Brook had the same title and the same double-edged meaning.)

Nyong’o plays Adelaide, who with her genial, good-natured husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is taking the kids for a summer lakehouse vacation: this is Zora and younger brother Jason, in which roles Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex are both excellent. The family is in a handsomely appointed cabin, which they have stayed in before, but Gabe is discontented. He wants to drive a little further down to the coast for some old-fashioned family time at the beach. Adelaide is not so sure. It was at this very beach resort that she had a horrible experience when she was a child – in 1986, the Reaganite era of the optimistic Hands Across America charity campaign. While with her parents at the funfair, right after her dad had won her a Michael Jackson T-shirt, little Adelaide had wandered off on her own and had a terrible ordeal. Now, as an adult, she is terrified of her own children straying from her and being “taken”. And she has cause to remember a sickening detail: a strange man on the pier holding a sign with the biblical reference – Jeremiah 11:11.

The traumatised memory has stayed with her, although she has never spoken about it, and being back at this cursed place makes her jittery and on edge. On the beach, they are reunited with a somewhat jaded white couple, the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), who annoy Gabe by showing off about being just that little bit richer. Their cabin is flashier, his car is a cooler model than Gabe’s and their rented boat seems in better shape. (Gabe’s is called “Craw Daddy”; the Tylers’ is toe-curlingly called “B’Yacht’ch”.) And so Adelaide and Gabe’s compromised family happiness, with its tingling undertow of material and personal disquiet, is shattered one night when they see a group of four people standing in their driveway, a group which seems eerily familiar.

Impostor syndrome is something that afflicts people who have fought their way up to a position of some prestige, while never quite being able to suppress the feeling that they don’t deserve it, that they are just fakes, and that they are taking up a space that should be filled by someone more deserving. Is that partly what Us is about: a whole nation of people who each feel a shadow of historical rebuke behind them? Or perhaps the impostors are coming back to grab everything back, having just been deposed? The demonic invaders seem to be attacking from below and at the height of the horror and mayhem, Gabe and Adelaide briefly discuss the possibility of escaping to Mexico, before deciding they are much better off where they are. Perhaps if America was in dispute with Canada, we would be getting a zeitgeisty horror-thriller about Americans getting attacked from above.

Yet perhaps these lines of interpretation are beside the point and what is important is the attack from within. It leads to uproarious scenes of chaos, as Gabe shouts to the invaders: “If you wanna get crazy, we can get crazy” – and crazy is certainly what they get, especially in the outrageous fight scene, which makes shrewd use of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations and NWA’s Fuck tha Police.

The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.

Rape inquiry dropped against French film mogul Luc Besson

French prosecutors have dropped an investigation into claims that the film mogul Luc Besson raped his former girlfriend, his lawyers said on Monday.

The actor Sand Van Roy told police in May that she had been repeatedly raped by Besson, 59, during an on-off relationship.

She is one of nine women who have said they were assaulted or harassed by the director and producer, whose 2017 space odyssey, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, was the most expensive European film ever made.

But his lawyers said that prosecutors had closed their inquiry into the alleged rapes, which Besson had always denied.

Besson “is sad that some people – a minority happily – were too quick to condemn him”, his lawyers said. They said the director “thanks all those others whose constant support has helped him get through these difficult months”.

Van Roy, a Dutch-Belgian actor who had relatively minor roles in Besson’s Taxi 5 and Valerian, had said she had been raped a total of four times but had feared for her career if she complained.

Besson had denounced the claims as “fantasist accusations”.

Blood tests conducted after the first rape claim was made in May showed that Van Roy had not been drugged.

But her allegations prompted eight other women to complain to the police or the French media about his behaviour. One actor claimed she had had to escape on “her hands and knees” from a casting in his Paris office in 2002.

The woman, in her 40s, who now lives in the US, wrote to prosecutors 10 days ago to say she wanted to formally add her testimony to the other complaints against him.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind review – Chiwetel Ejiofor's charming directorial debut

Last year, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Netflix headed to Sundance with Come Sunday, a dramatisation of the life of “heretic” pastor Carlton Pearson that, despite the provocative source material, fizzled out before making a soft landing online months later. Actor and platform have reassembled for a second attempt to woo Utah crowds with a BFI-backed project close to the Oscar nominee’s heart – so close, in fact, that the 12 Years a Slave star picked it as his directorial debut.

In The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Ejiofor has found an astonishing true story to tell, based on a book by William Kamkwamba, the boy of the title. It’s 2001 in Malawi, and the Kamkwamba family is struggling to make ends meet but parents Trywell (Ejiofor) and Agnes (Aïssa Maïga) remain focused on their children’s education, despite the financial cost. When their 13-year-old son William (Maxwell Simba) is forced to leave school after falling behind on payments, he becomes determined to help not only his family but a community facing famine.

When adapting a novel with a child protagonist, directors too often resort to creating an overly childlike film, earnest and sentimental to a fault, any sense of reality failing to seep through. From The Kite Runner to The Lovely Bones, a delicate balance of trauma and treacle on the page has erred toward an overdose of the latter on the big screen. Ejiofor, from a script he adapted himself, is up against a similar battle but despite behind-camera inexperience, he manages to toe the line with ease, skilfully manoeuvring between charm and poignancy. It’s a conventional film in many ways but one that slowly and effectively builds to a remarkably rousing climax, displaying an act of overwhelming ingenuity that’s hard to deny.

For some, the journey there might be a tad too slow but I’d argue that it’s a necessary crawl: Ejiofor carefully lays the film’s emotional foundation and ensures that the story is never less than involving. A great credit here should also be given to newcomer Simba, whose lead performance is really quite extraordinary. With his soulful eyes and infectious enthusiasm, he anchors the drama around him, easily steering himself through the story’s emotional shifts as he matures from a playful child to a philanthropic saviour.

While Ejiofor does pitch the film at a broad audience, he makes a key decision not to force his characters to always speak English. They oscillate between English and Chichewa, mostly using the latter, and at a time when too many film-makers are choosing to avoid subtitles, even when telling fact-based stories from foreign countries, it’s hugely refreshing. There’s an interesting throughline, rarely seen on screen, of tradition v modernity in rural Africa, of parents deliberately eschewing what they perceive to be dated belief systems of the past to encourage progress. They don’t want to rely on praying for rain to save their crops; they want pragmatism instead. It’s also reflected in a desire for education so that children can leave their village, determined that they won’t be facing similar hardships as adults.

There’s similar complexity in the characterisation, most notably in Ejiofor’s conflicted, flawed father who craves education for his children yet must deal with the consequences of feeling less intelligent than them and of the crippling financial impact. Ejiofor has long been a charming presence on screen but here he’s stripped back of his more obvious star presence and is no less impressive as a haunted, beleaguered and not always likable man.

There’s unavoidable darkness in the story and Ejiofor leans into the brutal reality of Malawi’s early 2000s food crisis while balancing the more harrowing details with notes of resilience and hope. When the climax arrives, it’s with immense, earned satisfaction, a crowd-pleasing triumph that will have to be enjoyed on Netflix without one.

The Favourite review – Olivia Colman is priceless in punk Restoration romp

Just when we thought Olivia Colman couldn’t get any better, she steps up to movie-star lead status with an uproarious performance as Britain’s needy and emotionally wounded Queen Anne in this bizarre black comedy of the 18th-century court, a souped up and sweary quasi-Restoration romp full of intrigue and plotting – with wigs, clavichords and long corridors to storm down. The drama is loosely based on the true story of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, competing with her cousin Abigail, Baroness Masham, for the monarch’s favours, and creating a horribly dysfunctional politico-sexual love triangle with mother issues. The two emotional duelists are played here by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, the latter with a very good Brit accent.

There is a cheerfully obscene original script from Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, directed by the Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, who brings to it the absurdism he’s already known for, along with something even more jagged and uninhibited. In fact, The Favourite may have corrected Lanthimos’s tendency towards arthouse torpor. It is a scabrous and often hilarious film, made loopier by the nightmarish visions and wide-angle distortions contrived by the cinematographer Robbie Ryan.

At first – I admit it – I thought these stylisations were going to be insufferable, and even had the unworthy thought that this script might work quite as well with a trad director, in a trad style. But no. Acclimatisation to the visual and verbal rhetoric doesn’t take long and the point is that Lanthimos’s provocations pump and energise the screenplay, which with a conventional director might have just reverted to simpering bonnets-and-ruffles period drama, for all the raucous language.

Olivia Colman’s queen is a really funny creation – perhaps funnier and more sympathetic than her Queen Elizabeth II is going to be for Netflix, but who knows how she will reinvent that role? Her Anne is like something between the QEI that Quentin Crisp created in Sally Potter’s Orlando and a weird blend of Nursey and QEI in Blackadder. But that doesn’t do justice to the sadness of her Queen Anne: someone who has been infantilised by a lifetime of emotional manipulation. She is transported everywhere by wheelchair or sedan chair but can walk just as well. She sometimes flies into something between an anxiety attack and a rage at music or the spectacle of people enjoying themselves because of a self-hating inability to participate in pleasure. There is a private tragedy in her life which means that her emotional energies have been displaced into her large menagerie of house rabbits and she shows a keen interest in racing ducks and lobsters. Again: in the hands of an actor who wasn’t funny this could have been awful, but Colman sells all of it.

Weisz plays her court favourite and intimate Lady Sarah, who deploys every sly sexual and emotional trick to keep the monarch co-dependent and keen on the raising of taxes for an ongoing French war that will glorify Lady Sarah’s warrior husband Marlborough (Mark Gatiss). This is to the horror of minister, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult). Then a gentlewoman and cousin of Sarah’s, fallen on hard times, arrives at the court as a servant: this is Abigail (Stone), whose knowledge of medicinal herbs helps the queen’s gout. Her majesty takes a shine to the pretty little thing. So does the predatory nobleman Lord Masham (Joe Alwyn). The contest between Abigail and Sarah is on like the 18th-century equivalent of Donkey Kong.

If there is a flaw in the film, it is probably that Colman will inevitably upstage Stone and Weisz, and put their very important face-off in the shade. That is a minor consideration. The Favourite is full of freaky zingers and deeply strange laugh-lines: I loved the idea of someone sleeping like a “shot badger”. (There’s quite a lot about badgers.) And The Favourite is a reminder that the idea of royalty as polite and picturesquely sentimental is something that came in with Queen Victoria: The Favourite is more punk than that. It’s a rousingly nasty, bleary, hungover punchup.
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• The Favourite has premiered at the Venice film festival and is released in the US on 23 November, in Australia on 26 December and in the UK on 1 January 2019

Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us review – dud animation lost in promo fog

I have no idea whether this makes the prospect more appealing for accompanying adults, but the 112-minute running time here includes ads for the official Pokémon magazine and console games, multiple unfathomable shorts, and a sneak peek at next summer’s live-action Detective Pikachu. After last year’s animated series reboot I Choose You! – detailing how everyboy hero Ash first teamed up with the totemic Pikachu – it’s evidently business as usual within the branded collectibles universe.

The overextended cartoon that follows broadens its predecessor’s focus by establishing a coastal Poké-festival that brings multiple players – including (brand expansion alert) girls – to the table. Yet it never transcends its resemblance to a trailer for other forms of product, landing just in time for Christmas.

The cynicism might have slipped down easier had it been cut with something else; instead, it’s set before us in artless blocks. Director Tetsuo Yajima, a veteran of the late-90s TV series that made this pursuit a phenomenon, can punch up the colours here and there and drop in (clumsy) stabs at digimation, but he’s contractually obliged to retain the same basic-to-ungainly after-school visuals and irritating voice artists.

This reboot hasn’t changed the way these things look and sound. That arrested creative development surely accounts for the needless furore provoked online by the live-action movie’s newly furry Pikachu: an imagination has been applied that challenges the long-established rules of the game.

Even narratively, the new film is a dud, as diffuse in its storytelling as the clouds of toxic smog that threaten the festival’s success. Amid the fug, grownups will be able to make out an entirely arbitrary designation of rare new creatures, intended to shift more packets of trading cards, and an environmental message, half-baked and half-inched from Ghibli, which seriously positions Pokémon collecting as a means of slowing the depletion of the Earth’s natural resources. Suffice to say, it plays a little synthetic coming barely an hour after an advert for a tie-in magazine offering an array of single-use free gifts.

Give the conglomerates responsible points for brazenness, but if our kids are swallowing this Pika-garbage wholesale, we really are doomed.