THIS is American director Jordan Peele’s second feature film. The first, “Get Out”, was a well-balanced mixed-race horror film that attracted favourable critical and audience favour.

“Us” is also a mixed-race film being promoted as a horror movie. After seeing it, I vox-popped a trio of young adults who liked it, thought it okay.

It’s a zombie movie by whatever categorisation you care to assign to it. A well-to-do Afro-American family has driven in its Mercedes station wagon to its waterside weekender. They are father (Winston Duke), mom (Lupita Nyong’o), teenaged daughter (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and younger brother (Evan Alex). Next door live a wife (Elisabeth Moss) and her layabout spouse (Tim Heidecker).

By the film’s end, these six and a few lesser characters are dead, leaving the actors free to play their zombie doppelgangers each wearing a red, zip-up jumpsuit and carrying a large pair of tailor’s shears ready to stab the next live human they meet.

The story unfolds over a single night and the following day. By its end, the corpses of the local population are scattered around the town and a long, thin, red line of zombie doppelgangers holding hands stretches over hill and dale, looking for all the world like a sort of human wall such as Donald Trump is having built to keep out unwanted folk from breaching America’s borders.

Any good teacher of creative writing will tell the pupils that short stories work best if their conclusions are linked to their beginnings of place, time and narrative themes.

“Us” follows this precept, with the same beginning and end inviting viewers to supply their own explanations. What happens between those two ends speaks for itself. Jordan Peele’s screenplay has a message for viewers prepared to recognise it. But tedium may well set in before recognition strikes, thereby making it very hard to discern.

A horror movie, perhaps, not so ill-fashioned as to be a horrible one.

At all cinemas

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