Jordan Peele's 'Us' Will Have Its World Premiere At 2019 SXSW Film Festival

Get Out writer/director Jordan Peele's new horror film Us opens in the United States on March 15, 2019, but if you're attending this year's SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, you may have a chance to catch it even earlier. The Us world premiere date has been announced, and the movie will be the opening night film at this year's festival. Read on for more details.

A press release informs us that Peele's "original nightmare" Us will have its world premiere at SXSW on Friday, March 8, 2019, and the specific mention of the words "world premiere" comes like a pair of gold scissors in the heart to those of us who were hoping the film would appear as a surprise screening at Sundance later this month. Still, we'll have someone on the ground at South By to review Us for /Film, so stay tuned for that.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"We are crazy excited to world premiere the most anticipated film of 2019 from the creative powerhouse that brought us Get Out," said Janet Pierson, Director of Film. "We honestly couldn't imagine a more perfect film to kick off the 2019 SXSW Film Festival."

Set in present day along the iconic Northern California coastline, Us, stars Oscar® winner Lupita Nyong'o as Adelaide Wilson, a woman returning to her beachside childhood home with her husband, Gabe (Black Panther's Winston Duke), and their two children (Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex) for an idyllic summer getaway. Haunted by an unexplainable and unresolved trauma from her past and compounded by a string of eerie coincidences, Adelaide feels her paranoia elevate to high-alert as she grows increasingly certain that something bad is about to befall her family. After spending a tense beach day with their friends, the Tylers (Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon), Adelaide and her family return to their vacation home to discover the silhouettes of four figures standing in their driveway. Us pits an ordinary American family against a terrifying and uncanny opponent: doppelgängers of themselves.

Peele produces for his Monkeypaw Productions, alongside Monkeypaw creative director Ian Cooper, in the company's first solo production venture.  Also producing are Sean McKittrick and Jason Blum. Written and directed by Peele, Us will be released by Universal Pictures on Friday, March 15, 2019.

Unlike his massively successful (and Oscar-winning) social horror thriller Get Out, Peele says Us is not about race, but instead about how we are our own worst enemies. As you can see from the most recent trailer, it appears as if Peele is making that concept literal in a fascinating way by introducing the "monster mythology" of The Tethered.