Jordan Peele's Get Out had a lot to say, but Us is arguably twice as ambitious, doubling
down on both the horror and the social commentary.
But if you didn't quite catch what the movie was going for, then it might also be a frustrating
watch.
There's a lot going on beneath the surface of this movie - and we mean that literally.
The premise of Us revolves around sinister, slasher-movie doppelgangers, who show up out
of nowhere with apparently murderous motives.
It supposedly focuses on one family, the Wilsons, being attacked in a home invasion by brutal
copies of themselves.
But the third act reveals that it's not just the Wilsons having this strange experience
- it's the entire United States of America, with an unfathomably huge army of doubles
being led by a woman named Red, the shadow version of Lupita Nyong'o's Adelaide.
That's the first twist the movie throws at you.
But the second big twist, teased out slowly, is that the Addie the audience has been following
the whole movie isn't the original Adelaide - it's her double, who switched places with
her at a young age during the movie's opening flashback scene.
Grown-up Addie is haunted by an experience from her youth, when she wandered into a boardwalk
funhouse and saw a sinister vision of herself.
But the movie leaves out crucial information of what happened during that encounter, apparently
reflecting the fact that Addie herself has suppressed what happened.
As she recalls, she wandered into the attraction, found herself, and then shortly returned to
her panicking parents.
But as the final frames of the movie reveal, a whole lot of consequential stuff happened
during that brief period - like the fact that the original Addie never came back.
In the movie's final moments, Addie realizes - or perhaps just finally admits to herself
- that she is the double from the underground, who strangled the original Addie and took
her place, leaving the original Addie shackled down below to begin a new life as Red.
One big clue that this is what happened is that Red is the only one of the doubles that
can talk.
Everyone else only emits inhuman grunts and moans, with Red speaking in a raspy, damaged
voice.
Turns out, this comes from the damage her double did to her throat when she strangled
her.
When the double entered the real world, she still didn't know how to speak, leaving her
parents baffled at their daughter's sudden, apparently trauma-induced muteness.
Addie spends the first act sporting a serious sense of dread, but the twist changes our
perception of what that dread is all about.
While it's played somewhat ambiguously, it seems like the adult Addie truly does not
know, at the beginning of the movie, where she really came from.
But she knows something is wrong, and that a reckoning is coming.
"I think…
I feel like it means she's getting closer."
The first thing most people did when they got home from seeing Us was probably Google
the phrase "Jeremiah 11:11," which turns up in the film multiple times.
Though translations differ, the sentiment of that Bible passage is pretty clear: "It's
payback time."
The International Standard Version of the passage translates into:
"I'm about to bring disaster on them from which they won't be able to escape.
They'll cry out to me, but I won't listen to them."
It's clear what's being set up here — an us vs. them conflict between the oppressed
tethered underclass and the ignorant, privileged surface dwellers, led by Red — the original
Adelaide.
One big thing the Red twist does is completely recontextualize who the viewer should be rooting
for in the story.
Red still became a bad person, but realizing why she's so thirsty for revenge against Addie
makes her a sympathetic villain — and vice versa.
One person who clearly picks up on Addie's otherworldly nature is her son Jason, who
witnesses her growling and snarling her way through several fights in the movie.
While he doesn't say anything about it, he comes to increasingly regard his mother with
apprehension, even terror, realizing that the woman he thought he knew may not be who
she's said she is.
At the end of the movie, as Addie realizes her true nature while Jason watches, Jason
pulls his mask down on his head — to which Addy smiles in response, putting on a mask
of her own.
Addie's true nature as a tethered person also comes into play during some of her more inexplicable
actions, like getting out of the car to watch the Zora double die, or refusing to strike
the double of Jason when he confronts them near a burning car.
Her actions don't seem to make sense, until you understand what she's realizing: These
people are her people, and maybe she doesn't want to hurt them after all.
The question of who created the tethered doesn't get answered — and that's probably for the
best.
It's also what Jordan Peele intended, with many of the movie's specifics being intentionally
open to interpretation.
Think of it less like a puzzle, and more like an ink blot.
"I want to leave some runway for people to explore what it means to them."
While the viewer might first think that Addie's visit to the mirror maze is what triggered
the creation of her double, the ending demonstrates that the doubles already existed underground
long before she arrived.
How?
It's unknown, it's designed to be that way, and it's really not important.
No answer on this Earth would be as satisfying as the mystery feels.
The most obvious explanation is that the doubles come from a secret government experiment — an
unfathomably massive cloning project of some sort that copied every American's body while
failing to replicate the soul.
But since the scale of such an operation seems impossible for humans to accomplish, it's
hard to take this explanation at face value.
In a logistical sense, nothing can explain how the doubles are created — much less
how they got 300 million pairs of scissors, Freddy Krueger gloves, and red jumpsuits.
The fact is, the real villains of the movie are the people who set up this deranged experiment
before abandoning its subjects.
But whoever these people are, they never actually appear.
Without the ability to identify, confront, and fight back against their real oppressors,
the characters instead tear each other apart.
And that sounds like a big fat metaphor for American society to us.
"We are our own worst enemy."
Jordan Peele has described Us as being about the fear of the other, and the self-destructive
tendencies that fear can cultivate.
With this framework in mind, the tethered can represent a lot of different groups.
Maybe it's all the people that American society has condemned over the centuries — victims
of the slave trade, mass incarceration, racism, or a predatory class divide.
They represent the forgotten Americans who fall through the wide holes in the country's
social safety nets — the people we abandon.
The striking final shots of the movie show these people stretched across the continent
in a human chain, hand-in-hand beneath the blue sky and the sun.
For so long, they suffered, living only a shadow of the good life that their doubles
enjoyed.
Not anymore, though.
It took a lot of killing to get topside, but considering the suffering they went through,
it's almost hard to blame them for making the effort.
Remember what Red told Adelaide — they're humans, too, you know.
Just like us.
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