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Article provides theories regarding the meaning behind Jasons actions. Some theories are more believable than others

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The more we think about Jordan Peele's Us, the more we question what we thought we knew about the movie.That's a testament to Peele's layered filmmaking. There are so many references in the film, as well as allegories about class, Americans' ugly history, and ideas about nature, nurture, and humanity. And, of course, there's that enormous twist:

Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) is actually what's called a Tether, a doppelganger created as part of a forgotten government experiment, who switched with her human counterpart when they were children. It changes the entire film, bringing into focus every scene, every detail that we just saw.

But what if this wasn't the film's only twist?

Swirling in the Us conversation is the idea that Adelaide's son Jason is a Tether too. He, like his mom, took the place of his human - or so some fans thinks.

The idea began as a kernel on Reddit and, with the help of Us fans, has blossomed into a full-fledged conspiracy theory. It makes you reexamine the movie and Jason's role in it. It also makes you question if this was Peele's intention all along, or simply a testament to the remarkable power of fandom.

But we don't fully believe it, and there's plenty of reasons not to. We present the "Jason is Pluto" theory, and our best attempt at debunking it:

The theory: Jason and Pluto previously swapped

This theory begins with the end of the film. After Red, the real Adelaide who was locked into the Tether's underground prison when she was a child, takes Jason ( Evan Alex) during a standoff against her family's remaining Tethers, Adelaide chases her down. She finds Jason in a locker once she's killed Red.

After a climactic moment in which Red reveals she is actually the real Adelaide who was swapped years ago - a story that Jason might have heard too -Adelaide and Jason return to the above world, where Adelaide drives her family to safety. Jason, who has a rabbit in his hand, gives her a suspicious look before he puts on his mask and averts his eyes from her.

While you could interpret that look to be Jason is now wary of who his mother is and what she has done, Redditors theorize that it instead indicates that Jason himself has switched places with his Tether, just as his mother did. The boy known as Pluto is actually the human Jason, who swapped with Pluto sometime before the movie started.

"At the end, he has realized that his mother, at one point, has also switched bodies. She gives him a look almost like 'I also know what you know' and then he puts on his mask, as a symbol of the masks they will now wear for the rest of their lives," the Redditor theorizes.

The theory spread on Reddit where fans bolstered it with evidence

The "Jason is Pluto" theory appeared on Reddit's Fan Theories subforum on March 22, in a thread posted by a Redditor named Hoopster Ben. Hoopster posits that "the summer before the movie takes place, the boy and his 'tethered' also switched places," and then has a list of four reasons why they believe that to be the case.

Two of the reasons are the looks Jason/Pluto and Red/Adelaide give each other - but those are harder to believe, considering how subjective interpreting a look can be. One of Hoopster's stronger, more evidence-based reasons is how Jason doesn't remember his magic trick. Hoopster theorizes that the real Jason performed the trick last summer and burned half his face off, and that his Tether, Pluto, doesn't remember it happening.

"[Pluto] forgot the magic trick. [Jason] didn't actually forgot the magic trick, he learned it successfully and burnt half of his face off in the process, though his tethered [Pluto] only has a slight memory of him learning the trick," Hoopster wrote.

Presumably, the switch occurred their previous summer vacation, sometime after Jason learned the magic trick and set himself on fire, but before Pluto mirrors the "magic trick." The switch also presumably happened in a way that the rest of Jason's family did not notice.

The other piece of evidence mentioned is that Jason is digging tunnels at the beach (which Kitty's obnoxious twins stomp on) instead of sandcastles, presumably indicating that he acts a little different or unconventionally (kids presumably make sandcastles), and wants to express his experience of the underground since he is a Tether.

In that original thread and subsequent others, fans posted details they picked up on that bolster this theory. Here are some of their best ideas:

Jason doesn't like to eat - Jason doesn't eat with the rest of his family when they arrive at the beach house. Adelaide, who we find out is actually her Tether, isn't eating thefood either (we see her eating strawberries, and the assumption is that she is a vegetarian because of her diet of raw rabbits in the underground). His lack of appetite could be a relic of growing up as a Tether under ground, and he's probably not a fan of anything that reminds him of eating raw rabbit.

Jason's drawing isn't from his point of view - Adelaide sees the picture that Jason drew of the bloody man - the Tether of the man holding the Jeremiah 11:11 sign that Adelaide sees as a young girl and the entire family sees being treated at the ambulance in the present day. The picture is actually a third-person perspective as it shows Jason's back and the Tether. This might show that it is drawn from Pluto's point of view or how the switched Jason sees himself as not inhabiting his own body.

Jason's cussing is odd - Jason says "kiss my anus" instead of "kiss my ass," which indicates that he might be bad at picking up above-ground language.

Pluto is the only Tether without shears and doesn't want to harm Jason - Pluto is the only Tether that doesn't brandish or use his shears.He also doesn't try to kill Jason. "Unlike all the others, Pluto doesn't seem to want to harm Jason," a Redditor posited. "Instead he grabs Jason's hand to show him how to do the magic trick which Jason performs for the first time on screen."

Jason was the first to notice his family's Tethers - When his family's doppelgangers appear, Jason is the one who realizes: "It's us." Fans say this may indicate that he knows a little more than he lets on and is sensitive to who the Tethers are.

Jason's "control" over Pluto - In the final act of the movie, Jason "walks" Pluto into the fire and seemingly kills him. We also learn that the Tetherswere created to one day control humans. No other human in the movie has this command over their Tether like this, signaling that the switched Jason is truly a Tether since he could ostensibly "control" his human.

Jason can no longer work the "fire" magic trick - This theory has a few variants, but the gist is that the tethered Jason can no longer "snap" his fingers effectively in order to perform his favorite fire magic trick because he's tethered and delayed. This ties into the argument that the tethered Adelaide is snapping off-beat to "Five On It" in the car scene because she's similarly delayed. It's also tied to the "Jason has a bad memory/is unfamiliar with the house" thread.

Jason "just has trouble focusing" - On the beach, after Kitty's twins knock down his tunnels, they comment to Zora that her brother is weird, to which she replies that he just has trouble focusing. From everything we have seen, the Tethers are focused as hell, but if you were a recently freed Tether, your disorientation might translate as a lack of focus, so this line has been mentioned frequently as a clue indicating that something is different about Jason.

Were you able to follow along with all that?

Great.

Here's why none of it's true

Jason can only control Pluto, not the other way around - The single biggest reason the "Jason is a Tether" theory falls apart is that it would fundamentally undermine too many of the established facts about the film's world. This is because, in the scene where we see Jason deliberately exit the car and walk backward, he's clearly able to control Pluto.

Redditors argue that a replacement Jason is somehow special - that if a replacement Jason is able to control his Un-Tether, he's somehow an outlying example of the government project that created the Tethers to begin with.

But there's zero evidence in the movie that anything about that project was successful - in fact, its quiet failure and burial is a huge part of the movie's overall point. As far as we know, none of the Tethers have any ability to control any of their Un-Tethers; only the reverse is true. The Tethers' enslavement and lack of agency is the whole reason they rebelled to begin with.

That means, in the scene where Pluto walks backward into the car, Jason is the real Jason.

But if that's not enough to convince you, there are plenty of other logical reasons.

Pluto's face really is burnt - We know that Pluto's scarring is real. We have enough evidence to understand that it's due to his many burns received over time and caused by the delays from Jason's playing with fire. The only way Pluto's burns make any logical sense is that, as a Tether, Pluto couldn't control either his own motions or the delayed reactions of the fire down below.

If Jason and Pluto swapped places, then Replacement Jason, a.k.a. Pluto, would be the one bearing all the scars. His face is unscarred, so he's clearly the original Jason.

Pluto can't control his walk backward into the fire. But the real, Un-Tether Jason could and would have - This seems self-explanatory. Pluto couldn't control his movement into the fire, but if a swapped Jason had been ordered back into the fire, he would have been able to resist, because as the original Un-Tether, he would have been able to control his movements.

Pluto doesn't speak English. Jason does - This piece of the puzzle has several implications, so let's unpack them. We know that Red is the only one of the Tethers who can speak English; neither of her children nor her husband do. Jason is still young, but he clearly speaks English well. If Jason had been kidnapped to the underground within the last couple of years, then when he comes to the surface with the others, he would still be able to speak up and say that he'd been abducted. But he doesn't.

So if Jason and Pluto had really switched places, they would have had to have done so long ago - at an age early enough for the Underground Jason, a.k.a. Pluto, to completely lose all his linguistic abilities and be unable to recover them in time to actually speak to anyone once he was above ground.

But this would also mean that the real Jason's face would be unburnt, because he'd be able to control his actions and move away from the fire from that early age - meaning that all those years of facial scarring would never have happened. But they did, because the boy who's underground is Pluto - the boy who can't control his motions, just as he can't speak English.

The movie's whole message gets distorted if Jason is a Tether - While the "Jason is a Tether" theory is fun, it also undermines a lot of what's richest about the movie's symbolism. Jason's fun magic trick results in Pluto's horrible disfigurement because Jason is an Un-Tether and Pluto isn't. The whole point of this revelation is to shore up Jordan Peele's point about class and systemic inequality - specifically, how the underprivileged are all too often disproportionately and devastatingly affected by the behavior and motions of the wealthy. Since the ramifications of their actions don't effect them, but rather the masses of people in classes below them, the wealthy often have no reason to care about the impact of their behavior on other people - just as Jason doesn't understand until he comes face to face with what's on the other side of his "game."

If that fundamentally unequal dynamic shifts, then that metaphor is sullied. And examining Jason-Pluto as a metaphor for inequality is a far more meaningful, and purposeful, reading of the film than trying to spin theories about them swapping places just because it's clever. There are moments when it's possible to be too clever - and moments, as Jason's final donning of his mask shows, when it's best not to know too much.

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Us's Jason/Pluto theory, explained and debunked

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The more we think about Jordan Peele's Us, the more we question what we thought we knew about the movie.That's a testament to Peele's layered filmmaking. There are so many references in the film, as well as allegories about class, Americans' ugly history, and ideas about nature, nurture, and humanity.

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Lyrics for itsy bitsy spider

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Itsy Bitsy Spider lyrics - The itsy bitsy spi...

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Information about itsy bitsy spider and how it correlates with the film.

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You can be forgiven for being confused at the end of Us. The movie, like creator Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out, is rife with metaphors - only in Us, the allegory is much more ambiguous. That's partly due to the complicated relationship between the main character, Adelaide, and the mysterious woman, Red, who appears out of her past. (Both women are played by Lupita Nyong'o in an incredible dual performance.)

If you've already seen the film then you know there's a lot more connecting the two women than a mere case of stalking. But you might not have caught all the details - or how the connection between Adelaide and Red ultimately helps enrich the film's overall symbolism.

So let's walk through it. Spoilers ahoy!

There are three big clues that tell us about the women's identities

To break down the film's ending, we of course have to reveal the giant plot twist, so here goes: When the two girls met in the carnival maze years ago, they switched places.

The one from the Underground - attempting to escape from horrific enslavement down below - attacked and kidnapped the one from above, replacing her in her old life as "Adelaide." The girl formerly known as Adelaide then grew up in captivity underground, becoming known as "Red." Meanwhile, the new, replacement Adelaide apparently repressed her memory of what happened and grew up believing she was the real Adelaide. In the present day, Red has become the leader of the underground slave rebellion.

All of this makes it difficult to say who is the imposter and who is the victim. And that's the whole point. But before we think about that too closely, let's look at the big clues we get that tell us what's really going on. (Note: From here on out, we'll call the original Adelaide "Red" and the replacement Adelaide "Adelaide.")
1) For Red, the color red represents freedom and her memory of her old life
The color red seems to be a powerful trigger for Red. The last thing she is eating before she's kidnapped and taken to the Underground is a bright red apple. We're given several prominent shots of it before she goes inside the maze - where one of the last thing she sees is a bright red "Exit" sign.

She then is forced to trade places with Adelaide, who puts her own Hands Across America sweatshirt on Red and takes the other girl's Thriller T-shirt instead. That Hands Across America shirt is another obvious link for Red to her former life above ground. The figures on it are also colored in red, which is why, when she eventually leads her fellow Tethered slaves to rise up, she has them all don the color red and recreate the image.
2) Red is the only one of the Tethered who knows English
Though her voice is rusty from disuse, Red clearly speaks English - in fact she starts with the phrase "once upon a time," which makes sense given that her last memory of spoken language most likely involved hearing children's stories.

But she's the only one of the escaped Tethered slaves who does. She notes that the others have all gone mad from the deprivation of their lives below, in which they're essentially forced (by powers unknown) to mimic the motions of living in a torturous echo of their above-ground counterparts. That manifests as a primitive form of communication that sounds like incoherent noise to us. But it's an actual language; we see the slaves use it to communicate multiple times. For instance, when Abraham (Gabe's double) is out on the boat, he hears a call from one of the other slaves in the distance, and calls out to them in turn.

Meanwhile, Adelaide actually seems to occasionally lose her grasp of English as she gets closer to uncovering the truth. At several points, she seems to struggle for coherent language, and early on, she tells her friend Katie that she sometimes has trouble talking - which we realize she means literally. And, crucially, the moment she finally kills Red, she lets out a deep roar that's similar to the primal calls of the Tethered - as if she's remembered her first language at last.
3) "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" is a trigger for Adelaide to fully recall what she did
Horror movie audiences love clapping when the hero finally defeats the villain - but that, interestingly enough, didn't happen in either of my opening night Us showings, and an informal poll suggests audiences were more disturbed than happy about the moment when Adelaide finally defeats Red.

This is probably due to the subtle clues we get that Adelaide isn't entirely the victim. In fact, at one point, near the end, Adelaide is shown pursuing Red with a limp that precisely mimics that of Jack Torrance near the end of The Shining as he goes on his murderous rampage. But Adelaide doesn't seem to know that she's the kidnapper who originally grew up Tethered - that is, until the final moments of Red's life.

In the film's climax, Adelaide has fatally wounded Red; Red uses her final moments to do something unexpected: She whistles. The tune she's whistling is "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" - the last song she had stuck in her head before she was kidnapped. (The song also invokes the slaves' ascent to freedom by "crawling up" the water spout, i.e. the sewers, to their escape.)

The moment Adelaide hears the song, her face changes and she immediately tries to silence Red, even though Red is already dying. As she brutally snaps Red's neck, her expression becomes almost gleeful, and she lets out the aforementioned primal scream that turns into a laugh.

But this moment of awareness is immediately followed by denial. When she rescues her son, Jason, she tells him, incredibly, that now things will be just like they were before. If that line sounded hopelessly naive or misplaced - after the mass slaughter of what appears to be millions of people across the country, clearly nothing will be the same - that's because it was born out of Adelaide's desperate personal desire to forget what she's just remembered: her own past.

And that's a huge theme of Us, overall. The movie constantly reminds its audience that America's story is one of history perpetually being forgotten or overwritten, like the genocide of Native Americans, whose iconography gets briefly appropriated and then hastily remodeled for the maze that starts the story. Characters frequently speak of forgetting things; Adelaide's entire character is rooted in forgetting.

The ones who don't have the luxury of losing their memories are the ones who remain Underground. ("I never forgot you," Red tells Adelaide.) That's because not only are they forced to live out approximations of "real" life without any agency over their own bodies or identities, but they are the only witnesses to their own misery and enslavement. In Red's world, a good memory is the key to escape.

But while Red tells Adelaide that the two of them are special, Us takes care to undermine our expectations in order to make a cold point that none of this is special at all - that what's important is how ordinary the underground slaves are. In fact, they're just like us, because they are us.

Us sets up the idea that the Tethered are Others, when they're anything but

Through their sheer weirdness - their scuttling movements, their violence, their primal language, their creepy smiles, and their apparent lack of purpose beyond "killing everyone and holding hands a lot" - we come to think of the Tethered as Others early on. They are monstrous, and their physical resemblance to those above ground only establishes an uncanny valley that makes them that much creepier.

That assumption - that the Doppelgangers are different, shadow figures - helps cement the audience's belief early on that Adelaide must have successfully escaped from the carnival maze. After all, compared to Red, she's so fully human, so powerfully emotive, so loving and caring - right?

So the revelation that she was born in the Underground is jarring to us for multiple reasons. Not only does it make us think differently about Adelaide herself, but it forces us to reconsider our views on the rest of the Tethered. They're clearly every bit as human as we are - capable of living fully self-actualized and happy lives above ground.

And this is where Peele's metaphorical work really pays off. Because once we start thinking about the Underground as an allegorical space that represents dehumanized and marginalized bodies, then suddenly "we" are forced to contend with the troubling idea that perhaps the only things separating "us" from various "thems" - society's countless marginalized communities - are chance and privilege. And even this isn't enough to ever fully sever us. We are all, as the movie repeats, tethered not only to each other, but also to the sins of our country's past and present, to the people and cultures we have tried to erase and diminish. And that connection leaves its traces, even when we try to deny it.

Perhaps this is what makes the movie's final scene so harrowing. Even though Adelaide has protected her family and escaped the danger Red posed, she now has to contend with the reality of what she did to Red to begin with. And what's even more significant is that her son, Jason, now seems to know it, too. As we all know, the sins of the past are passed down to our children - for them to perpetuate, learn from, or deny in turn.

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You can be forgiven for being confused at the end of Us. The movie, like creator Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out, is rife with metaphors - only in Us, the allegory is much more ambiguous. That's partly due to the complicated relationship between the main character, Adelaide, and the mysterious woman, Red, who appears out of her past.

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Source to comprehend the rabbit symbolism.

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The opening credits to Jordan Peele's Us is a long shot on a row of cages ( 11, to be exact) containing a majority white rabbits with a few black and brown in the mix. The camera lingers on this shot long enough, accompanied with the unnerving score from Michael Abels, for these rabbits to feel more menacing-an omen of what's to come next.

The rabbits are one of many recurring symbols during the film. Adelaide's daughter, Zora, wears a shirt with a rabbit on it. She also has a sweatshirt with the word "Thỏ", or Vietnamese for "rabbit." There's a stuffed rabbit in the family cabin. And, of course, the rabbits are hopping around during the film's underground climax. Then, in one of the final scenes, Jason-after being rescued from the underground-is holding a rabbit.

So, what do they mean?

The film does offer one answer: Red tells Adelaide that the Tethered have been surviving by eating rabbits raw, which is disgusting, but effective, considering how quickly rabbits reproduce.

But there's a deeper meaning, too.

Often, rabbits symbolize rebirth, which fits with the intentions of the Tethered to start a new chapter living on the surface. But, connecting with Peele's greater theme of duality, rabbits are often used as test subjects, which represents the lives of these Tethered as an abandoned experiment.

We can also look at the rabbit as an allusion in cinema. For example, in Alice in Wonderland, the animal is known as going down the rabbit hole, which is literally what happens to the real Adelaide in 1986 when she travels down into the funhouse on the Santa Cruz beach. There's also the duality of rabbits as cuddly forest creatures in Disney films like Bambi and rabbits as menacing horrors like Donnie Darko.

The closest Peele has gotten to explaining the meaning of the rabbits is to point out how they fit with the film's greater theme.

"They're an animal of duality. They're adorable but they terrify me at the same time," he told The Guardian. "And they got those scissor-like ears that creep me out."

Ah yes, those scissor-like ears absolutely fit with the Tethered's weapon of choice. But also, he's legitimately creeped out by rabbits.

"Rabbits they're supposed to be cute. On paper they're adorable, lovable rabbits," Peele said in a red carpet interview. "Have you ever gotten close to a rabbit? You can tell in their eyes that they have a sociopath. If you put a rabbit brain in a human body, you have Michael Myers. They have no empathy."

So, the closest thing to an actual answer Peele has given is the nature of duality with rabbits-that they're at once cute and terrifying.

Beyond that, there are a few interesting theories elsewhere. One Reddit user believes that the Tethered must free a rabbit to gain control over their own body (after we see them mimicking the movements of their doppelgänger above):

In the beginning the rabbits were locked up in cages, symbolizing the loss of free will and movement. When Adelaide was switched, Red had more control of her body as she was from the surface. Since she had control she was able to free the rabbits from their cages. Each rabbit is tied to a doppelgänger, and once Red freed the rabbits from the cages the doppelgängers were able to walk normally (Be set free). Which would explain why in the underground all the rabbits were free-roaming in the final scenes. In the final scene when they were in the ambulance it can be seen that Jason was holding a rabbit, which is Adelaides rabbit.

It's an interesting theory, but might be overcomplicating the simple necessity for the Tethered to eat. Another theory believes that the same technology used to create the Tethered was used to create the rabbits, which could be possible, but doesn't account for the speed with which rabbits reproduce.

What's so fun about this film is-whether it's Jeremiah 11:11 or "I Got Five On It" or rabbits-Jordan Peele has created a tightly woven tapestry of symbols for fans to unpack. This is a film that's literally about deeper levels to our waking norm, that something unknown is waiting under the surface. So whether these theories or answers we create are wrong or write, the beauty in this movie is the journey to understand them and get something out of it.

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In 'Us,' the Real Meaning of the Rabbits Is Much More Than Food

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The opening credits to Jordan Peele's Us is a long shot on a row of cages ( 11, to be exact) containing a majority white rabbits with a few black and brown in the mix. The camera lingers on this shot long enough, accompanied with the unnerving score from Michael Abels, for these rabbits to feel more menacing-an omen of what's to come next.

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This provides information regarding the bible verse Jeremiah 11:11. It gives details about why its included in the film

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Jordan Peele's chilling new movie Us features repeated references to the Bible verse Jeremiah 11:11 - and many moviegoers may be wondering what this means. In short, Jeremiah 11:11 is a prophecy of people being punished for their sins by having evil brought upon them, which makes it very fitting for Us' themes and revelations.

We first see the sign saying "Jeremiah 11:11" being held by a character called Alan, whom young Adelaide passes as a child when she walks down to the beach. We later see Alan again, having been murdered by his doppelganger, and finally we see his doppelganger on the night that Adelaide went down to the beach. Instead of holding a sign, Alan's Tethered half (who is called Jeremiah in the credits) actually has 1111 carved into his forehead.
Related: Us: The Meaning Behind Each Doppelganger's Name
Jeremiah 11:11 has multiple meanings, the most obvious one being that "11:11" is a palindrome (the same backwards as forwards). Mirrors are used symbolically throughout Us, most notably in the hall of mirrors that Adelaide wanders into as a child, and are naturally associated with the experience of meeting one's doppelganger. However, this is the actual Bible passage that Jeremiah 11:11 refers to:

"Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them."

The Book of Jeremiah is part of the Old Testament, and is taken from the writings of a Judaean prophet called Jeremiah, who is also believed to have authored the Book of Kings and the Book of Lamentations. Jeremiah's writings include accounts of how he was persecuted and mocked for his prophecies, but he couldn't help but speak them because the word of God was like " a burning fire shut up in my bones." Because of this suffering, Jeremiah is also called "the weeping prophet" - which is interesting when coupled with the fact that a signature image of is a close-up of the protagonist's face with tears running down it.

Chapter 11 of the Book of Jeremiah, where the quote in Us comes from, warns of a covenant that has been broken between God and the people of Judah and Jerusalem, and the suffering that will follow as a result of this broken covenant. The chapter recalls the agreement made between God and the people of Israel during their Exodus from Egypt that they would be obedient to the word of God: " Yet they obeyed not, nor inclined their ear, but walked every one in the imagination of their evil heart." This takes us up to Jeremiah 11:11, where God promises to bring evil upon the people as punishment for breaking their ancestors' covenant, and warns that he will not listen to their cries.

Needless to say, the God of the Old Testament can be a little brutal, which makes the quote very fitting for the Tethered in Us. Jeremiah 11:11 captures the themes of both punishment (the Tethered rise up against their other halves, and Red takes revenge on Adelaide for imprisoning her all those years ago) and an absence of mercy (the Tethered are unmoved by their doubles' pleas or attempts to bargain). In a sense, Adelaide fulfils the role of Jeremiah in the movie, as she knows the Tethered will eventually take their brutal revenge, but is helpless to stop it from happening.
More: Us Ending Explained (& What It Really Means)

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Jordan Peele's chilling new movie Us features repeated references to the Bible verse Jeremiah 11:11 - and many moviegoers may be wondering what this means. In short, Jeremiah 11:11 is a prophecy of people being punished for their sins by having evil brought upon them, which makes it very fitting for Us' themes and revelations.

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The pupose of this site is used hopefully for a better understanding on how this film is somewhat creepy and "scary". Yet this film also provides a sense of humor. The connection behind both intentions to be scary but funny at the same time makes me more enticed to watch this film.

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Examining the nature of humanity can be a dark and depressing venture, now more than ever. A world that feels divided, one which you fear, becomes your greatest enemy. These are the building blocks for "Us," writer-director-producer Jordan Peele's highly anticipated, thrilling and satisfactory follow up to his Oscar-winning 2017 debut "Get Out." It's also where he cements his place as one of the best horror creators of our time, knowing that life's true horror stems from what humans are capable of doing to each other.

Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o), her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and their children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph, "Hairspray Live!") and Jason (Evan Alex) head to the beach town of Santa Cruz for their summer vacation. They're an all-American family, with a father who has a degree in dad jokes, a mom who tends to the needs of all her family, a monosyllabic teenager who never looks away from her phone and a spritely, rambunctious young boy content to run around in a Chewbacca mask all day long.

But then a pattern of coincidences appear - the number 11:11 popping up several times, circles landing within a circle, words being spoken in the same moment - that shake Adelaide to her core. She's been through this before, as a young girl, in that exact same beach town. And what she once ran from has now come to make her remember what she left behind.

The performances are uniformly fantastic, but I was most impressed by Wright Joseph and Nyong'o, both delivering distinct and completely unique work. Nyong'o gives a master class in acting in dual roles and is almost unrecognizable as her doppelgänger persona. (Which is as much plot as will be revealed here.) Not only does she take on an entirely different voice, but her posture, movements and facial expressions suggest a different individual entirely. At times, I had to remind myself that this was the same woman; that's just how good she is.

Watch Video: Jordan Peele's 'Us' Trailer Shows a Terrifying New Nightmare

Wright Joseph, meanwhile, plays two extremes of a teenager: one slightly removed, angsty but loving, while the other is just downright creepy. Her strengths are on full display in some of the more climactic scenes, but that evil-twin smile will haunt me in my sleep. Duke and Alex are great pairings against Nyong'o and Joseph, with Duke - the imposing M'baku of "Black Panther" - transforming himself into a full-on suburban dad. Co-stars Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker, who play the Wilsons' friends and neighbors, add a touch of humor with their own dark twist.

Duality is a big theme throughout the theme of the film, an examining of things that are so very similar in appearance but vastly different too. The film even incorporates the theme within its own structure. "Us" plays as two contrasting movies: one is very much a jump-scare-filled, thrilling horror flick that many of us grew up watching, while the other is a much deeper and complicated drama with a sometimes muddled message about society. It's a smart strategy but also a bit disorienting.

Also Read: Lupita Nyong'o Zombie Comedy 'Little Monsters' Acquired by Neon, Hulu

There's a plot hole that evolves from this very contradiction of themes, but it's not a deal breaker, mainly because Peele envelops you in the film's dichotomy. Ultimately, this yin and yang deepens the film, because it allows it to evolve and change in each subsequent viewing, even if it might disengage viewers at certain points.

That duality surfaces in the soundtrack created by Michael Abels ("Get Out") that features both Luniz's "I Got 5 On It" and the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," in scenes which would not usually come to mind for either song. The unique takes on both heighten the sense of the world Peele has created. Production designer Ruth De Jong ("Manchester by the Sea") has crafted disparate yet parallel sets, which are highlighted along the way as the story reveals itself.

See Photos: 'Black Panther' Star Winston Duke Exclusive StudioWrap Portraits

You don't have to guess at what films may have been some of the inspiration for "Us." Peele, taking a cue from M. Night Shyamalan, leaves the breadcrumbs right on the table for you to see. The opening sequence of the film is a wide shot of a few VHS tapes surrounding the television set where a young Adelaide (Madison Curry) is watching a news segment about 1986's "Hands Across America" charity event. The VHS spines read: "C.H.U.D.", a handwritten sticker of what might be a home movie, "The Goonies" and "The Right Stuff." It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it type of moment, one that is otherwise insignificant, but strains of those four films all influence "Us."

Peele's sophomore effort is the type of genre film that will merit re-examination every few years, and it has the potential to stand among his greatest contributions to genre filmmaking.

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'Us' Film Review: Jordan Peele Terrifies Again With a Chilling Examination of Duality

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Examining the nature of humanity can be a dark and depressing venture, now more than ever. A world that feels divided, one which you fear, becomes your greatest enemy. These are the building blocks for "Us," writer-director-producer Jordan Peele's highly anticipated, thrilling and satisfactory follow up to his Oscar-winning 2017 debut "Get Out."

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Apparently the ending can be somewhat ambiguous therefore i plan to use this sites' suggestions on the interpretation behind the ending of the film. This source also provides quality intel behind the visuals and interpretations of the scenes. Also I plan to gain information about "Red".

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Warning: ending spoilers for Jordan Peele's Us. Read at your own risk.
Jordan Peele's second directorial project, Us, was a stunning success in its opening weekend. The tremendous box-office response was likely buoyed by memories of Peele's terrific writing and directing debut Get Out, by an eerie advance marketing campaign, and by strong word of mouth from early screenings. While that early conversation could focus on the film's unsettling imagery, central metaphor, and ratcheting tension, though, early viewers couldn't say much about the film's final startling twist. It requires so much context from the film itself that it's hard to casually discuss with people who haven't seen the film, and without the buildup of the movie itself, the intended emotional impact isn't there. But with the film out in the world, it's inevitable that viewers are going to want to discuss what happens in the film's final moments. Above all, that last twist raises questions: does the reveal make any sense? And what does it mean for the story?

The quick summary: in the film, Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o) and her family are attacked by doppelgängers who have escaped from a hidden subterranean laboratory. They're led by Adelaide's double, Red, who's also played by Nyong'o. Red explains that the duplicates, known as the Tethered, are soulless copies of people above. They were created in the underground lab in an attempt to control their surface counterparts, and when the experiment failed, they were abandoned. The Tethered have little volition of their own, and are forced to clumsily mimic the behavior of the originals they were created to copy, but Red has led them up into the world to kill the originals and take their places. It's a metaphor for a divided America of privileged haves and invisible have-nots, Peele says, but the image serves a number of different potential metaphors as well.

At the very end of the film, however, Peele flips the script. He reveals that in childhood, Adelaide and her Tethered counterpart encountered each other in a boardwalk funhouse, and the Tethered version attacked Adelaide, chained her to a bed in the labs below, and took her place up above. The character the audience knows as Adelaide is the lab-created duplicate, and Red, the supposed monster attacking her from below and trying to steal her life, is the original child, trying to reclaim what was taken from her long ago by a supposedly soulless monster.

That's a startling reversal, and it does entertaining, complicated things to the audience's sense of empathy and connection with the protagonist. Adelaide is fighting to defend her actual family and her own life, but she's also fighting to defend a lie, and to keep a world she only gained by assaulting and imprisoning its rightful owner. As an adult, Red is a feral, murderous monster, but in the usual manner of great hero-villain pairs, she's a monster inextricably linked to, and even created by, the "hero" who defines her. It's a gut-punch of a revelation that makes it harder to feel any sense of triumph in Adelaide's success or survival, because it inevitably came at the cost of an innocent life. At the same time, neither Adelaide deserved to be stuck in the underground. Maybe there are no true monsters in Us, just victims. Or maybe both the main protagonist and the antagonist have been made equally monstrous by the circumstances of the world they're forced to inhabit.

But either way, that ending raises a lot of baffling questions. Peele lays out a little groundwork for the twist early on, when Adelaide returns from the funhouse mute and subdued. Her parents (and the audience) assume she's deeply traumatized, but she's actually just a Tethered with no previous exposure to the living world, and she has to gradually learn how to speak and act as a human. In retrospect, there are other potential hints, like the way Adelaide finds her way down to the labs unerringly when she's trying to find her kidnapped son, Jason. It seems suspiciously easy, the way she makes her way down there - until you realize she's been there before, that she came from those labs in the first place. Even so, does the twist make any logical sense?

The hardest part of the story to fill in is what Red's life was like after Adelaide left her in the labs. There seems to be no reason a bright and desperate child couldn't have found her way back up to the surface eventually, especially since her much more limited Tethered counterpart was able to. The path up to the surface seems complicated, but without significant barriers or pitfalls. Why would original-Adelaide have stayed down below for decades, given the misery down there, and her clear memories of the other world? Most of the Tethered don't escape because they don't have Adelaide's clarity and ambition, but Red is a normal child, with every reason to explore until she finds her way out.

More confusing is the way Red describes her miseries as a Tethered to Adelaide when they confront each other in adulthood. She explains that because of the milestones in Adelaide's life - meeting her husband, having children, enduring complications with her second pregnancy, having a C-section - Red was forced to go through clumsy mirror images of the same events, taking on the mute, brutish Abraham (Winston Duke, who also plays Adelaide's affable husband Gabe) as a life partner, and tearing her own body open in order to birth her own damaged version of Jason.

The mechanics of that process are deeply mysterious - why would Red be forced to mimic Adelaide's activities, instead of the other way around, given that Red is the original? Even assuming that Adelaide was able to bend the Tethered connection enough to claim her own unique life instead of copying Red's, why would Red be beholden to her in any way? The deeply sad and horrifying implication is that Abraham is stronger than Red, and that in mindlessly going through the motions of mimicking Gabe's behavior, he raped and impregnated her. But that doesn't explain why Red would get pregnant at the exact same time as Adelaide, or have the exact same difficulties in birth. It doesn't explain Peele's imagery of Red dancing below while Adelaide dances above, as if they were still aware of and duplicating each other.

A lot of this can be hand-waved away with the understanding that Peele doesn't entirely explain how the Tethered connection works, or what it means. Seemingly the connection goes both ways, even if that doesn't seem to affect any other "original" human in the story - and given that Adelaide and Red's situation appears to be unique, it could be enough to argue that it has unique effects on both of them. And an early claim that the Tethered seem to engender big coincidences seems to come to nothing, but maybe it's a way to explain the ongoing link between Red and Adelaide. The entire idea of the Tethered is based in a metaphor, not a rigorous scientific process. Other aspects of the Tethered are glossed over as well, like who's cleaning up after and feeding the seemingly infinite lab rabbits they live on, or why the people who designed the experiment would just walk away, leaving thousands of created humans wandering around free on their own.

For the sake of the metaphor, it's enough to say that Red and Adelaide both live in the same America, where the power structure inherently creates economic splits, and indifferently gifts some people with wealth and comfort, while others are handed privation through no specific faults or choices of their own. It's a system designed to create suffering, and the privileged are often unaware of how much of that suffering is going on. Everyone in that system is connected in some way, whether they realize it or not. And the twist ending adds a little extra grief, as it's clear that Adelaide is in some ways woke, and choosing to suppress her class-consciousness. She knows full well that her comfortable, happy life came at someone else's expense, and that she chose to hold someone else down so she could be free. She's clearly done her best to deny and forget it, but the understanding that her life is a fragile construct is still lurking under the surface of everything she does.

But even with that understanding, and with the application of a few small, telling details - like the way Adelaide strangles Red when she overcomes her in childhood, apparently damaging her vocal cords and leaving Red with a constricted, squawking voice that carries through into adulthood - the twist still feels like it's designed for shock value rather than to further the film's central ideas. It's problematic not because the questions it raises are insurmountable, but because it's likely to leave viewers more distracted by the mechanics than caught up in the emotions.

And the twist does undermine one strong, nascent image that seemed on first blush to mean something else entirely. As Adelaide desperately fights back against the Tethered, she comes more and more to resemble Red. In her most extreme moments, snarling and wild-eyed, she looks exactly like her feral counterpart. The explanation, in retrospect, is simple enough - Adelaide is that lab-born monster from the beginning of the movie, and her true nature is leaking out in spite of all the efforts she's made to curate it away and replace it with something more civilized and acceptable to the world above.

Without the twist ending, that image feels much more telling. In a version of Us where Adelaide and Red didn't switch places in childhood, Adelaide's fall into savagery suggests that there's really no difference between her and the woman she sees as a monster, except the accident of birth. Throughout history, the privileged have always claimed that the underclasses deserve their station because they're just not suited for better things - that they're inherently cruder people with less potential, less ability to take advantage of education or appreciate intellectual pursuits. Adelaide's seeming descent into Tethered-style snarling barbarity feels like a confirmation that there's nothing really separating Us ' above-ground people from the below-ground people.

And to some degree, that idea still carries out in the story as Peele executed it. Red says the Tethered are soulless, but there's no indication in Us to say what a soul means. If it's the ability to love, to feel, and to hope, Adelaide certainly has a soul. She knows enough to want a future she was never invited to have. She's capable of jealousy, resentment, and fear, but she also seems to authentically love Gabe and their children. She has the capacity for ambition and desire for a better life, even if it means stealing someone else's life. Us implies that America's most discarded people are just as human as anyone else living a more comfortable and culturally desirable life, and that neglecting them and letting them suffer is an ongoing act of cruelty that society may come to regret.

And with or without the twist, Us suggests that the answers lie with the next generation, who are increasingly aware of the costs of America's economic divide. As Adelaide becomes more like Red, her son Jason notices, and is unnerved by what his mother is revealing about herself. She clawed her way to the surface at Red's expense, and can claim to be a self-made woman. But the price she pays for her choices is alienation from her own son, who has every reason to question who she really is.

It's clear by the end that Adelaide has won, that she's hung onto her stolen humanity, even if she's lost some of it in the process of defending it. It's less clear what the future holds, whether the Tethered's new independence will have lasting results, or how the newly developing generation gap between Adelaide and Jason will play out. Peele's final twist may not entirely play fair with the audience, or with the rules he's established for this world. But it does carry out his intended message, that the economic and educational divides in America are difficult to cross without significant cost, and that they hurt people on both sides of the line. And it implies something even darker: in America, the best way to get ahead - maybe the only way, for people not coincidentally born into power - is to be amoral, ruthless, and absolutely willing to steal and even kill in defense of whatever luxuries we can get.

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Does the ending of Jordan Peele's Us play fair with the audience?

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Us, Jordan Peele's follow-up to his tremendous writing-directing debut Get Out, stars Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke as a couple dealing with an invasion by murderous duplicates that look exactly like them. It's scary and sad, with a central meaning about the divided state of America.

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This source is also intended to provide more information about the intentions Jordan Peele had. However I also plan to utilize this as a source I can use for a better understanding of the verse Jeremiah 11:11. I wish to understand the importance of the bunnies as well.

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Although the movie's third act included a lengthy exposition dump where Adelaide's Tethered doppelgänger Red explained most of her companions intentions, there were still a few mysteries left unexplained at the end of Jordan Peele's Us. This was half the fun of Peele's excellent second feature film-unraveling the tapestry of references and symbols and Easter Eggs. In the weeks since the movie's release, we've discussed at length the meaning of the rabbits, and Jeremiah 11:11, and "I Got Five On It."

But fans have continued to debate what exactly happened in the closing moments of the film, where Adelaide suddenly remembers what really went down in the fun house as a little kid. In a flash back we see the young Tethered girl knock out the real Adelaide and bring her down to the underground and swap places with her. So the Tethered woman we've called Red this whole film is actually the real Adelaide. As the family drives away from Santa Cruz-with Red dead-Adelaide shares a look with her son Jason, who seems to know her dark secret.

Now, in a new interview with the Empire podcast, Peele has explained his take on this twist ending:

This movie's about maybe the monster is you. It's about us, looking at ourselves as individuals and as a group. The protagonist in the movie is the surrogate for the audience, so it felt like at the end of the day, I wasn't doing my core theme any justice if I wasn't revealing that we have been the bad guy in this movie. We've been following the villain. I say 'villain' lightly because I think there are many experiences of the film, and I think a lot of people go through a question of what is good and evil? Does that even exist? Both characters are lovable and terrifying, based on the lives they've led they've just sort of inverted the paths.

That description really is a clear way of fitting this ending with the overall theme of the film. But what about that look between her and Jason?

Adelaide and Jason sharing that moment at the end, I'm purposefully leaving it a bit vague as to what exactly he knows or how far he's come in figuring out what, if anything, he's figured out. I think the little smile she gives him is a lot of things. I think it's a connection to the evil smile she once had as a little girl, but also a sort of understanding that her family unit was stronger from this experience.

Leaving that vague makes sense, and still allows for fans to theorize that maybe Jason and Pluto switched places somehow, or all of this is in some way connected to Michael Myers.

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Jordan Peele Just Explained the Real Meaning of the 'Us' Twist Ending

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Although the movie's third act included a lengthy exposition dump where Adelaide's Tethered doppelgänger Red explained most of her companions intentions, there were still a few mysteries left unexplained at the end of Jordan Peele's Us. This was half the fun of Peele's excellent second feature film-unraveling the tapestry of references and symbols and Easter Eggs.

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I plan to utilize this website to help me better understand the intentions from the producer, Jordan Peele. Perhaps theres a connection between the film "us" and his previous art " Get out". This source should be beneficial towards the understanding of the film.

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Once you get over the disappointment that Jordan Peele's second feature, , isn't as trim or impish in its satire as his marvelous debut, , you can settle back and salute what it is: the most inspiring kind of miss. It's what you want an artist of Peele's sensibility and stature to attempt - to broaden his canvas, deepen his psychological insight, and add new cinematic tools to his kit. However clunky and repetitive, Us continues to demonstrate Peele's understanding that great horror requires metaphors that are insanely great, that might have come to him in dreams of falling into a "sunken place" or, in this film, into a parallel subterranean world denuded of all material pleasures. Imagine Alice's White Rabbit down and out and eaten away by deprivation. Imagine that it's a white lab rabbit. Imagine a fusion of Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, and James Baldwin - plus arterial spray. So much here to love.

Peele's opening is up there with the nightmare classics. After titles that assert there are thousands of miles of tunnels under the U.S., many of which "have no known purpose at all," we're in a beachside Santa Cruz amusement park in 1986, where a little girl wanders away while her father is distracted by a game of Whac-a-Mole. (What better metaphor for macho futility?) Gothic convention compels the girl to enter a fun house on the beach with a sign reading vision quest: find yourself. In the hall of mirrors, she nervously whistles "Itsy Bitsy Spider" - and then hears someone whistling it back. What appears to be her mirror image is actually ... well, that's the question. The credit sequence that follows is diabolically brilliant: The camera rests on a white rabbit, then slowly pulls back to reveal a cage and then a vast wall of cages, each with its own leporine specimen. Michael Abels's blend of The Omen -like Latin chants and polyphonic Afro-rhythms is so infectious you don't even realize that by tapping your feet you're helping to conjure the devil. It possesses you, this music.

The first scenes lose the pulse, though, and the film never really recovers. In the present, the reasonably prosperous Wilson family goes to Santa Cruz for a vacation, its arrival broken by flashbacks to '86 and the aftermath of the little girl's trip to the fun house, when she's mute, apparently in shock. The connection is Adelaide Wilson, who was once that little girl and is now a jittery mom played by Lupita Nyong'o. Adelaide is nervous about going back to the beach, which is easy to understand - but then why is she there in the first place? Peele's writing is blah and perfunctory, especially when Adelaide's husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), shows up with a powerboat he bought in a vain attempt to keep up with the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker) and their much fancier house and athletic blonde daughters. The Wilson kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), are more cerebral, but we don't get to know them before the so-called "us" arrive.

If you've seen the trailer, you know Us centers on the appearance of the Wilsons' exact doubles in the family's driveway, which might lead you to expect semi-farcical scenes in which the identical Not-Wilsons take their look-alikes' places or cause at least momentary (potentially deadly) confusion. But apart from Adelaide's double, the invaders have little in the way of personality - only pairs of scissors they aim to sink into their counterparts' throats. Peele and his cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, show their relish for the genre in the attacks, in how the doubles seem to rise up from the ground (you don't see how they got there) to envelop and then puncture their victims. But I almost wrote " zombie attacks": Although it's packed with mythically scary images, much of the movie plays like just another walking-dead splatterfest. Peele saves the big reveals for the end, when they're effective but too late. In the ways that matter, the attackers are "them" and not "us."

This is the sort of movie that fans will rewatch to appreciate the fillips, the purposeful echoes, the bits of foreshadowing, and the performances. Moss has little screen time, but she shows her genius as her character's murderous double. Watch her savor the act of putting on lip gloss: Her eyes turn dreamy, and her smile spreads so wide it looks as if it will swallow her face. This is zombie Kabuki. Nyong'o hits extraordinary notes. When she's the double, her voice is the whistle of someone whose throat has been cut, with a gap between the start of a word in the diaphragm and its finish in the head. It's like a rush of acrid air from a tomb, further chilled by eyes like boiled eggs, fixed on nothing in this world. The terrestrial Adelaide is more subtly scary; Nyong'o builds extra beats into the performance, lurches and ellipses that keep you from identifying with her too closely. Something's off - but what?

When the movie ends, you can rearrange the pieces in your head and appreciate the breadth of what Peele set out to achieve. Social scientists and pundits speak of human society in terms of gaps - in wages, in education, in quality of life. It's Peele's ingenious notion that the under- and over classes are not estranged but "tethered" in ways that those at the bottom perceive as mockery and theft but that the privileged can't see - and can perhaps feel only at the instant those scissors slash their jugulars. As in Get Out, that privilege breeds dissociation, one of the ripest subjects for a genre that brings to roaring life the revenge of the repressed.

But to give Peele's vision its due, you'd need the skills of an artist-animator like Hayao Miyazaki, for whom the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds is porous and those rabbits could take human form - and vice versa. As a horror buff, I hate to admit it, but Peele's attachment to creaky genre tropes is already starting to hold him back. The good news is that he's more than halfway to creating his own syntax, his own means for illuminating the sunken places of the world. I have a feeling there will be miraculous excavations to come.

*This article appears in the March 18, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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Us Doesn't Live Up to Get Out, But It Shows the Promise of Jordan Peele

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Once you get over the disappointment that Jordan Peele's second feature, Us, isn't as trim or impish in its satire as his marvelous debut, Get Out, you can settle back and salute what it is: the most inspiring kind of miss.

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This source will be a reference to my paper in order to provide an extra set of lens and give me a better perspective with parts I may not connect independently with. This source does a tremendous job on backing up important symbolism. I may actually drown with the information this source provide.

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If you're reading this article and you're anything like me, that means you most likely watched Jordan Peele's newest horror film, Us, and are a bit confused about what it all meant. Questions should be running through your head and chances are, all you've been thinking about is this movie.

And if that doesn't apply to you and you, for some reason, haven't seen this brilliant film, then to quote another Peele film, GET OUT. Seriously, though. Major spoilers for Us and Get Out are ahead. To read my spoiler-free review, click here.

Now, in my review, I said that I planned on watching it again, because the amount of unsolved mysteries in this film was LITERALLY keeping me awake at night. And that's exactly what I did. This time, I sat down with a notebook and took some (very sloppy) notes on everything that stood out to me this time.

So today, I am going to be analyzing and explaining the events of Us, in chronological order. This is gonna be my own interpretation, and it may not be right or wrong. It's just the way that I perceive the film.

The Tethered

Many years ago, the US government created a program in an attempt to have total control over their people. Their goal was to create clones of existing people that they could control like puppets. These clones were known as the Tethered.

However, they soon discovered that they could duplicate the bodies of people, but they couldn't duplicate their souls. The government couldn't control the Tethered. As a result, people in real life shared the same soul as their Tethered counterpart.

The film opens with text saying there are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the United States. Many have no known purpose. The government filled these tunnels with the Tethered, keeping them underground.

As people share the same soul as their Tethered counterpart, the one with the stronger portion of the soul controls the other. The Tethered are depicted as much more primitive and not as advanced as humans, which is why humans are stronger, and the Tethered are forced to mimic the actions of humans.

I also believe that the Tethered were able to see what their real-life counterparts saw. The Tethered would essentially have to not only do, but also see what their real-life counterparts did.

The ones with the weaker portion of the soul would just be passengers in their own body, as another person controlled their body. They'd see what the other person saw. They would pretty much be in the Sunken Place from Get Out.

Life for the members of the Tethered was difficult. They were unable to eat any meals, instead, needing to feed on raw rabbits. And according to Red later in the film, on Christmas, they would receive sharp golden objects for Christmas instead of good presents.

The Tethered were eventually completely forgotten, with society being completely oblivious to their existence.

Red and Adelaide

The big twist in this movie is that Red was Adelaide and Adelaide was Red, and to avoid confusion, I'm going to be referring to these two as "Real Adelaide" and "Tethered Adelaide."

On Real Adelaide's birthday in 1986, she watches an advertisement for "Hands Across America," which was an event in which people all over the United States held hands and formed a human chain. Real Adelaide is also wearing a "Hands Across America" t-shirt.

Real Adelaide goes to the amusement park in Santa Fe with her parents. She gets a Michael Jackson's "Thriller" T-Shirt from her dad (a horror music video) and eats a RED candy apple before she wanders off to the beach.

Real Adelaide turns and sees an attraction called Shaman's Vision Quest. As she enters, Tethered Adelaide walks toward her from the tunnel. The power goes out. A few moments later, Real Adelaide turns around and sees Tethered Adelaide. Tethered Adelaide chokes Real Adelaide, and she falls, unconscious.

Tethered Adelaide drags Real Adelaide downstairs and handcuffs Real Adelaide to the bed with a pair of gold handcuffs. She takes Real Adelaide's "Thriller" t-shirt and puts it on herself.

When Real Adelaide wakes up, she is tethered to the bed. She touches her pained throat, unable to speak or yell for help. Her vocal chords are damaged. Tethered Adelaide is now slightly stronger than Real Adelaide, and her movements are no longer completely bound to those of Real Adelaide's.

Real Adelaide is now trapped under the rest of civilization, while Tethered Adelaide assumes her life. For months after the incident, Adelaide's parents are worried, as their daughter hasn't said a word since she exited the hall of mirrors.

They speak with a professional, and they believe that their daughter has been traumatized by what she witnessed. In actuality, it is because Tethered Adelaide did not know how to speak English, and was therefore mute.

For the next few years, Tethered Adelaide begins to learn how to speak English. Meanwhile, underground, Real Adelaide is unable to find an exit and instead must slowly adjust to her life underground.

And I believe it is around this time that the two Adelaides are playing a bit of tug-of-war with each other where sometimes, Real Adelaide controls Tethered Adelaide, and other times, Tethered Adelaide controls Real Adelaide.

Soon, Tethered Adelaide goes to dancing class, where she learns how to be her own person and discover herself. And I believe that it is the performance we see in the film when Tethered Adelaide ended up with the stronger part of the soul, and assumed control over Real Adelaide.

At the end of the film, Real Adelaide tells Tethered Adelaide, "If it wasn't for you, I never would have danced at all." This shows how at that point, Real Adelaide couldn't help but do Tethered Adelaide's dance routine underground, showing the significance behind this scene.

But as the years went by, Real Adelaide grew angrier and angrier with the knowledge that the fake version of herself was in the real world, living the life that SHE deserved to live. Her desperation to escape becomes anger, strengthening her soul.

Eventually, her soul grew strong enough to break free. Real Adelaide and Tethered Adelaide could move independently because they shared equal halves of their soul. Real Adelaide was able to partially free the rest of the Tethered, enough to get them all to participate in her revolution.

Inspired by the "Hands Across America" t-shirt that she wore as a child, she wanted to make the presence of the Tethered known to the world. She didn't just seek to kill Tethered Adelaide; she wanted to make a statement.

And before Real Adelaide broke free, she could still see what Tethered Adelaide saw. That's how Real Adelaide knew when Tethered Adelaide would be coming back to Santa Fe. She knew how to time her revolution perfectly.

On the day that Tethered Adelaide and her family are going to Santa Cruz, Real Adelaide and the rest of the Tethered have begun their revolution. Tethered Adelaide is very apprehensive about going back to the beach.

We assume this is because of her traumatic experience when in actuality, it is because Tethered Adelaide knows that the beach is where Real Adelaide is and she wanted to stay as far away from her as possible.

As the family is on their way to the beach, they see the bloody corpse of a homeless man (Mr. Jeremiah 11:11) being put into an ambulance truck. Later that day, we see his Tethered counterpart on the beach with his arms out.

The Tethered counterpart had just murdered the real homeless guy and was standing on the beach with his arms out as the beginning of the Tethered human chain.

Also, when Tethered Adelaide is sitting with Kitty on the beach, Tethered Adelaide says, "I have a hard time just... talking." The reason she has a hard time talking is because she only learned to communicate with English by listening to other people.

That night, Tethered Adelaide tells Gabe about what happened to her as a child; only it didn't happen to HER. It happened to Real Adelaide. But Tethered Adelaide tells the story from Real Adelaide's perspective because again, the Tethered can see what we see.

When the Tethered family breaks in, the power goes out, like it did in the hall of mirrors. Real Adelaide explains why she was there, beginning her story with "once upon a time," the classic beginning to fairy tales. This is because she was familiar with fairy tales from her time in the real world as a child.

Real Adelaide is also the only one amongst the Tethered who can speak English. The rest of the Tethered only make clicks and other noises, but the reason Real Adelaide speaks English while the rest don't is because she's human.

In her story, she mentions how because Tethered Adelaide married Gabe, Real Adelaide had to marry Abraham. She states that she was, " tethered to the girl's prince." Nice little play on words.

Real Adelaide then tells Tethered Adelaide to TETHER herself to the table with gold handcuffs. This parallels what happened when they were children, when Tethered Adelaide handcuffed Real Adelaide to the bed, and now, Tethered Adelaide must do it to herself.

When the Tethered break into the Tyler family's house, you can see the power go out again before quickly turning back on due to their background generator. I have yet to uncover the link between the entrance of the Tethered and power outages.

When Tethered Adelaide reenters the Tyler house to get their car keys, she gets attacked by one of the Tethered twins. After a quick fight, Tethered Adelaide grabs the scissors and brutally murders the twin, letting out an ear-piercing maniacal shriek as she does so.

Jason, her son, sees her do this and is visibly disturbed by this. Later, in the forest, when Tethered Adelaide walks into the forest and encounters Umbrae, Tethered Adelaide communicates with her, knowing that she can do this because they are both members of the Tethered.

The following morning on the beach, the family runs into Pluto, Jason's Tethered counterpart. But at this point, the members of the Tethered are fluctuating between their own actions and copying their real-life counterparts.

And that's why Jason is able to kill Pluto. Jason's soul remains slightly stronger than Pluto's, forcing him to mimic the actions of Jason and walk into the burning fire.

After Jason gets kidnapped by Real Adelaide, Tethered Adelaide enters the hall of mirrors again. This time, she goes down to the basement. It seems a bit too easy for her to just find this hidden place, but it makes sense given that it's where she was as a child.

Years after Tethered Adelaide cuffed Real Adelaide to the bed, Tethered Adelaide murders Real Adelaide in front of the very same bed. Before Real Adelaide dies, she whistles "The Itsy Bitsy Spider," the same thing she did right before she met Tethered Adelaide for the first time.

After Tethered Adelaide snaps Real Adelaide's neck, she lets out another bloodcurdling scream and then begins to laugh in a very creepy way. When I heard this, I immediately thought of how much it reminded me of Real Adelaide's laugh earlier in the film.

So Tethered Adelaide saves Jason, but Jason doesn't look too thrilled to see her. As the family sits in the ambulance truck, Jason eyes his mother suspiciously, thinking back to what he witnessed back in the Tyler house.

Tethered Adelaide thinks back to what she did in the past.

As Jason looks at her, Tethered Adelaide knows that Jason knows her secret. But she drives away, and what happens next is left unknown.

Believe it or not, this is not everything I found. There is SO MUCH that still needs to be uncovered in this film. Let's dive into our next mystery.

Jeremiah 11:11

At the amusement park, Adelaide sees a homeless man carrying a sign that says Jeremiah 11:11. Years later, she is able to recognize his corpse because he is holding the same sign. The man's Tethered counterpart has 11:11 carved into his forehead.

What does the Bible passage say? This.

"Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them."

What did this have to do with the story? Throughout the film, Red references God on numerous occasions, believing that she was being tested by God. So throughout the film, she is essentially following this verse.

She is bringing evil (the Tethered) upon the people of the world, and they would not be able to escape them.

11:11 could also be used because the number is symmetrical, and on both sides of the colon, we have two duplicates. Later in the film, Gabe is watching a baseball game, and we hear the commentator say the game is tied 11-11. In the next scene, Jason points at the clock when the time is 11:11.

Rabbits

One of the animals that repeatedly pops up in this film is rabbits. The opening credits of the film played over a shot of numerous rabbits in cages. But why are rabbits so prominent in this film?

My interpretation is that the rabbits represent the Tethered. The rabbits we see in the beginning of the film are locked away in cages, similar to how the Tethered are stored underground.

When Adelaide first enters the hall of mirrors, she encounters one free rabbit, just as she was about to encounter one free member of the Tethered.

And at the end of the film, when Adelaide reenters the underground world of the Tethered, the cages are empty, and the rabbits are free to roam around the room, just as at that point in the film, the Tethered are free to roam around the world.

You take that along with the fact that the Tethered actually eat the rabbits, and you have a pretty damn good analogy.

Rabbits don't just make appearances beneath the ground, either. Near the beginning of the film, we can see that Zora, the daughter, is wearing a shirt that has a rabbit on it.

Later in the film, she wears a hoodie that has "thỏ" written on it, which translate to "rabbit" in Vietnamese.

More Symbolism, Foreshadowing, and Explanations

Let's begin with the opening of the film. If you think about it, the opening scene of this movie gives away everything you need to know.

We began with some reading about the tunnels underneath the U.S. and how some don't serve any known purpose. These are the tunnels that the Tethered live in.

We then see a TV commercial for "Hands Across America," an event in which people would, and I quote, TETHER themselves together to raise awareness. Later in the film, the Tethered form this human chain to create awareness that they exist.

The TV screen cuts to black briefly, and we see Adelaide's dark reflection in the screen (the first shot we see of Adelaide isn't a direct shot of her). And right after that, we have a commercial for Santa Cruz beach, which is where the passageway to the world of the Tethered is.

At the amusement park, Adelaide eats a RED candy apple, which may foreshadow later, as all of the members of the Tethered wear RED jumpsuits and she would eventually be named Red.

When the family arrives in Santa Cruz, Gabe tells Zora a joke: "Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"You."

And later in the film, it is "you" who starts knocking on their door.

The family is also seen seated at a table eating a meal. You may notice that everyone at the table appears to be eating fast food except for Adelaide; Adelaide is the only one eating RED strawberries.

This not only symbolizes how Adelaide is actually Red, but also how she may not be too accustomed to eating most human foods.

And later, Adelaide looks on the table. She sees a fake spider on it, and a tiny little real spider crawling under the fake spider. This symbolizes how the fake Adelaide was above, and the real Adelaide was below the fake one.

In addition, we have a lot of mirrors and reflections in this movie.

For example, when young Adelaide is watching her parents talk to the specialist, she is not watching them in person. She is watching them in the reflection of the mirror.

At night, when Gabe is talking to Adelaide from the bathroom, we don't see Gabe. We just see his reflection in the bathroom mirror. And as Adelaide gives the story of what happened to her when she was younger, we see her reflection through the glass.

When Adelaide is looking at a photo of herself when she was a teenage dancer, she looks up and sees another version of herself, as a teenager in a dancing outfit. The "teenager" then turns to the mirror and looks at Adelaide through the reflection.

In a scene that takes place right around this one, we get a shot of Zora looking at her reflection in the mirror. This all represents how much time we spend looking at mirror images of ourselves and of other people. And later, the mirror images of the family come to haunt them.

Jason also wears a Jaws t-shirt, another horror film where the danger happened on a beach.

A small toy ambulance truck holds the closet door open to keep Jason from being trapped. Later in the film, an ambulance truck keeps the family from being trapped in Santa Cruz with no method of transportation.

When Adelaide says that they should leave Santa Cruz, she says, "I don't feel like myself." That's because she isn't actually HERSELF. She's a member of the Tethered, not the real Adelaide.

Throughout the movie, we don't just get mirror shots. We also get shots of shadows. This symbolizes how the Tethered are the "shadows" to the real people.

Early in the movie, Zora tells the family about how the government puts fluoride in the water to control our minds. While this isn't exactly true, this film does have a failed government experiment in which they tried to control our minds.

While on the beach, Jason digs a sand tunnel, which is interesting as they were on the beach, right where the Tethered live under in tunnels.

There's also another little detail that I noticed. In the picture below, take notice of the painting in the very center, above the fireplace.

You'll notice that there are four human-like figures. This represents the four members of the family. Out of these four figures, ONE of them is red. The red figure represents Adelaide, as she is actually a member of the Tethered, who wear red.

When the Tethered family is breaking into the house, the Wilson family freaks out when Red unlocks the door using a key hidden under a rock. Red knew where the key was because she used to live in the house as a child.

On the beach, Gabe mentions that he has a boat, and realizes that he forgot a flare gun. Josh tells Gabe that he needs a flare gun. Later in the film, Gabe runs into Josh's boat, finds a flare gun, and kills Josh's doppelgänger, Tex, with it.

When Gabe is killing Tex, Dahlia, Kitty's doppelgänger, watches through the window. Through her reflection in the glass, we see that she appears to begin to cry, only to then emote an evil, satisfied smile.

This really threw me off, but I realized it made sense. Kitty married Josh, so Dahlia was forced to marry Tex, who she had no feelings for. Add that to the fact that earlier in the film, Kitty joked about how she thought about murdering her husband, and you can see how Dahlia isn't too sad to see Tex die.

Another scene with Dahlia that stood out to me is a scene where she is looking at her reflection in the mirror and she puts on lip gloss. Why was this included? It's because Dahlia had never seen her reflection before. Now that she sees what she looks like, she puts on lip gloss, finally able to beautify herself.

Dahlia also takes the golden scissors and slices herself in the face as she watches in the mirror. This can be taken multiple different ways, but I perceive it to be symbolic of how humans can harm themselves at times.

When Adelaide is walking through the amusement park, as she walks by the Jeremiah 11:11 guy, she sees a couple playing rock-paper-scissors. Each one of these comes into part in the film. Jason kills Dahlia with a rock, scissors are the weapon used by the Tethered, and Red creates a model of two people with paper.

In the opening scene, we see tapes of other films on the shelf such as The Goonies and C.H.U.D.. I haven't seen these films, but from what I heard, they have connections to this film.

And here's something else that I noticed that I haven't uncovered the mystery behind. In the scene at the beginning, Adelaide enters the hall of mirrors and outside it, the attraction is Shaman's Vision Quest.

When we return to this place later in the film, it no longer reads "Shaman's Vision Quest". It reads "Merlin's Forest".

I don't yet know the meaning behind this, but rest assured, there must be a TON of little details that I missed given that this film is filled to the top with these tiny details. And now, for my next section on this movie.

The Social Commentary of "Us"

Those who watched Get Out know that Peele enjoys putting metaphors and symbolism in his movies. Like Peele's previous film, there is a bit of social commentary in this movie as well that can be interpreted in a multitude of ways.

First, one of the biggest themes in this movie is, "you are your own worst enemy". The entire film is essentially a metaphor for that; how maybe the evils and the sources of the stress and pain we deal with in our lives stem from us. We are the heroes in our story, but we are also the villains.

That's the meaning behind the ending. That's the reason why this film needed that twist where Adelaide was actually the "bad guy" the whole time. Because the way we can harm ourselves can be far worse than the ways other people can harm us. None of us are perfect, and we can be the bad guy in our own lives.

Us can also be interpreted as a metaphor for classism in our current society, with the Tethered representing the very bottom, and the people rejected by the government and society, doing whatever they can to receive equal treatment from everyone else.

The Wilson family, who we follow throughout the movie, represents the middle class. They aren't incredibly rich, but they managed to make a good life for themselves. They have a boat that breaks down from time to time, and throughout the film, they fight to maintain what they have.

And the Tyler family represents the upper class. They are a family that lives in a gorgeous home, a boat that works VERY well, and every simple task can be done for them with their interactive home device, Ophelia. They aren't affected when the power goes out because they can afford a backup generator.

Early in the movie, Daisy even admits she got a bit of plastic surgery to keep looking as beautiful as she could. This family has everything, and that's why they are killed by their doppelgängers so fast. They have very little to fight for, given that they live a privileged life completely opposite from those of the Tethered.

This film also has a lot to say about what the U.S. is as a country. When I first Googled "Us" to find information about this movie, all I could find was information about the U.S.. That's, of course, because "Us" is essentially the same as "U.S.".

What this film may also be trying to say is how poorly the U.S. treats those who we perceive to be the OTHER, or in this case, the Tethered. We reject them from society, we fear them, and we kill them. And at the end, Red says she wanted the world to know that the Tethered were "humans too".

And at the end of the day, the undocumented immigrants, the Muslims, and everyone that the United States tends to be a bit touchy with-they're all just like us. They're humans, and in the case of this film and the twist, the enemy we feared the whole time was actually the human and the hero we cheered on in the film was a member of the Tethered.

This film blurs the line between who's "good" and who's "evil", suggesting that there may not really be any definitive "good" or "evil". The U.S. may not always be the "good guys" and other countries, including people from those countries aren't just the "bad guys".

Adelaide herself may be representative of the U.S. as well. She was once a member of the Tethered, and that's a secret that she buries so that she can continue to appear to be the "good guy".

Similarly, the U.S. and Americans have done some atrocious acts in the past. Our country is built on stolen Native American land, enslaved black people, and oppressed them for decades. Yet, we have painted an image of ourselves as noble American warriors. But we aren't just the good guys. We have a past of committing terrible acts on innocent others.

Another way of seeing this film is that all three families represent the U.S. The Tyler family represents the U.S. not putting up a fight to stop certain global issues, the Wilson family (the heroes) represents the U.S. sticking together and fighting global issues despite an unpleasant history, and the Tethered represent the worst of us.

The members of the Tethered, including Tethered Adelaide, commit murder throughout the film. They can represent both the oppressor and the oppressed. And that is the beauty of Us.

I believe that Us is a masterpiece. I don't use that word lightly, either. I think it's a genuine masterpiece. This film is much more than just a horror movie with a good story. There are so many layers to this film that can be peeled back and interpreted in a multitude of different ways.

And I think it's truly special when we have a film that can get people talking. This isn't the kind of movie where you watch it, you shrug, and forget about it a few days later.

This is a movie that forces you to think. Its mysteries and symbolism get inside your head.

So it kind of threw me off when I saw that it received a bit of a mixed, polarizing reception amongst audience members, with many complaining that the twist was obvious, it wasn't that scary, and the ending and the whole film "didn't make sense".

Those just aren't fair criticisms. If you saw the twist coming, great. I didn't. And neither did many others. It doesn't say anything objective about the film itself.

You didn't think this movie was that scary? Fine. Neither did I. But I still absolutely love this film because it's very clear that scaring the audience is not the only thing Peele was trying to accomplish. There is so much behind every single writing choice and directing choice in this film that it's way more than an average, run-of-the-mill horror flick.

And if you didn't think this movie made any sense, then...well, please see the above "Red and Adelaide" section where I summarized everything and how it all DOES make sense.

This movie is essentially a game of connect the dots. Peele is gonna give you the dots, but it's your job to connect them. Peele leaves a lot unexplained and he leaves a lot of ambiguity because it's up to us, as the audience, to decide how certain things worked.

At the end of the film, Red explains quite a lot about the backstory of the Tethered. While it does feel like a bit of an exposition dump, it doesn't answer every question that we have. This movie is made to get people to have conversations about it. It allows us to talk about all of its different meanings and explain certain aspects.

I've heard many say Get Out was a better film. I don't like drawing that kind of comparison because Get Out and Us are two very different films intended to get us to react differently. Get Out was supposed to make us go, "Yes! Kill those evil white people!" And Us was supposed to make us go, "Whoa. WHOA. WHAT?!"

They're different movies. And personally, Us is the movie that made me think more. I honestly couldn't get any sleep because I was always trying to solve the mysteries that were left unsolved during this film.

And when a movie can stick with you-when a movie can get you to have conversations about it, taking about the deeper meaning behind it all and you can't even SLEEP because you can't stop thinking about it, THAT is the sign of a damn good movie.

Because if every single little mystery and everything about the plot was completely resolved by the end of it, this film likely would have been a lot more boring and it wouldn't have tread any new ground in horror territory. Instead, this movie gives US the puzzle pieces and tells us to create a picture.

As someone with experience, I know that writing a movie is not easy. Even the worst screenplays ever written had to have taken some thought and time. Peele wrote an excellent screenplay filled to the top with subtext and directed it to perfection.

I just think it's truly special when a filmmaker trusts their audience. I love how Peele gave us numerous ways to interpret the ending, the twist, the symbolism, and the story. This movie can get people talking and theorizing. And that makes this a truly great film.

I don't give many movies a 10/10. But this one absolutely deserves it. I'm not even exaggerating; I think a generation or two from now, people will look back upon Us as The Shining of our generation.

This is, in my opinion, one of the best films ever put to the screen, and I love it more the more I think about it. I think the reason why not everyone likes this film is because not everyone has thought about it as extensively as I have along with many others.

Us evokes the power of cinema and when every single little detail of this movie is analyzed, then everything makes perfect sense. And that is the beauty of Us.

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If you're reading this article and you're anything like me, that means you most likely watched Jordan Peele's newest horror film, Us, and are a bit confused about what it all meant. Questions should be running through your head and chances are, all you've been thinking about is this movie.