5 Unanswered Questions in Jordan Peele’s Us

Back with an excellent follow-up to 2017’s Get Out, Jordan Peele once again delivers with his part home invasion, part zombie apocalypse, all scary horror movie, Us. It’s an excellent, terrifying film that evokes classics from the horror canon, and firmly puts its own original stamp on a genre that’s so often filled with rehashes and remakes.

But, it’s not perfect. Like every piece of media ever made, there are holes that can be poked and questions that can (and should) be posed about the universe it establishes, and the rules it plays with inside of that.

Let’s go through a very quick run-down of the plot – though this will be spoiler heavy, and you shouldn’t read on if you haven’t seen Us.

In 1986, a young Adelaide Thomas goes to visit a beach in Santa Cruz while on holiday with her parents. One thing leads to another, and the young girl wanders off to explore some very sketchy tourist attractions; the kind you wouldn’t go to in the daytime, let alone on a dark and stormy night. She runs into a seeming doppelganger, and we then cut to the present day, when an older Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) visits the same beach with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke), her daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and her young son Jason (Evan Alex). Not long after beginning their family holiday to Santa Cruz, Adelaide is once again haunted by the idea that the doppelganger from her childhood is coming for her – a fear that’s realised when the whole family is terrorised by mimics of themselves. What follows is a tense and often brilliant film that’s as witty as it is unnerving.

Not everything is answered by the film’s conclusion, though, and here’s five questions I have after watching Jordan Peele’s latest:

 

1. How Do The Tethered Work?

So we learn during a monologue delivered by Adelaide’s clone (known as ‘Red’) that the underground-dwelling mimics are known as ‘Tethered’, and they are essentially doomed to replicate the actions of their above-ground counterparts; just without any real interaction with the world. This is shown with examples like a group of people enjoying a rollercoaster on the pier, and their Tethered counterparts shaking violently in a group, as if they were on a coaster but without the thrill of flying around a track.

However, in other scenes, this isn’t the case. Tethered seem to be able to move freely and do whatever they please, and perhaps are only limited by the actions of their ‘real’ selves when it’s convenient for the plot. I’d like to believe that this isn’t the case, and that there’s some deep lore reason for why they only sometimes copy what their other selves are doing – there’s just not a lot to explain this. Which brings me on to…

 

2. How Does Jason Kill Pluto?

It becomes clear to the Wilson family that it’s a kill-or-be-killed situation, and they must fight their Tethered selves in order to prevent their doppelgangers from planting those sharp golden scissors into their chest. This culminates in a brilliant, sprawling game of cat-and-mouse, which proves to be much more than the initial confines of the holiday home allow for.

The penultimate Tethered to kill is Pluto, who is the pyromaniac replica of Adelaide’s son, Jason. Donning a haunting white mask and covered in burns, Pluto is a psychotic exaggeration of Jason’s interest in a spark toy that he plays with for most of the movie. This is highlighted when the two are confined to a small cupboard in the holiday home, and Pluto fools around with a match while Jason flicks his finger-mounted toy, trying to pull off what Adelaide calls his ‘trick’. In the scene, Jason and Pluto seem to mirror each other’s movements; though it doesn’t seem like they’re intrinsically linked, and instead are just two young, impressionable boys.

Later in the showdown between the two, though, Jason manages to outwit Pluto by forcing the burned Tethered to copy his movements, and walk backwards into an inferno that he caused in a bid to kill all of the Wilson family. It’s a great scene with some striking imagery – something found throughout all of Us – but it doesn’t entirely make sense. Why did the two young boys not completely replicate each other for the rest of the movie? Why wasn’t Jason crawling along the ground, à la The Grudge, like Pluto so often does? Again, it seems like this was more a convenience for a specifically neat scene, but when viewed in the wider context of the film, things start to look a bit more flimsy.

 

3. How Did The Tethered Assemble?

So seemingly, the plan that Red had while underground was to prompt the Tethered to rise up, take America, and recreate the 1986 political protest, Hands Across America, to raise awareness for their kind. This is straight-up shown in the very opening of the movie, and later foreshadowed further by Jason finding the homeless man standing on the beach (pictured above).

However, lots of this doesn’t entirely add up. First of all, it’s implied that millions of Tethered live underground in these abandoned tunnels across America, and for reasons I’ll cover in a moment, Red becomes their appointed leader. She then decides to make everybody uniforms consisting of a red jumpsuit and single brown glove (which will no doubt be a popular 2019 Halloween ensemble), and equips every Tethered with a deadly pair of golden scissors.

Let’s be real, though; how did they put together the millions of suits needed for this, when all we see underground are some desks and dead rabbits? And how did they create, and sharpen, all of the deadly scissors? And, perhaps most glaringly, how did Red manage to coordinate such an effort that saw the Hands Across America movement succeed, as shown by the film’s final shot of thousands of jumpsuit figures spread across the Santa Cruz hills? It’s a political demonstration that barely came together back in 1986, so for Red to succeed in (presumably) spanning the whole US using only mute sewer-dwellers seems a bit of a reach. Speaking of Red…

 

4. Does The Red/Adelaide Twist Work?

Big reveal: Red is actually Adelaide. Well, kind of. In the film’s opening scene set in 1986, when Adelaide ventures down to that Santa Cruz beach and encounters her doppelganger, it’s revealed that the Tethered version of her actually kidnapped her and switched roles. Underground-Adelaide went to live with the above-ground parents, and the eventual jumpsuit-wearing version we see in the present day is the regular, human version who has come back for revenge.

It’s a twist you can see coming a mile off, but that doesn’t detract from how well it’s foreshadowed throughout the first two acts of the film. By only showing sporadic cuts of that pivotal 1986 night, Jordan Peele manages to withhold just enough information to keep you guessing as to whether that’s the direction he’ll head in for the finale. That he does choose this as the film’s central twist isn’t a bad thing; it just adds to what’s already been one hell of a ride.

That is, until you think back to the way Red (above-ground, fake Adelaide) acted throughout the early scenes in the film. She’s terrified to return to the Santa Cruz beach with her family, and we assume that this is because of her repressed past when she met a terrifying replica of herself. Instead, it’s because she doesn’t want to be found out as the imposter…I guess? Lupita Nyong’o is phenomenal in this dual role, so none of this is a critique of her, but her actions and dialogue with her husband early on don’t entirely work when you view it from the perspective of her being a Tethered.

However, I’m yet to rewatch the movie knowing where everything goes (which I plan on doing asap), so this concern might be unfounded. For now, though, I’m wary that some people will be disappointed with the handling of the film’s final moments.

 

5. What’s Next?

The film’s conclusion is a fairly bleak one. Lots of Americans are dead, Red has killed Adelaide and affirmed herself as the Wilson family’s matriarch, and the Tethered are seemingly all across America, having killed their above-ground counterparts. After a terrified Jason regards his secret Tethered mother with accusation and fear, whom he’s just watched murder the real Adelaide, we cut to a shot of some mountains and a sprawling red line of Tethered heading off into the distance.

So…what now? Peele’s Get Out still had room to expand after the credits, but it was mostly resolved by the Armitage family all being killed and Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris escaping in a cop car with his TSA buddy, Rod (Lil Rel Howery). With Us, though, it seems like the USA is now just a ravaged  wasteland, with the Tethered fixed as a blood-red reminder of what happened.

There could be a sequel expanding on what happens beyond this dramatic finale, but with Jordan Peele currently focused on The Twilight Zone, it may be a ways off. In an interview with Polygon, when asked about a follow-up, Peele said:

Sure! It’s a fun one. There’s a lot going on there. The ‘Us-verse’. I like that.

Whether the film needs a sequel or not is up for debate, but a bit more of an explanation around its rules wouldn’t go amiss. I’m definitely in the camp of leaving things for the audience to interpret, don’t get me wrong, but it is fun to look at the shakier areas of an otherwise excellent horror movie.

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