Us: Themes, Symbols & Ending Explained - Which Side Are You On?

by Panzer
“They look exactly like us.”
Jordan Peele’s Us is a cautionary tale for our society –
it’s warning us to change the way we’re going,
or what we’re seeing here could very easily be US.
“There’s a family in our driveway.”
Horror films are all about the return of the repressed.
They bring out our buried fears and demons,
and force us to look them in the face.
In Us, Peele goes further
and puts our own face on what we’ve repressed.
He makes us reckon with the guilt that we’ve buried,
not just as individuals, but as a country.
The title has a dual meaning –
it’s both ourselves
“It’s us.”
and U.S., the United States of America.
Where Get Out was a symbolic horror
designed to make us think about race,
Us is a parable of inequality.
In this story, there are literally two Americas.
And while at first,
we assume middle-class Adelaide is our heroine,
and her Tethered, Red, is the monster,
the film’s ending reveals it’s far from this simple.
In most horror movies,
the repressed force that rises up gets re-repressed at the end,
as the hero defeats the monster
and cathartically purges the audience’s fear.
But these poor, scissor-wielding Tethered
bent on murdering their Above-Ground counterparts
“Maybe I should cut something off of you.”
aren’t the true monsters –
they’re the biggest victims of all.
The evil here is the fact that anyone has been relegated to
this miserable, underground, less-than-a-life.
“I have a definite world of things
that I’m exploring and trying to say with this film
all relating to our duality as human beings,
and the guilt and sins that we bury deep within ourselves.”