Us is the rare horror movie where the more you think about it, the worse it gets—and Jordan Peele seems very confident that you’ll be thinking about it a lot. Unfortunately, most of that thinking is, “Wait… what?” followed by, “No, seriously, what?”
Don’t get me wrong: the performances are strong, the imagery is striking, and Lupita Nyong’o does so much heavy lifting she should have her own union. But the film itself feels like a beautiful, expensive TED Talk where the speaker forgot to write the middle.
The Setup: Great Vibes, Strong Start, Shame About the Rest
We open in 1986 with young Adelaide at the Santa Cruz boardwalk, wandering into a creepy hall of mirrors and meeting her doppelgänger, Red. It’s unsettling, stylish, and oozing dread. Then we hard-cut to 33 years later, where adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is on vacation with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their kids Zora and Jason.
Already, the movie’s firing on all cylinders:
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Lupita sells PTSD with one glance.
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Winston Duke is doing awkward dad energy like he’s auditioning for a Costco commercial.
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The kids are believable and not obnoxious (a miracle).
Adelaide doesn’t want to go back to Santa Cruz. Gabe insists. They go anyway. This is horror, so obviously no one listens to the traumatized Black woman who is clearly correct. Tradition must be honored.
At the beach, weird stuff happens: a guy gets hauled away, there’s a sign callback, Jason sees a bloody figure standing alone with arms outstretched. It’s all creepy, atmospheric, and promising.
Then night falls, and the movie shifts into “home invasion, but make it thematic.”
The Home Invasion: Peak Movie
The Wilsons notice a strange family standing in their driveway. Gabe tries to dad-talk them away. Instead, they break in and reveal themselves as the Tethered—red jumpsuit-wearing, scissor-wielding doppelgängers who look like the family’s evil cosplay versions.
This is the best section of the film by far:
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Red (Adelaide’s double) speaks in a nightmare rasp that sounds like Pennywise swallowed a kazoo.
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Abraham, Gabe’s double, is a lumbering, animalistic brute.
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Umbrae, Zora’s double, smiles like she’s thinking about murder and nothing else.
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Pluto, Jason’s double, is a fire-obsessed kid with a burned face and unsettling obedience.
The concept of doppelgängers who “share a soul” and have come to “untether themselves” is eerie, and the family being split up and hunted by their own twisted reflections is genuinely tense.
If Us had just been a tight, focused story about this family vs. their doubles, it might’ve been a masterpiece.
But Jordan Peele saw that excellent horror premise and said, “What if instead of telling this story well, I attempted to explain everything and actually ended up explaining nothing?”
Meanwhile, at the White People’s House…
The Wilsons escape their Tethered (through varying degrees of luck, violence, and plot armor) and flee to their rich friends the Tylers, played by Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker, who are doing a parody of awful, drunk, privileged white couple so hard you expect a laugh track.
Just as you think the movie’s about to take a breather, the Tylers’ own Tethered show up and brutally murder them—set to “Good Vibrations,” because subtlety is for cowards.
This sequence is fun in a dark way and delivers one of the only truly memorable kills in the movie. But it also marks the moment where the film says:
“Surprise! Everyone in America has a murderous clone and they’re all out at the same time doing synchronized homicide.”
From here, the movie goes from creepy family horror to confused apocalypse with vibes of a political cartoon drawn by someone who lost their notes.
Worldbuilding? We Don’t Do That Here.
The Tethered are killing their counterparts all over the country and then joining hands in a giant human chain like a blood-soaked Hands Across America reenactment. It’s supposed to be iconic; it mostly looks like a very committed flash mob from hell.
Eventually, Adelaide pursues Red back to the boardwalk, into the funhouse, and into an underground facility full of:
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Fluorescent lights
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Rabbits
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Rows of empty rooms
This is where Red gives us The Explanation, which achieves the rare feat of answering questions while making everything worse.
Apparently:
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The Tethered are clones, created “by the government” (sure, why not).
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The idea was to control people on the surface through their doubles underground (somehow).
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The project was abandoned, leaving the Tethered to mindlessly mimic their surface counterparts while eating raw rabbit and occasionally doing interpretive dance.
Don’t think about:
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Where the clones came from.
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How they were made.
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How they got supplies.
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How birth works when you have to mirror someone else’s pregnancy.
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How thousands of people lived underground for decades without anyone noticing the “oh yeah we cloned the entire country” line item in the budget.
Just accept it and move on, says the movie. Unfortunately, the human brain cannot move on. It just sits there, screaming.
The Big Twist: Cool… I Guess?
In the climax, Adelaide and Red fight in a ballet of stabbing, dodging, and over-choreography. Red keeps outmaneuvering Adelaide, because she knows her moves.
Adelaide finally kills her and rescues Jason.
Then we get the big twist: Adelaide is actually the Tethered. As a child, she was choked out and dragged underground by her double, who then took her place in the real world. The original Adelaide became Red, trapped below for decades, plotting her revenge.
It’s a decent twist emotionally—Lupita’s dual performance makes it sting. But if you stop to think about it for more than 4 seconds, the logic collapses like a damp paper bag.
Questions include:
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How did child-Tethered-Adelaide assimilate into the surface world without speaking?
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How did no one notice the personality swap beyond “she’s quiet now”?
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How exactly is “we swapped once” supposed to explain a nationwide clone revolution?
The twist also retroactively undercuts the movie’s supposed message about class and oppression. If Adelaide was originally one of the oppressed who took the place of the privileged, is she a victim, an oppressor, both, or neither? The film says: “Yes.” And then wanders off.
Jason clearly suspects something at the end, looking at his mother with fear while she smiles like, “Please don’t ask follow-up questions. The movie’s over.”
Theme Soup Served Lukewarm
Get Out was laser-focused: racism, exploitation, commodification of Black bodies. Clean, sharp, effective.
Us feels like Peele emptied his notes app into one script:
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Class inequality
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American exceptionalism
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The idea that “we are our own worst enemy”
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Consumerism
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Trauma
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Government conspiracy
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Hands Across America
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Clones, because why not
There’s the outline of something smart here, but the film never quite lands on a coherent metaphor. Sometimes the Tethered are the underclass, abandoned and oppressed. Sometimes they’re a dark mirror of the comfy middle class. Sometimes they’re just there to stab people for cool shots.
You can cherry-pick meaning from it if you want—and many people have—but the movie doesn’t really earn its symbolism. It feels like it’s relying on vibes and expectation: “This is Jordan Peele. It must be genius. If you’re confused, that’s your fault.”
Sometimes, though, confusion is just confusion.
Style Over Substance, Over Logic, Over Everything
To be fair, Us looks great:
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The red jumpsuits and scissors are instantly iconic.
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The night-time boardwalk sequences are gorgeous and eerie.
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The score absolutely slaps.
And again, Lupita Nyong’o is phenomenal. Her Red is disturbing and strange; her Adelaide is fragile, fierce, and slowly unraveling. She inhabits both roles so well they deserve a better movie holding them up.
Winston Duke is funny but undercut by inconsistent writing—Gabe veers from bumbling dad to useless liability. Elisabeth Moss gets one incredible deranged mirror performance and then the movie moves on from her like it’s late for another subplot.
Us is full of strong pieces that don’t add up to a satisfying whole. It’s like a puzzle where some of the pieces belong to a different box.
Final Verdict: Great Horror Trailer, Messy Movie
In the end, Us is the horror equivalent of a gorgeous, expensive Rorschach test. You can stare at it and see all sorts of depth if you want to, but the ink is still kind of smeared.
If you go in for:
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Striking visuals
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Excellent acting
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Creepy doubles and home invasion tension
…it’s worth watching. Just don’t ask too many questions. Or any questions. Ever.
Because once you start poking the logic of Us, you realize the real horror isn’t the Tethered.
It’s the script.
