Us

A little girl is at the fair with her parents. It’s 1986 and her parents have taken her to Santa Cruz beach where they’re wandering around playing a variety of games but the father seems more interesting in showing off and drinking than spending time with his daughter.

When the mother goes to the toilet and the father is focussed on playing Wack-A-Mole, the little girl, Addy, wanders off to the beach where she comes across a fun house full of mirrors. Entering inside she soon becomes disorientated and lost and struggles to find her way out until she suddenly comes across an oddly acting reflection that is her but also isn’t.

We jump forward to the present day and Addy Wilson and her family are heading off to their summer home — Addy’s childhood home — near Santa Cruz beach. The two kids, Zora and Jason, don’t seem overly thrilled that they’ve been dragged along with their parents on vacation but Gabe tries to encourage some fun by telling them he’s arranged a trip to the beach with some family friends.

Addy is adamant they’re not going to the beach as it’s too crowded and full of weirdos. She’s obviously still scarred from the events that happened years before which left her unable to speak for months. Gabe is insistent that they should meet with their friends as the plans have already been made and they shouldn’t let them down and Addy reluctantly agrees as long as they’re home by dark.

They head out to the beach and meet up with Kitty and Josh Tyler and their twins Becca and Lyndsey. The families couldn’t be any more different: the Wilsons are seemingly down-to-earth whereas the Tylers are mainly concerned with outward appearances such as what car they’re driving and having plastic surgery.

Jason wanders off which panics Addy and she frantically searches for him, finding him near the hall of mirrors she got lost in all those years before. Freaked out, she demands that the family go home and eventually confesses to Gabe about how she got lost in the same spot all those years before.

Just as they’re trying to work through Addy’s issues Jason appears saying that there’s a family standing in the driveway. His parents think he’s either messing with them or imagining things but when he drags them to the front door they can see the silhouettes of 2 adults and 2 children holding hands in the middle of the drive.

Gabe goes out to ask them to leave but gets no response, and Addy calls the police only to be told they’re 40 minutes away. Gabe grabs a baseball bat to go and scare the people in the driveway off but just ends up getting hurt himself and allowing the strangers to gain access to the house.

What the Wilsons thought were burglars turn out to be exact duplicates of the entire family with a link to Addy’s past that will change not only their lives but the lives everyone in Santa Cruz and beyond.

Nature vs Nurture

🎃Warning! Spoilers for Us ahead!🎭

Us asks us, the audience, an interesting question: are we defined by our circumstances, how we’re raised or something that lies deep within us?

While we don’t see the physical swap between Addy and Red take place at the start of the film it was obvious that something happened to Addy within the hall of mirrors — and to be honest I had thought that there was a swap going on at this point — the parents are oblivious to the fact they now have a different daughter apart from the fact that she can’t speak.

We then see Red have difficulty speaking when she confronts Addy so we can assume that speech isn’t used in the Tethered World and even though the “real” Addy (who became Tethered Red) could speak, she only kept a basic ability after years of being around people who didn’t use language as a form of communication.

But the interesting point is that Addy (the swapped version) gains the ability to speak, turns into a relatively normal adult, forms relationships and has her own children.

So does that mean that anyone from the Tethered World could become a “normal” functioning member of society? Or is it just that there is something unique and special about Addy/Red as a Tethered pairing? Could the Tethered versions of Zora and Jason (Tethered Umbrae and Pluto) also learn to speak and have a life outside the Tethered World given proper treatment and love?

It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? That we’re only where we are with the lives that we have thanks to a chance that put us her, we could have easily been the one Tethered and kept underground acting out a shallow version of another life.

How Far Does The Experiment Go?

Red explains in vague terms that the Tethered were created by “the government” as a means to control the population.

I’m assuming that because the Tethered act out what their linked above-ground counterpart is doing then “the government” thought that if they could make changes to the Tethered then it was change people’s actions in the above-world.

I am assuming that “the government” didn’t count on free will and that’s why the experiment failed, but why just abandon all of these people down there? Why not gas them or put them to work in a factory? Or maybe the link was too strong and killing the Tethered would have an impact on the above-ground person?

But what does Red mean by “the government” anyway because I wanted to put my tin foil hat on at this point.

I could understand a rogue department running a small clandestine experiment on a town and abandoning it when it didn’t work and funding dried up, but at the end of the film we see the Tethered holding hands stretching across a vast area of land. The inference is it’s not just the residents of Santa Cruz that are Tethered, but everyone in the Unites States.

And this causes questions: what happens if someone drives to Canada or Mexico? Or gets on a plane to England? We’re not saying that every country across the entire world has Tethered people are we?

And I think that’s where the premise of the film fell apart for me.

I can understand why making it a country-wide conspiracy/catastrophe makes the film seem more hopeless for the survivors, but I just couldn’t get my head around the practicality of it all and it took me out of the story a bit. I think it would have been much more compelling to have it localised with maybe the Tethered having a way to create new Tethered people when interacting with those on the surface.

I really did enjoy this film and it was an interesting look on what it means to be us, what makes us and what we do with that when our own position is challenged. It’s also a look at what a family will do to stay alive — Zora comparing body counts with everyone was hilarious coming from a teenager — and it was great to see a woman being the stronger of the two parents as it’s usually the patriarch that’s the one to save the family.

Every actor in this film was brilliant — even Elizabeth Moss who I didn’t realise was in the film and I tend to avoid thanks to her icky Scientology background — and the fact that Lupita Nyong’o wasn’t nominated for an Oscar is an absolute disgrace.

What do you think? Am I reading to much into this in terms of the scale of the Tethered threat? Does it make a difference whether it’s a localised area or the whole of the US (or entire world)? Let me know in the comments.

Watch Us if you think you catch your reflection acting odd out of the corner of your eye or wish that they’d bring back Hands Across America for nostalgia’s sake.

Where to Watch:

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