Us 2019
Buisness
Through a business lens, Us imagines a country run like a company that has buried its operations center in the basement. The surface world enjoys beaches, boats, and summer homes, the glossy customer facing brand of American prosperity, while the Tethered live in fluorescent tunnels, mechanically repeating every move with none of the reward, like a workforce trapped in a supply chain they never chose. The abandoned government experiment that created them echoes projects where data and human subjects are treated as test material, then discarded once executives lose interest. Peele folds in Hands Across America as a symbol of feel good corporate style activism, a public stunt about unity that leaves the underlying structure of inequality untouched. When the Tethered rise, it plays like the nightmare version of labour backlash, where people hidden in the cost column finally demand to be seen as stakeholders rather than shadows.
Us 2019
Critique
As a film, Us builds its power from careful mirroring and controlled visual chaos. Peele opens with that static shot of caged rabbits and a grainy Hands Across America tape, setting up a story that constantly reflects itself in old images and doubles. Everyday family scenes are framed in warm, slightly loose compositions, then echoed later with the Tethered holding the same spaces in rigid, centered tableaux, like the eerie silhouette of the four figures in the driveway that refuses to move while the camera holds its breath. The red jumpsuits and golden scissors cut through otherwise familiar suburban interiors, turning living rooms into stages for revolution. Editing carries a lot of weight, especially in the cross cutting between Adelaide’s polished ballet performance and Red’s brutal imitation underground, where lighting, color, and camera angle stay similar enough that the differences burn into you. The sound design finishes the effect, stretching the hook from I Got 5 on It into a dissonant, orchestral motif that makes a casual car singalong echo over the film’s final fight.
Us 2019
Ethics
Ethically, Us keeps circling the question of what we owe to the people whose suffering makes our comfort possible. The Tethered are monstrous in their violence, yet the film keeps reminding us that they were created, abandoned, and forced to mimic lives they never got to live, which makes their uprising feel like a horrible form of justice rather than random evil. Red’s raspy voice and speech about being “the shadow” turn the horror showdown into a confrontation between a person who got a life by chance and a person who was denied one by design. The twist that Adelaide was originally a Tethered collapses any clean moral line between victim and beneficiary, because the loving mother we have followed is also someone who took a place in the sun and left another girl underground. Peele refuses to hand over a simple answer about who is right, leaving the audience with a harder ethical demand: to recognize that comfort built on someone else’s captivity is already a kind of violence, even before the scissors come out.
Us
Accompanied by her husband, son and daughter, Adelaide Wilson returns to the beachfront home where she grew up as a child. Haunted by a traumatic experience from the past, Adelaide grows increasingly concerned that something bad is going to happen.