Movie Interpretation of Jordan Peele’s Us

What I extracted from the movie.

Jordan Peele’s latest movie ‘Us’ has left fans hanging with its thoughtfully crafted touch and go ending. The movie ends with Adelaide smiling at her son who looks at her with questionable eyes. This unfolded several layers to understand the true meaning behind the stellar masterpiece.

From my perspective

The night Adelaide wandered into the fun house, she came out of the place as a different person. A seed of insecurity was planted in her mind that night which grew fiercer the more she avoided confronting it. The movie takes off from the moment she tries to open up about it, struggling to put it in words the painful trauma she’s been bearing from her childhood.

It is clear that Adelaide is battling a tough monster in order to express herself more openly to the people around her. She even acknowledges this when she informs her nosy friend who is trying hard to make conversation with her at the beach, that she has difficulty in talking. This is contrasted by the fact that only her doppelgänger speaks amongst the other tethered characters who only make noises.

The movie pockets moments like this to symbolize duality which are indeed used to draw parallels of the contrasting characteristics of the two egos that create intractable conflict within us.

We even notice the parabolic references to the number 11 which justify the coincidences that drive the story and also support Adelaide’s intuitive calls at climatic places.

As a victim myself, to the coincidences brought into my life with the number 11, I caught a pattern at the start of movie which confirmed my bias to the story by the end of the movie.

If you observe carefully, the camera pulls back gradually as the starting score plays, captivating us to notice something about the rabbits arrayed in cages. The camera stops zooming out when there are 11 columns of rabbits in the caged rows. An obvious meaning to take away from this foreshadow is how the same rabbits are freed at the end when Adelaide and Red face each other. But what if the entire movie was made in a way to test how far the audience can dig to extract the cleverly concealed meaning surfacing a more obvious double meaning?

Events from the movie

Adelaide’s son is intrigued by what looks like a dead man standing like a scarecrow who happens to be none other than the man with the cardboard that read “Jerimiah 11:11” when Adelaide was young. For all those who haven’t read about this, the phrase literally translates to,

“Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.”

It is now evident that Jason is the next target but none of us know to what. He is seen goofing around, wearing a mask and playing with a lighter. These two factors are prominently shown throughout the movie and the reason to probe into them is supplemental because the tethered character, Pluto, is seen with the same characteristics. This has to mean something. Is the tethered character’s face burnt under the mask because he is a representation of the kid’s insecurities of burning his own face? Could this be connected to the fact that the kid never succeeds in lighting fire from the lighter he is constantly fidgeting with? The first time the he manages to light fire is in the darkest place where he is stuck with his tethered character, Pluto. Right after Pluto closes Jason’s face with his mask, he probably feels safer or desperate, one of the two, to fire the lighter.

Yet another pattern I noticed was the order in which the family members defeated their tethered doppelgängers. Clearly the tethered characters were growing increasingly stronger by feeding on their counter parties’ fear. But the weaker the insecurities were of the family members, the easier it was for them to get rid of their doppelgängers.

Another question running on my mind is about the recurring occurrences of an ambulance in the movie. A toy ambulance is used to keep the closet door from shutting completely when Jason hides, the man holding the cardboard is seen taken away in an ambulance when Adelaide visits the beach with her family, and at the end we see Adelaide’s family riding away in an ambulance. In my opinion, the ambulance has been used to symbolize a sense of redemption just as how ambulances are used in reality to save people’s lives.

The strongest meaning the movie makers have portrayed is at the climax when the character is seen walking into the same place she had visited earlier but the second time she ventures even further. The courage she musters to travel to the bottom of the fun house is analogous to how she travels to the core to face her fear. The true meaning of thriller marries the cavernous nature of psychology during this scene.

We later see her smiling as they drive home, just after she recalls her past in flashes which she refrained from until that day. The moment she accepts her past, she is unchained from her traumatic past and turns back to look at her son, for a coincidental reason. The silent interaction between Adelaide and her son, few seconds before the end of the movie is what left the audience in doubt and gave birth to various speculations to interpret the ending.

My interpretation of the ending

Adelaide is seen smiling but why does it create doubts in the minds of the audience that the son has sensed the evil in his mom? For all we know, she truly feels a certain weightlessness after accepting her fear and is genuinely liberated at the end of the movie.

When she turns to her son, there is a shift in perspective and subconsciously we begin to perceive Adelaide from her son’s point of view who left behind his fear of fire but has taken over a new insecurity as he leaves the fun house with his mother. Maybe he is going to relive his mother’s pain till he is called back to the fun house later again.

Final thoughts

The story is written in a way to test the audience’s alertness during the course of the movie. Every part of the movie is happening for a reason which we can only add up if are able to connect the dots at the end. The more scenes we remember, the clearer the ending is going to be to make sense of the well played open ending.