Us Ending Explained! Jordan Peele Secret Twist Revealed!

Hi, I'm Eric Voss, and Us, the new horror film from Get Out director Jordan Peele, leaves quite a bit unexplained. Not just Stanley Kubrick throwing a lot of mindf**ks at us in The Shining so film nerds 30 years later can claim it's really about the moon landing, but what seems like a socially conscious home invasion story that then makes us feel like that older sister in Poltergeist. I'm gonna explain what's happening in Us, the ending, the deeper meaning, some secrets that you might have missed, spoiler warning if you haven't seen the movie yet, you dummy, you clicked on this without seeing Us, you deserve to be killed by your double. Okay, let's start with the main question you might be wondering about. What exactly are these tethers? The tethers are part of a secret government project in which Americans were given doubles who live in underground tunnels and mirror their actions. The tethers share a soul with their surface selves and they control their surface selves movement like puppets, and the tethers survive by eating rabbits that are caged down in these tunnels. Now this project was abandoned and I can't imagine why, people puppeting sounds like a slam dunk use of public resources. And one of these abandoned mole people, Red, the pita niongo, mobilized the other tethers into an uprising, attacking their surface world doppelgangers. This happens with the Wilsons, the main family, as well as the Tylers, and all over the country. These tethers all wear uniform, red jumpsuits, one leather glove, and they use golden scissors. Now it's never explained why or even how this coordination happened, but if you're able to just let go of the practicality and logic of this uprising, and instead see it as more of a symbolic statement that it was intended to be, these scissors are symmetrical and they reflect both the literal and the metaphorical severance between the tethers and their surface selves. In the final minutes of the movie, we learn that Red is actually the real surface world Adelaide. And the Adelaide we knew throughout this movie was actually fake. The whole time. When Adelaide was a young girl, she wandered into this house of mirrors, and there she met Red, her underground mole person doppelganger tether. Red choked Adelaide and then swapped places with her. And throughout the movie, there are actually a bunch of clues that were dropped hinting that the Adelaide we were seeing was actually a mole person. Like in flashbacks that take place after the incident at the boardwalk, young fake Adelaide never spoke. She required therapy, and that's because tethers don't use their words. They communicate with grunts and clicks and hand signals. And later, when adult fake Adelaide tells Kitty that she isn't good at talking, that's the real reason why. Also notice that when she teaches her son to snap to the song, she snaps off rhythm with the beat of the music. So she's not normal. And that's also why this fake Adelaide peaked at ballet at age 14. That was the precise moment the real Adelaide danced brilliantly down the tunnels and won the admiration of the other tethers. Fake Adelaide up on the surface was never on rhythm. And the daughter, Zora, brings up the conspiracy theory that the government puts fluoride in the water to control us, which the family ignores at the time, because while there is fluoride in a lot of public water, it's actually good for our teeth, and the idea that it's used for mind control is a false conspiracy theory. See? I told them. No, give me back my son! But fake Adelaide's reaction to this conspiracy is a bit more shifty-eyed, because while fluoride mind control is a false conspiracy, this fictional world totally is controlled by government experiments. Fake Adelaide also nibbles red strawberries, and those nibbles are really weird, very reminiscent of the way Allison Williams' character ate Froot Loops in Get Out. Just a big red flag. And when we meet Red, the real Adelaide, she speaks with a croak, a mix of damage to her windpipe and probably rarely ever using her speaking voice down in the tunnels. During their confrontation at the end of the movie, real Adelaide, Red, mostly dominates her doppelganger, using her ballet-level footwork to sidestep fake Adelaide and throw her further off rhythm. Really, it's mostly through luck that fake Adelaide manages to kill Red and escape with her son Jason. Now, as Red spent her life orchestrating her revenge plot, she fixated on the shreds of surface world culture that she still had with her, including her Hands Across America shirt. The movie actually opens with a TV promo for Hands Across America, and the Tethers creepily recreate the stunt as they take over. So what is the deal with Hands Across America? Hands Across America was a nationwide charity event in 1986, basically you paid ten bucks to join a simultaneous human chain from coast to coast. Lots of celebrities participated, Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby. They were just holding hands, right? The reason Peele featured Hands Across America in this movie is that Us is a uniquely American story. Even the title, Us, can also be interpreted as U.S. Red tells the family, we're Americans, and at one point fake Adelaide suggests fleeing to Mexico. So Red's plan was to brand her uprising with the most American image she could think of, the biggest thing on TV before she went underground, using her Hands Across America shirt as a kind of banner or flag for their movement. Also the lyrics of the Hands Across America theme song might reflect the relationship between these Americans and their symmetrical mirror image tethers. Spiritism is so creepy. But joining this political imagery is a recurring biblical reference, Jeremiah 1111. This Bible verse goes as follows, You might recognize this verse from the famous quote in The Watchmen, spoken by the character Rorschach, whose sigil actually reflects the recurring symmetry of Us and its inkblot marketing campaign. The book of Jeremiah features the wrath of God as he judges his people for their pagan worship and false idols in Babylon, and his quote evokes a day of reckoning, similar to what the surface level America of Us experiences. 1111 shows up all over this movie. Of course on the homeless man's sign, but also 1111 is the number of the ambulance that he's loaded into. The score of the game on TV that Gabe watches is 11-11, and of course 11-11 is on the clock in Jason's room. And if you look at this number visually, it's also symmetrical, 11-11, and the four ones reflect the four tether family members in the driveway, and this chain of ones also reflects the chain of tethers in Hands Across America 2.0. If you combine all of this, it gets us to Jordan Peele's deeper meaning of this movie. One interesting detail in the final image is that the human chain of the tethers goes over rugged terrain unbroken. In the actual Hands Across America 1986, there were a ton of gaps. This country's topography would make this nearly impossible to pull off. So I think this final image implies a cynical view of American society. To be American in this movie is to be a soulless drone going through the motions, chasing false idols like the people of Babylon did. But these false idols are things like material wealth, alcoholism, technology. Peele has said in interviews that the movie is about facing our demons, that maybe instead of seeing ourselves as the good guys and fearing the other, that maybe the monster that we all need to look at is our own faces, and maybe the evil is us. And yeah, by suggesting that these tether mole people are victorious over the surface world suggests that those monsters are superior to us and more deserving of inheriting this earth. The Adelaide who wins is the one born as a tether, the one who stole someone else's life. And she might not be the only one who did this, because what is the son hiding in the final scene? As the family drives away, Jason side-eyes his mom, perhaps suspecting that she's actually fake Adelaide from when he was hiding in the locker during their confrontation. But Jason ultimately shrugs it off and lowers his Chewbacca mask, because I think the real twist of this movie is that Jason is also his tether, swapped with his real self. Look at the evidence. Jason's an odd kid. He has weird eating habits, like fake Adelaide does. If you're growing up having to gobble down caged rabbits, it'll do quite a number to your appetite. And notice how fake Adelaide and Jason both snap in sync with each other, but both are off rhythm to the song, because neither of them truly belong in the surface world. When they arrive at the vacation house, Jason runs off to find his old magic trick, Sparker, that was left there from a past summer. But he can't remember how to use it. Meanwhile, it's his doppelganger who has burn scars on his face. Perhaps that was the real Jason, a pyromaniac whose magic trick went awry, and it was his tether who swapped with him, and wouldn't know how to use his magic trick. That could be why it's Jason who recognizes this doppelganger family, and why Red doesn't kill him when she kidnaps him, because this would be the son that she would have given birth to, fake Jason, before he swapped with the real Jason, burn scars. But to me, the biggest evidence is when those girls cartwheel on a sandcastle on the beach. They ask if it was a sandcastle, and Jason says that he was actually digging sand tunnels. Yeah, mole person confirmed. My question for you guys is, do you think Us is scarier without explaining how this mole person uprising worked, or would you have preferred more of the backstory to be spelled out? Comment down below with your thoughts, and follow me on Instagram and Twitter at EA Voss, and subscribe to New Rockstars for more in-depth analyses of your favorite movies. Thank you for watching, and you know, isn't it great that the world of Us is just a fictional nightmare rather than a real one?