Jordan Peele’s Us released in 2019, exciting critics and audiences alike but confusing many among them with a fairly ambiguous ending that not only offered little resolution but incited a revelation that completely upended its world.
The plot concerns a family harassed by home invaders, later revealed to be their exact doppelgängers called the Tethered who recently escaped from an underground complex that had imprisoned them. Their intent is to leave their subterranean world behind and take control of our own. The film ends with a violent climax followed by scenes of hundreds of Tethered no longer trapped beneath the earth holding hands in a chain, as seen in the famous Hands Across America event of 1986 which was referenced at earlier points throughout Us.
This odd finale has of course been a heated point of discussion and remains one even now, nearly a full year later, to the extent that Peele himself recently chose to weigh in with the following:
“I think part of the answer you’re looking for is that to the Tethered it doesn’t matter. Their purpose is the expression and there was something kind of terrifying to me – we see it all the time today – terrifying to me about the idea of violence as expression because it’s an inevitable force … I feel like what happens after is fascinating but irrelevant to the Tethered.”
While this explanation offers little in the way of the closure many seemed to hope for, the ambiguous elaboration fits well with the film’s open-ended nature and even with Peele himself, as his previous effort Get Out ended in a very similar manner. Whatever definite answers can be taken from Us will have to be taken through the interpretation of individual viewers alone.
As for Peele, he appears content to leave the plot the way it is and will instead focus his efforts on The Twilight Zone reboot, which he produces, writes and narrates. Its second season is currently in development and will be released at a currently undisclosed date.