Film / Us

We are our own worst enemy.

"They look exactly like us. They think like us. They know where we are."

— Adelaide Wilson

Us is a 2019 horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele, and his second film after 2017's Get Out. It stars Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, and Evan Alex, with Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker in supporting roles.

Married couple Adelaide and Gabe Wilson (Nyong'o and Duke) decide to take their children Zora and Jason (Joseph and Alex) on vacation to a beach house to unplug with their family friends, Kitty and Josh Tyler (Moss and Heidecker). Meanwhile, Adelaide is plagued with an unexplainable trauma from her past which keeps her on edge.

Unfortunately, the Wilsons' serenity doesn't last. On the first night of their arrival, they see an uninvited family standing on their driveway who then break into their house. The Wilsons then discover that not only are the intruders doppelgängers of themselves, but both families share a deep connection and unfinished business, turning their peaceful vacation into a chaotic fight for survival.

Previews: Trailer (preview), Super Bowl TV spot.

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Us contains examples of:

• The '80s: The prologue of the film is set in 1986.
• Absurdly Ineffective Barricade: Really, the only things keeping the Tethered from escaping to the surface aside from their Psychic Links with their counterparts were a combination of their lack of motivation and an escalator that only goes down.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The scissors the Tethered use have unusually sharp points. Umbrae manages to pierce through a car window and windshield with one despite having the same teenage physique as Zora.
• Aerith and Bob: The Tethered have names which are generally out of fashion for the 2010s (Abraham, Umbrae, Dahlia, Nix, etc... — most are named after Greek or Biblical characters). And then you have Dustin Ybarra's tethered: Brand.
• The Alleged Car: Gabe's boat is older and prone to stalling out, far less impressive than he thinks it is. Its unreliability comes into play when Gabe is fighting Abraham.
• Allegory: For how the upper and middle class are supported by the world's poor with no thought for the welfare of the people they're exploiting.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: All in all, your Tethered wants your life, and also your house.
  • The Wilsons are intercepted by their Tethered in their summer cabin. Gabe refuses to surrender his cabin to the Tethered Wilsons, but he does start offering money, his car, and his yacht for them to go away.
  • The Tylers' doubles are able to break silently into their home. Dahlia even gets a chance to enjoy a taste of the Tylers' lifestyle in their luxurious mansion by putting on Kitty's lipstick.
• Always Someone Better: The main dynamic between the middle-class Wilsons and the richer, but not happier, Tylers.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Gabe shows shades of this when he gleefully shows off his new boat to the (unimpressed) family.
• Ambiguous Ending: The Wilsons kill their doppelgangers and escape Santa Cruz alive and for the most part healthy. However, the audience knows that 'Adelaide' is actually the doppelganger of the original Adelaide, who we knew the entire movie as Red. Jason seems to know as well, judging by the glare he gives Adelaide as they drive off; in response, she just smiles and looks back to the long road ahead, leaving the audience to wonder what she might do next to keep her secret safe. The rest of the US also seems to be in shambles, as the final shot is of the countryside with a long line of doppelgangers holding hands, with smoke seen rising in the distance. Presumably the rest of the world outside the US is unaffected, but it isn't looking good for America...
• Ambiguously Evil:
  • With the reveal that Adelaide was actually the doppelganger all along, with Red being the original Adelaide who was forced by doppelganger Adelaide to live underground, we don't really know what is going on in Adelaide's mind at the end. As they drive away from Santa Cruz, Jason is seen glaring at Adelaide, implying that he learned the truth from Red after being taken underground. Adelaide just gives him a small smile, then returns to driving the car. One presumes that she genuinely does love her family, but the fact remains that as a child, she still replaced her "real" self, then later killed her "real" self. And the cackle she gives after doing it...
  • While some of the Tethered, including Red and her family, intend to kill their counterparts and whoever gets in their way, it's debatable whether all or even most of them are particularly violent by nature; the majority of the Tethered we seen onscreen do nothing but stand around as part of the Hands Across America-inspired chain, which could be their equivalent of a peaceful demonstration against the government.
• Ambiguously Human: The Tethered; a group of red-jumpsuit-wearing doppelgangers who live underground that are obsessed with killing and replacing their overworld/real counterpart. They are failed copies created by the government, and they are spiritually/mentally connected to their originals.
• Ambiguous Situation: Just how many of the Tethered are there? The ending reveals it is a lot, but as they are a government experiment, the scope is unlikely to have involved everyone. Then again...
• And I Must Scream: Generations of Tethered have lived their entire lives underground, unable to make any real choices for themselves as they are forced to mimic whatever the person they're a duplicate of is doing above ground, without ever being able to communicate their suffering.
• Animal Motifs: Rabbits. There’s one on Zora’s shirt when Gabe is showing off his new boat, her green sweatshirt has the Vietnamese word for rabbit on it ("thỏ"), and they're a staple food of the Tethered. Honest Trailers suggests that it might be a reference to the African and African-American folktales of the trickster Br'er Rabbit, which originated among the Bantu-speaking peoples of south and central Africa.
  • The lingering shot of the spider on the coffee table, along with the sculpture displayed on the coffee table that looks like a stylized Arachnid, could also qualify as an Animal Motif. Assuming the rabbit motif refers to Br'er Rabbit, the spider might refer to the Akan tales of the trickster Anansi, commonly depicted as a spider. The Akan were a West African society located in modern-day Ghana. There are strong parallels between the folklore of Br'er Rabbit and Anansi, chief among them themes of a smaller and more vulnerable animal outsmarting larger ones. It's highly likely these folktales intermingled among enslaved Africans brought to the Americas.
• Anti-Villain: The Tethered are sentient beings who are sick of being stuck in abysmal conditions underground, and want to kill their counterparts so they can live outside the complex and stop being forced to mimic their actions. Depending on how sympathetic you are to them, both Adelaide and Red can be interpreted as this.
• Apocalypse How: Class 0. Everywhere outside of America is implied to be fine, but everyone inside of America is being chased by evil replicas of themselves. The result is cities like Santa Cruz apparently being left deserted. This is also mitigated a little in that news stations are still on the air and several news helicopters can be seen at the very end, and the reason Santa Cruz is deserted is because it housed a massive facility full of Tethered and was ground zero for the attack, so some cities are likely better off than others.
• Archetypal Character: Jordan Peele intended for all of the Wilsons to be a different archetype; Adelaide is the Leader (takes charge and has the most knowledge about what's going on) Zora is the Warrior (acts before she thinks and kicks ass) Gabe is the Fool (doesn't really know what's happening and is more comic relief, albeit he does kill two Tethered) and Jason is the Wizard (very observant and intelligent, closely watches his mother and potentially figures out that she's actually a Tethered.)
• Arc Number: 11, which resembles two identical bodies. A variant, 11:11, also represents families of four.
• Arc Words: "Find yourself."
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • The Tethered subsisted entirely on raw rabbits. It's not possible for humans to do so because rabbit meat is so exceptionally lean. Eating too much of it will lead to protein poisoning, which is also called "rabbit starvation" for good reason. This could be potentially handwaved for the Tethered, since they're artificial copies of humans who are shown to have greater resistance to injuries, though this still applies to Red, who is the original Adelaide with the same biology as other original humans.
  • It would be physically impossible for Red and Abraham, despite being genetically identical to their counterparts, to naturally conceive a son and daughter who were also genetically identical to their counterparts. Although it is likely that the same ovum was involved each time (due to the psychic link compelling them to have sex at the same time as their counterparts), the chances of exactly the same sperm reaching the egg both times are so astronomically unlikely as to be impossible. As above, the only explanation for this is that the Tethered are something other than human.
• Artificial Stupidity: An In-Universe example. Kitty is killed when she tries to get her digital assistant Ophelia to call the police, only for the stupid thing to start playing N.W.A's song "Fuck tha Police”.
• Asshole Victims: Downplayed and a weird case of this, as the Tylers are only cantankerous within the family, and they're genuinely nice to the Wilsons.
• As the Good Book Says...: The guy on the boardwalk holds a sign reading "Jeremiah 11:11". This verse has quite a bit of foreshadowing for the events of the film:
  "Therefore thus says the Lord, 'Behold I am bringing disaster and suffering on them which they will not be able to escape; though they cry to Me, I will not listen to them.'"
• Badass Family: The Wilsons, who manage to kill their Tethered counterparts.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Played with. Adelaide's Tethered succeeds in killing her original and escaping with her entire family still intact (if a bit bloodied), but how bad she really is is up for debate, since Adelaide’s doppelgänger is who we’ve been watching furiously defend her family for the entire film, having switched places with the real Adelaide when she was a child. And at this point, the majority of the United States population is probably dead by now because of the surprise scissor stabbings their Tethered inflicted to replace them.
• Bait-and-Switch: Done twice in the fight between Gabe and Tex: at first, it seems that Dahlia, in overhearing the fight, "screams" in despair over the horror and the belief that Tex is being killed, and then begins to "laugh,” knowing full well what he's going to accomplish. Then, by his cries of pain, we are led to believe that Gabe is on the losing end of the fight (especially after misfiring the flare gun). We then see him limp out as the living victor.
• Batter Up!: Gabe attempts to intimidate the Tethered versions of his family with a baseball bat, only for his counterpart to end up with it.
• Battle Couple: Despite how dangerous and surreal their situation is, Adelaide and Gabe will do whatever it takes to keep their children safe.
• Beard of Evil: Gabe's Tethered counterpart has a much larger beard than Gabe himself does.
• Bickering Couple, Peaceful Couple: Although, unlike Josh and Kitty, Adelaide and Gabe both become very violent to protect their children, they have an extremely peaceful relationship, while their wealthy friends, Josh and Kitty, are arguing in all their appearances.
• Bilingual Bonus: At one point, Zora wears a shirt that says "thỏ" — "rabbit" in Vietnamese.
• Black Comedy: A lot of it, but a big moment would be when Kitty, bleeding out of her neck from getting stabbed, is crawling across the floor, and tries to get their voice-activated digital assistant Ophelia to call the police, only for the system to misunderstand and play "Fuck tha Police" by N.W.A instead. She is killed moments later.
• Bland-Name Product: The Tylers' smart home is managed by a digital assistant called Ophelia, which is as likely as an Amazon Echo/Alexa to misunderstand what you're saying.
• Bloody Horror: This movie doesn't get its scares from its gore, but there's still plenty of blood, particularly when the Tylers are murdered.
• Body-Count Competition: It's briefly brought up near the end of the second act when Zora boasts that she has "the highest kill count in the family", since she killed the Tethered versions of both Tyler twins. Adelaide corrects her, since she finished off Nix. Jason chimes in that he killed Kitty's doppelganger, before Gabe tops all of them by pointing out that he killed both Josh's doppelganger and his own. By the end of the film, the Wilsons are literally and symbolically tied at two kills each: Zora and Jason each kill their own doppelgangers, and Adelaide kills Red, the real Adelaide.
• Book Ends: Adelaide whistles The Itsy Bitsy Spider right before she and her doppelganger meet for the first time as children. She whistles it again as Red right before "our" Adelaide strangles her to death as adults.
• Bunnies for Cuteness: Subverted generally, as the rabbits are shown in deeply sinister circumstances. However, it's played straight at the end, when Jason is shown taking one of the rabbits with him and stroking it. Unless, of course, this is all a case of History Repeats.
• Call-Back: To Peele's previous film Get Out (2017). At the Tylers' house, Jason eats dry Froot Loops from a bowl just like Rose did in the former.
• Cat Scare: The animatronic owl in the Hall of Mirrors. Both times. Viewers will likely empathize with Adelaide when she smashes the damn thing off its perch.
• Chain of People: The Tethered symbolically revive Hands Across America from the 1980s as a means of a protest toward the United States government for their cruel treatment and incarceration of them.
• Changeling Tale: Russell and Rayne Thomas never learn that their daughter was replaced by a doppelganger at some point in her life and raised her as normal.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: Red and Adelaide's ballet, which rebounds at least once. It's a handy way for Adelaide to escape, the way in which Red showed the other Tethered she was special, and Red's preferred defense method when she reveals she's the real Adelaide.
• Chekhov's Gag: The boat with the less-than-stellar engine Gabe buys, which he uses to kill Abraham.
• Chekhov's Gun: Played with, as Josh mentions the flare gun on his boat. When Gabe gets onto the boat with Tex chasing him, he finds the flare gun and attempts to shoot Tex with it. It just bounces off the doorway next to Tex, and Gabe is forced to beat him to death by hand.
• Chekhov's News: A young Adelaide watches a "Hands Across America" commercial in the very first scene of the film. In the present, the goals of the Tethered are to murder their surface selves and form a human chain stretching from the West to the East Coast of the United States. In fact, it was Adelaide who suggested it; the commercial was among her last memories on the surface before she was forced to live underground.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Whenever they are face to face, Pluto always mimics Jason's movements. Jason uses this to his advantage when Pluto attempts to set the Wilsons' car on fire by walking backwards, forcing him into a nearby car fire, where he perishes.
  • Invoked by Red, who forces Zora to try to outrun Umbrae, and Gabe had been unhappy with Zora's refusal to practice running earlier.
  • Ballet, which gave Adelaide aka real Red the flexibility to escape after Red forces her to handcuff herself to the table.
  • Red is the only Tethered that can speak. Because she was raised in the real world and learned to speak there.
• Clone Angst: The Tethered are not happy about being discarded copies, forced to enact their counterparts' actions without any choice in the matter.
• Comically Missing the Point: After hearing Red's Motive Rant, Gabe is under the impression that the Tethered want their money or property.
• Confronting Your Imposter: Inverted with the Tethered, who decide to go after the originals. Except Red, who is the real Adelaide who was replaced by her copy. And played straight in that all the Wilson family copies are killed by the originals - see Killing Your Alternate Self, below.
• Conspicuous Gloves: The above poster features one of the Tethered wearing a single fingerless glove that also lacks knuckles. In the movie, each of the Tethered also wears a single one of these gloves on their right hand.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: At the end, Red comments that the whole mess could have been avoided and they could have been sisters if Adelaide chose to come with her to meet her parents instead of knocking her out and switching places with her.
• Create Your Own Villain: Red says that the above-ground people did this by living happy lives. But it's much more literal in that this is literally what Adelaide did: she kidnapped her original and imprisoned her below-ground, thus leaving her a Dark Messiah.
• Creepy Ballet: It is revealed that Adelaide's doppelganger was able to copy her performance of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy when they were children, and their deadly fight is intercut with flashbacks to the ballet.
• Creepy Child: Pluto and Umbrae, the Tethered versions of Jason and Zora. We also see a younger version of Red, Adelaide's doppelganger, in the movie's first scene.
• Creepy Shadowed Undereyes: Umbrae has them, which she accentuates by turning toward the camera while sporting these. Her mother, Red, and Kitty's Tethered, Dahlia have them too, but to a much lesser extent.
• Creepy Twins: Io and Nix, the Tethered versions of Becca and Lindsey.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Gabe seems like your typical corny joke-telling and goofy dad, but he still manages to single-handedly kill both his and Josh's doppelgangers and ultimately survives the film. And with a broken knee, to boot.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The Tethered versions of Gabe (ripped apart by a motorboat's engine) and Zora (thrown at high speed from a braking car, which impales her on a tree and basically breaks her body in half).
• Dance of Despair: Not Adelaide's, but Red's mirror dance in the underworld appears to be this, as one of the few organic expressions of her trauma at being switched with her Tethered, and it's the only way the Tethered can tell that she's "different".
• Dark and Troubled Past: Adelaide was traumatized as a child by her encounter with her Tethered. As it turns out, her Tethered has one too; the one we see for most of the movie isn't the real Adelaide, who was switched with her Tethered in the hall of mirrors and went mad in the underground tunnels.
• Dark Messiah: Red to the Tethered, chosen because she is not a copy like them.
• Dark Reprise: The trailer begins with a diegetic playing of Luniz' "I Got 5 on It". As it progresses, the song is substituted for a darker, string-led horror version. Both versions — the regular in the scene from the trailer and the Tylers' abandoned home, and the variant as Red and Adelaide duel — show up in the film proper.
• Deadline News: When the Wilsons are at the Tylers' house after having defeated their Tethered, they turn the TV on to try to understand what's going on. There's live coverage of a Tethered attack downtown, and suddenly one of the Tethered comes out of nowhere and starts walking menacingly towards the camera, presumably manned by his "original." The scene switches from the TV feed to the Wilsons on the couch, with Adelaide turning the audio off so that her children won't hear the cameraman's screaming (though why she didn't just turn the TV off or change the channel is anyone's guess).
• Death of a Child: Umbrae and Pluto are killed off quite gruesomely: Umbrae is thrown from a moving car, breaks her back hitting a tree, and dies slowly, while Pluto is burned alive. Becca and Lindsey are also killed in front of their parents. A teenage boy is also seen dead along with his parents when the family drives into town at dawn.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: In 1986, the attraction housing the hall of mirrors has a hokey Native American theme. By the modern day, it's been converted to an equally hokey but less culturally offensive "Merlin the wizard" theme.
• Deranged Dance: Rather than trying to defend herself actively when Adelaide aka the real Red comes at her with a sword, Red aka the original, real Adelaide simply dances away from her and avoids the blade. The closer Adelaide/Red gets, however, the more deranged Red's movements become, especially as it's intercut by Red's Involuntary Dance for the other Tethered.
• Diabolus ex Nihilo: Who created the Tethered, what practical purpose they served, and why they were abandoned is not elaborated upon beyond Red claiming that they were meant to control their originals in some way and that it didn't work.
• Dissonant Serenity: After the initial shock of battling the Tethered wears off, the Wilsons harden to the situation rather quickly, with the exception of Adelaide herself, who only gets more and more stressed in the film's second and third acts, with very good reason. The Tethered themselves also completely embody this trope.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Red's description of her life — no freedom, no joy, forced to marry a man she didn't love and bear children she didn't want — brings to mind the horrors of American slavery, such as forced marriage and forced breeding.
• Double-Meaning Title: "Us" both refers to the horrifying "Tethered," who look like replicas of the main characters, and the United States; at one point, Red says "We're Americans". Even the film's theme is titled "Anthem".
• Dumb Blonde: Mrs. Tyler is set up to be this. Ironically, she comes the closest to actually keeping her family from getting killed by the Tethered.
• Dumb Muscle: Abraham and Tex serve as this, slowly lumbering towards their targets without much in the way of strategy.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The fact that Adelaide is a Tethered throws a lot of what Red says about Tethered being emotionless, soulless copies into doubt, as well as whether or not they're justified in wanting to replace their originals.
• Evil Doppelgänger: The Wilsons have their own set. They then discover that many other people in America also have one.
• Evil Feels Good: Deconstructed. While the Tethered seem to enjoy tormenting and killing their above-ground counterparts, this is because everything that feels "good" to them feels horrible to their Tethered, and vice versa.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Apart from the prologue and Adelaide's flashbacks, the film takes place over about 24 hours.
• Facial Horror:
  • Jason's counterpart, Pluto, has burn scars that resemble the shape of the Wolfman mask that Jason wears.
  • Kitty's counterpart, Dahlia, slices her face with scissors to mimic Kitty's cosmetic surgery.
• The Family That Slays Together: The Tethered versions of the Wilsons are set up to be this. Along with the Tylers. And possibly thousands, if not millions, of other Tethered.
• Fantastic Racism: Adelaide views the Tethered with contempt, seeing them as nightmarish predators bent on killing their counterparts. Ironically, this is actually boomerang bigotry, as the end reveals Adelaide was a Tethered the entire time.
• Fauxshadow: The storm in the opening, the Bible quotes, and Adelaide's speech about coincidences seem to imply a biblical or apocalyptic reason for the Tethered's arrival, helped by Red's speech about seeing God's purpose for her. Nope. Besides the "soul" explanation, it's purely science fiction, and the Tethered are the result of US government experimentation.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Kitty asks Josh to turn off the second generator, which has unexpectedly switched on, and check if people are outside. The Tylers' Tethered versions show up not too long after and murder everybody.
• Foreshadowing: Has its own page.
• For Want Of A Nail: Had Adelaide's father been watching her like he should have been instead of being engrossed in his carnival game, she wouldn't have wandered off, gone into the fun house, and been captured and replaced by her Tethered self, setting off a doppelganger apocalypse across the entire country 30 years later.
• Gilligan Cut: When Jason tells Adelaide and Gabe that there is a family outside on the driveway, Gabe doesn't believe him. Cut to the trio seeing the family on the driveway.
• Golf Clubbing: Zora picks up a putter at the Tylers' home and uses it as her primary weapon of choice, most notably killing the Tethered of one of the Tyler twins with it.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: After over 30 years of being trapped underground and forced to mimic the movements of her double with no one to talk to, the original Adelaide has lost much of her sanity. It's unclear if the Tethered have gone mad from the isolation, if they were born wrong, or if they were actually happy before Red intervened. Or if they're even able to feel happy.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Surprisingly justified. The Tethered have "evil scars", because they've been abandoned, alone, and forced to perform various surgical processes on themselves, which is at least part of the reason they've gone mad. For instance, Kitty's Tethered, Dahlia, has intense "evil scars" on her face, because she performed cosmetic surgery operations on herself and had no choice but to take care of the resulting scars the best she could.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Some of the more gruesome deaths are not shown in detail, such as Abraham's death by boat motor or Zora's brutal beating of one of the Tethered Tyler twins.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Subverted. At one point, instead of saying "kiss my ass" to his sister, Jason says "kiss my anus" instead. This weirds out Gabe and Zora (and makes Adelaide laugh in spite of herself), and Gabe says in this particular case, he would have actually preferred "kiss my ass."
• Government Conspiracy: The US government was engaged in human cloning and mind-control experiments on the doppelgangers in a gargantuan facility beneath Santa Cruz, California, and likely elsewhere.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The person or people that created the Tethered, implied to be a government agency of some kind. They're long gone by the time the film begins, but their creation and abuse of the Tethered is what made the events of the film possible.
  • Equally, Red heavily implies that whoever created them did so with the purpose of controlling the entire world. It's just left ambiguous whether they succeeded. So the odds of that goal being noble seem extremely limited.
  • At the climax, Red mentions an encounter she had with "God" that inspired her to begin her crusade against non-Tethered. Assuming she wasn't speaking metaphorically, who or what this being might have been is never explained.
• Hair-Raising Hare: The opening credits manage to make the sight of bunnies in cages very creepy.
• Half-Human Hybrids: The children of Red and Abraham and Adelaide and Gabe are human-Tethered hybrids.
• Homage:
  • The overhead crane shot that opens the film and the underground facility flashing on the screen is a replica of The Shining.
  • The Tyler twins are framed in one shot (postmortem) in an exact imitation of the corpses of the Grady girls in The Shining.
  • Adelaide's son wears masks, is a Mama's Boy, has unusual behaviors and interests, and is called Jason, like the iconic '80s villain Jason Voorhees. His mother Adelaide also turns out to be a villain of sorts in the last twist.
• Humble Goal: Played with. The Tethereds' only goal after killing everybody is to form a chain across America a la Hands Across America. However, as this is the assertion of their whole identity, it may seem like a fairly humble thing to do after mass murders committed across the country.
• Iconic Item: Jason is always shown with a mask modeled after the Wolfman. Gabe wields a bat. When attacked by the Tethered, Gabe still has his bat, while Adelaide wields a fireplace poker and gold handcuff chains, Zora wields a golf club, and Jason has some sort of paperweight. On the opposite end, each of the Tethered seems to wield a pair of golden scissors along with their single glove.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: A few, mostly with the scissors brandished by the Tethered, though the fire pokers used by Adelaide's family also play a part.
• Info Dump: Near the end, Red explains that the doppelgangers were all part of a failed government experiment to control the minds of the country's citizens, but the experiment failed, so they were left to languish underground.
• Inspired by…: The central concept bears similarities to the popular works of Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Bertolt Brecht, and Rod Serling:
  • William Wilson, in which the titular character is haunted by a doppelganger of the same name who torments him for his sins and speaks only in a whisper. After defeating him in a duel, Wilson's double finally speaks aloud, telling him: "In me didst thou exist — and in my death, see ... how utterly thou hast murdered thyself."
  • The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether - in which the inmates of an asylum subdue and replace the doctors, but are given away by their distracted and violent nature.
  • The Casket of Amontillado — in which the narrator tricks an enemy into descending below ground and chains and imprisons him there, leaving him for dead.
  • As in Wells' The Time Machine, there is a conflict between a pampered and aloof over-class (the Eloi/above-ground humans) and a subterranean under-class (the Morlocks/the Tethered) upon whose suffering the over-class society is built (a reflection of Wells' enthusiastic embrace of socialism). The key contrast is that the Tethered rise up to kill their counterparts as an act of revenge, while in the haunting potential future of The Time Machine it's a standard function of the Morlock-Eloi life cycle.
  • While none of Brecht's work directly inspired the plot of Us, his work is well-known for focusing on the truth that the comforts and success of one person is all-too-often built on the suffering and disenfranchisement of another. His play The Threepenny Opera includes the song "What Keeps Mankind Alive?", which answers the question with bitter irony:
    What keeps mankind alive?
    The fact that millions
    Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, and oppressed.
    Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance,
    In keeping its humanity repressed...
  • In interviews, Peele has stated that Us is partly inspired by the Twilight Zone episode "Mirror Image", in which a young woman encounters her doppelganger at a bus station and becomes convinced that it is trying to replace her.
• Invaded States of America: The United States is ravaged by Tethered doppelgangers created by the government running around stabbing US citizens with scissors.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Adelaide (and Red) had an affinity for whistling "Itsy Bitsy Spider" as a child, and the last thing Red does before Adelaide offs her is attempt to weakly whistle the song again.
• Jerkass: The Wilsons' so-called friends the Tylers are not a very sympathetic family. Kitty is very shallow and self-obsessed, blaming her children for being born at the wrong time and ruining what she thinks could have been her chance to be a movie star, while Josh loves to flaunt his money in front of his friend Gabe and harasses Gabe for not being able to afford things as nice as him. Neither of them really get along at all and are both alcoholics, and their Alpha Bitch twin daughters are both rather cruel, insulting young Jason despite being older teenagers. It means the audience probably won't feel too bad when their doppelgangers suddenly kill them.
• Karma Houdini: Adelaide successfully managed to replace — and later, kill — her normal counterpart, and faces no repercussions from it other than it being implied that Red told Jason the truth before dying.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Discussed a great deal.
  • The Tethered believe they're doing this by killing their originals, who have (up until this point) all had cozy, happy lives while the Tethered suffer for them. On the other hand, the originals didn't know they existed, but the plot is clearly much more allegorical about the parts of labor that aren't publicly seen.
  • Adelaide is a much more literal example of this. She's the real Red, and she got away by violently kidnapping, and swapping places with, the real Adelaide. She lived a happy 20-30 years as Adelaide above ground before Red came back, leading a revolution that upended Adelaide's life. However, subverted in that Adelaide doesn't lose anybody personally — her husband and both her children survive, but everything she knows is gone.
• Key Under the Doormat: Abraham gains entry into the Wilsons' house by finding a spare key hidden in a fake rock. That he knows where to find it is a clue that the Tethered and their counterparts have a kind of mental link.
• Killing Your Alternate Self: The Tethered's whole plan. And the Wilsons end up killing their copies: Gabe turns on a boat engine on his, Zora brakes a car and throws her copy — who was hanging onto the windshield — into a tree, Jason makes his walk into a fire, and Adelaide impales Red. Or is it the other way around...
• Laser-Guided Karma: The US government created the Tethered in an attempt to mind control its citizens, only for the Tethered to develop free will themselves. They then proceeded to throw the Tethered into abysmal living conditions and forget about them, only for the Tethered to escape and possibly overthrow the government in the process of claiming the lives they feel should be theirs.
• Little Useless Gun: Gabe triumphantly pulls out a flare gun when facing Tex, Josh's doppelganger...only for it to miss, bounce off the wall, and sputter to the ground uselessly.
• Made of Iron:
  • The Tethered are extremely resilient. Tex shrugs off a fire poker to the brain.
  • Gabe takes a good amount of damage throughout the film, managing to survive a slash to the head by Abraham, at least an injured knee, a brutal beating from both Abraham and Tex, and being thrown into the ocean by Abraham.
  • Adelaide manages to defeat Red after receiving several wounds, then track down Jason and make her way back to the surface.
• Mama Bear: Played straight, then possibly deconstructed. Adelaide is willing to go to hell and back for her children and even for Gabe, but does she want to protect them or the life she stole from the original Adelaide over 30 years earlier?
• Meaningful Name:
  • Zora's name means "dawn." Umbrae means "shadows".
  • Jason is a character from Greek myth who starts out as heroic but does questionable stuff later on.
    • Also, Jason is named after Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th, who was also once upon a time a sweet, strange boy who turned out to be a psychopathic killer after his death during a summer camp vacation, and whose mom kills to avenge and protect him.
  • Pluto is the Roman version of Hades, who has an unsavory reputation but is nicer than the rest of the pantheon. Pluto is also a dog from classic Disney cartoons, which is a fitting name for a boy who walks on all fours and growls like a dog.
  • Gabe is short for "Gabriel." The archangel Gabriel was one of the three angels who informed Abraham of the birth of his son. Abraham was also the father of the chosen people in the Hebrew Bible, while Abraham is Gabe's Tethered double.
  • Tex Watson was one of the members of the Manson Family, responsible for the Sharon Tate murders. The Family had wanted to use the murder to kickstart a war and take over America.
  • Dahlia can possibly refer to Elizabeth Short, nicknamed the Black Dahlia, who was murdered and bisected at the waist (fitting for the movie's theme of duality/doubles).
    • In turn Kitty's name might be a reference to Kitty Genovese, a famous stabbing victim (like many of the victims in the movie) whose tragic murder is often used as a textbook example of Bystander Effect.
  • And Red is the color of blood. The fact that Adelaide has a less esoterically named Tethered than the rest of her family — or the rest of the Tethered altogether — may be a hint at The Reveal.
• Mercy Lead: Red tells Zora to run, giving her an approximate thirty-second head start before allowing Umbrae to chase her.
• Mirror Routine: There is a scene where Jason does this with his Tethered counterpart. This is later weaponized by Jason in a successful attempt to kill his double.
• Mole Men: The Tethered count, as they were bred underground and are noticeably distinct from human beings.
• Money Is Not Power: Gabe, thinking the Tethered are just burglars, tries to offer them money, his car, and yacht to leave them alone. Unfortunately, the Tethered don't care about these things. Gabe mentioning the ATM only makes Abraham scream for some reason. Abraham does, however, take Gabe's glasses.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The trailer opens with the bright and warm atmosphere of the Wilson family going on a fun vacation together. Then things take a dark, psychological turn when night falls and the family gets a good look at their antagonists.
  • In the middle of Kitty getting murdered by her Tethered, the stabbing victim desperately calls out to the Amazon Alexa Expy to call the police. It mishears this and instead plays the song "Fuck tha Police" by N.W.A, ruining the mood for a moment. It's a moment of pitch-black comedy in the middle of an otherwise brutal and intense scene.
• Moody Trailer Cover Song: Luniz's "I've Got 5 On It” is given this treatment in the trailer by way of recreating the song's main synth line with dark, creepy strings. In an unusual instance of this trope, both the original song and the moody variant appear in the film itself.
• Motive Rant: Red gives a harrowing one to the Wilsons after the Tethered corner them in the living room. Red and her family had to live without freedom, love, or material comforts, knowing that another family just like theirs enjoyed all of those things. It eventually drove them insane.
• Nature Versus Nurture: A key theme.
  • The Government Conspiracy believes that the Tethered cannot learn to be human and are doomed by nature to be only shadows of their original selves. However, the ending, which reveals the Adelaide we've spent the movie with was secretly her Tethered version and vice versa, leans heavily towards "nurture.” Despite being born underground, "Adelaide" was able to learn speech and attain her own agency when removed from those terrible conditions. Conversely, "Red" carries her childhood memories with her belowground and is able to both maintain the speech and self-awareness needed to inspire the revolution.
  • This is also shown in the Wilson children and their doppelgangers. All four of them are half-Tethered, but Zora and Jason turned out alright. Jason is considered a bit "weird", but in ways that aren't too uncommon for a boy his age. By contrast, Umbrae and Pluto were raised among the Tethered by a bitter and vengeful mother who saw them as monsters, and they act accordingly.
• Never Had Toys: Red says that, while Adelaide received toys on birthdays and Christmases, she only received scissors to play with.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: If you consider the original Adelaide to be more evil than the replacement, then Adelaide saved herself from a terrible situation but, in doing so, sent down a future cult leader who would return with the express goal of wiping out humanity.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: If you consider the replacement Adelaide to be more evil than the original, then the replacement Adelaide abandoned the original with the intention of taking over her life and so willingly surrendered her to a lifetime of torture. In this case, it may be Disproportionate Retribution, but she's still giving a voice to the people she deliberately imprisoned.
• Nightmare Face: All of the Tethered, but special mention goes to Pluto, Jason's double, who appears disfigured and burned.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: Adelaide finds a crayon picture Jason drew of the man with a bloody hand at the beach.
• No Brows: The Tethered version of Zora lacks any eyebrows.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Happens several times in the movie.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • The opening credits shot of the rabbits in the cages actually takes place underground. The rabbits are the Tethered's sole food resources.
  • Young Adelaide meeting her Tethered in the hall of mirrors is shown again at the end of the film. The extended scene reveals that during the 15 minutes she went missing, they switched places; the Tethered forced Adelaide underground and strapped her to a bed. She then went above and took her identity.
• Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending: The Wilsons succeed in killing off their Tethered and drive an ambulance, but Jason (the son) is going to have to live with the fact that his mother was one of the Tethered all along (she defected) for the rest of his life and keep it a secret from her that he knows. Many more people in the United States are or will be dead after being offed by their Tethered doppelgangers with scissors, and the only known survivors are those on aircraft such as the news helicopters seen at the end.
• Opening Scroll: The film opens with three lines of text on a black screen, explaining the creepy real-life fact that there are thousands of miles of subterranean tunnels beneath the U.S., and that many of them have no publicly known purpose.
• Our Souls Are Different: While the American government managed to copy the human body, they couldn't replicate the souls of the people they were copying. Efforts to use this to control people failed, and the abandoned Tethered were doomed to imitate the actions of their above-ground doubles in the horrific and squalid conditions of their tunnels.
• Papa Wolf: Despite being easy-going, Gabe will mess you up when push comes to shove. Just ask Abraham and Tex.
• Parents as People:
  • The start of the trailer has Gabe singing along to one of the songs he loved when he was younger, except now that he's a parent and the song's about smoking weed, he can't play it anymore. Fortunately, Adelaide saves it a little when she's teaching the kids to keep rhythm.
  • Adelaide's own parents. From what little we see of them, her father is implied to be emotionally distant and an alcoholic and her mother is implied to be self-centered and bossy. They also spend most of their time arguing with each other, and even while at the carnival, she is seen walking behind her parents instead of beside them. While later on in the film, Adelaide expresses admiration for her mother, because it was really the Tethered Adelaide, who was saved from nothingness due to swapping lives with the real Adelaide/Red, it's entirely possible that she still feels animosity towards them, particularly since it was their inattentiveness that caused her to be abducted.
• Percussive Maintenance: Gabe has to keep hitting the boat's engine to get it to work, and Abraham mindlessly does it after dragging Gabe aboard. As the two struggle, Gabe headbutts the engine and throws Abraham overboard just as it starts up, chopping him to pieces.
• Police Are Useless: They certainly don't come around to help the Wilsons when they're dealing with a home invasion. Because they're dealing with dozens of others at the same time and are completely overwhelmed. At the amusement park, we see an empty police car and a dead cop on the ground.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: At one point, Gabe suggests the family set up traps and compares the idea to Home Alone; shortly after, Zora asks what Home Alone is.
• Prim and Proper Bun: Zora wears her hair in one, and Adelaide did so as a child. Justified, as Zora is a track athlete and Adelaide was a dancer: buns keep one's hair out of the way when performing athletic feats or intricate dance moves.
• Production Throwback: The iconic shot from Get Out, with Chris staring wide-eyed as thin streams of tears run down his face, is replicated in the poster and echoed by one of the shots in the trailer. It happens in the film proper with Red as she gives the Wilson family a fairy tale-style Motive Rant that turns out to be a thinly-veiled metaphor for her hell growing up in the tunnels.
• Protect This House: Adelaide and Gabe attempt to do this when doppelgangers invade the house. It fails, and they ultimately have to leave. Later on, Gabe suggests they do this with the Tylers' house. Adelaide shoots that suggestion down.
• Psychic Link: Somehow, the Tethered are "connected" spiritually to their other selves, and that causes them to imitate the life and actions of their other selves and know wherever they are no matter the distance between them. This plays into Red's motives, as she was forced to marry Abraham despite not loving him give birth to "monsters", mimicking Adelaide's happiest moments as another torture for the hell she had to live through.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Red is extremely violent and childlike in her behavior. She has been trapped in squalid underground tunnels since she was a child, forced to enact the actions of her doppelganger counterpart, and went insane from the horrific conditions.
• Red Is Violent: The Tethered's combination of red clothes and golden scissors makes that pretty clear.
• Red Right Hand: Literally. All of the Tethered have scarred right hands, which they cover with a single glove. Adelaide, despite being a Tethered, lacks the scarring, suggesting it isn't natural.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The Tethered's uprising has shades of this. Red's Motive Rant has a lot of class rhetoric, and the massive human chain that the Tethered form is at least partially a political statement protesting their treatment by the government.
• Rewatch Bonus: The film has lots of foreshadowing and themes of doubles that you might miss on the first viewing.
• Rule of Cool: The Tethered all use fatally sharp, long scissors that can make loud knife-like sounds. These scissors are even more effective than typical pocket and kitchen knives, as with just one stab they can swiftly go deep through a human neck and easily swing back up, making the human victim quickly perish (most knives don't work that way even after multiple jabs).
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • At some point, a clock displays 11:11.
  • The Tethered's weapon of choice is a pair of golden scissors, a symmetrical object made from two identical pieces bound together so they move in tandem. When pointed down, the handles resemble two heads back to back, something illustrated in one of the posters.
• Safe Zone Hope Spot: Gabe believes this of the Tylers' house, but the Tethered seem to void and deconstruct this trope, if Adelaide is right when she says that, because the Tethered think like they do, they know where they will be, and therefore no place in America is safe.
• Screaming Warrior: Adelaide turns into this over the course of the film, ferally yelling when finishing off her attackers; this is a sign that she's not quite alright.
• Screw the Money, This Is Personal!: When the Tethered first attack the Wilsons, the family patriarch Gabe attempts to persuade them to leave them alone by offering them money, the beach house, or even his prized boat! Red just stares at him, and it soon becomes very clear that she (and the rest of the Tethered) are there to make the Wilsons' lives hell out of envy and resentment.
  Zora: No one wants the boat, Dad.
• Shear Menace: The Tethered's weapon of choice is golden scissors.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Gabe and Zora are left in the dust during the film's third act when Adelaide runs off to try and rescue Jason from Red.
• Shout-Out:
  • C.H.U.D. is one of the VHS tapes on the shelf in the prologue. It's pretty apt foreshadowing, with that movie dealing with underground entities rising up to attack people on the surface.
  • Adelaide's dad wins her a Thriller shirt in the opening. It's implied that Michael Jackson's red jumpsuit and single glove helped inspire the Tethered's ubiquitous outfit, and the "Thriller" music video also ends with the reveal that Michael was a monster the whole time, much like how Us ends with the reveal that Adelaide was a Tethered the whole time.
  • Jason also wears a Wolfman mask throughout the film.
  • The Tethered's outfits also seem to take influence from slasher films of the '80s, with their solid jumpsuits evoking Michael Myers and their single brown leather gloves calling Freddy Krueger to mind. Young Adelaide may have known about these films and used them as inspiration for the costumes once she was switched with her Tethered and became Red, using imagery that scared her as a child in hopes of intimidating people once she returned to the surface.
  • Gabe mentions Home Alone when suggesting that they set up traps in the home they're staying at to fend off the Tethered. Adelaide incredulously responds, "Tell me you did not just reference Home Alone."
  • Something Wicked This Way Comes also has an important carnival that comes into town on important days, and takes place in a Magic Mirror Maze.
  • There are multiple references to Funny Games (reportedly one of this film's biggest influences).
    • The Wilsons, like the Farbers/Schobers, are a well-off family taking a vacation at their summer home.
    • The home invasion of the Tethered family begins with the original family's patriarch getting his leg broken by weaponized sporting equipment (a baseball bat here, a golf club in Funny Games), and the original family getting held hostage in the living room.
    • When Abraham plans to kill Gabe, he drives him out in his boat with a bag over his head; both elements happen to separate characters in Funny Games.
    • Finally, Zora wields a golf club as a weapon for the latter portion of the film.
  • After Red reveals the Tethereds' plan, she states, "Now it's our time, our time up there," referencing an iconic line from The Goonies. A copy of The Goonies can even be seen next to the VHS copy of C.H.U.D..
  • In the opening, mention is made in passing of a film being shot at the boardwalk. This would be The Lost Boys, which was filmed in Santa Cruz in 1986.
  • Gabe's boat features heavily and Jason wears a Jaws T-shirt.
  • The Tethered are forced to live their entire lives in terrible living conditions in overcrowded underground bunkers and ultimately start a revolution against those living above ground, much like the workers in Metropolis.
  • According to the credits, the young couple playing rock-paper-scissor on the Boardwalk in 1986 are named Syd and Nancy. This is likely a reference to the movie Sid & Nancy (about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen), which was released in 1986.
  • During the climax, Red says of the Tethered: "We're all mad down here." Bonus points for being surrounded by white rabbits when she says it.
  • It might be a coincidence, but during her therapy session, young Addy wears a sundress and hairstyle reminiscent of Rudy's in the "It Ain't Easy Being Green" episode of The Cosby Show.
• Sickening "Crunch!": Adelaide breaking Red's neck via strangulation. And it is very loud.
• Slashed Throat: How Kitty is ultimately dispatched.
• Slasher Smile:
  • Red, the Tethered version of Adelaide.
  • Likewise, the Tethered version of Zora spends every minute we see her smiling creepily.
  • The Tethered version of Kitty also sports one, especially after applying some lipstick.
• The Speechless: The only Tethered shown to be capable of speech is Red, and even she seems to have trouble with it. All the others can only make animalistic howls and growls. This is because "Red" is the real Adelaide. Her strained speech is the result of permanent damage from being strangled by her doppelganger and/or years of disuse.
• Spoiler Title: A very mild example, but the soundtrack album contains a track titled "Death of Umbrae,” spoiling that Zora's Tethered counterpart dies at some point in the movie. Not that you'll even know who Umbrae is if you don't look at the cast list before viewing.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • Nothing like "Good Vibrations" from The Beach Boys to play over a scene of the Tethered Tylers committing familicide.
  • Shortly afterward, N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police" plays as our heroes kill the Tethered versions of the Tylers.
  • For some reason, the docile "Les Fleurs" by Minnie Riperton plays during the end credits.
• Surreal Horror: What else would you get when your family is attacked by violent, scissor-wielding doppelgangers?
• Symbolic Glass House: Although it's actually a rental home for their vacation, the miserable, rich Tylers are staying in a stylish all-windows house that is juxtaposed with the cozy home of the protagonist Adelaide's mom.
• Systematic Villain Takedown: The Tethered are established early as the evil versions of each of the family members. At first, they attempt to separate the family and kill them one by one, but the family manages to regroup and turns this around by taking them out separately first over the course of the movie, with each Tethered being killed by their respective family members. Abraham is the first to go, chopped up by Gabe's boat's motor. After fleeing to the Tylers', they kill their Tethered one by one as well. While leaving, Zora drives and manages to knock Umbrae into a tree. On their way out of town, Jason tricks Pluto into setting himself on fire, leaving the final fight in the Tethered's home base between the Big Bad Red and Adelaide.
• Title Drop:
  • After the house invaders finally break in, Jason observes them and makes a startling revelation:
    Jason: It’s us.
  • Later, Red drops the title again while telling Adelaide about their connection.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Adelaide is a Tethered and Red was the real Adelaide.
• Tragic Monster:
  • All of the Tethered. They were abandoned by the government as a failed experiment and left underground, living in squalid conditions, carrying out a twisted form of their counterparts' lives with little choice, and eventually going insane. It's arguably even worse, since even though Red said they're soulless, they're shown to be capable of emotion — Adelaide's doppelganger was able to adapt to life as her and have meaningful relationships, and Tex and Dahlia show affection for each other.
  • It turns out Red in particular was the original Adelaide, and the Adelaide we had been following the whole movie was the doppelganger. Red wants vengeance on Adelaide for taking everything from her.
• Trailers Always Lie:
  • A sly example. There's a shot in the trailer of young Adelaide getting attacked by her double. The film makes allusions to Adelaide's PTSD after that incident, thus implying that the attack shown in the trailer was the cause of her disorder. It turns out that that scene wasn't just showing Adelaide getting attacked, but also replaced by her double.
  • One shot in the trailer shows Pluto walking out of the fire of a burning car, as though to say he's immune to fire. That footage is actually being played in reverse; in the movie proper, he's walking backwards into the fire, copying Jason's movements. This is what ultimately kills him.
• Trap Is the Only Option: At one point, the Wilsons need to take the Tylers' car. When Adelaide goes back into the Tyler house to get the keyfob, it's not in the bowl where she knows it goes, it's sitting in the kitchen out on the previously bare counter, and the doppelganger who fell onto the coffee table is missing. Adelaide clearly knows something's up, but traveling on foot is too dangerous, so she grips her poker and just tries to grab the fob as fast as possible. Sure enough, the Tethered is alive and was using the fob as bait.
• Twist Ending: The Adelaide we have been following was actually born Tethered, and replaced the original at the fun house in 1986.
• Uncanny Valley: The Tethered are close to perfect replicas of their normal counterparts... but not quite there. While each of the doppelgangers mimics the appearance of the family quite closely, there are multiple aspects of their appearance that show they aren't carbon copies (Pluto's face is covered in burn scars, and Abraham sports a prominent beard, while Red and Umbrae are close to visually perfect with the exception of their hairstyles, the scar-like markings where their eyebrows should be, Creepy Shadowed Undereyes, and unnatural manner of movement).
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Adelaide, or rather her doppelganger, only wanted to be free above ground rather than live in hellish conditions underground. She swaps place with the "original" Adelaide, and takes her place. Original Adelaide, furious at everything that had been taken from her and the new hell she was living in, rallies all of the Tethered living underground together, and leads them all to rise up from below and find and kill their "real" counterparts all across America. Adelaide couldn't have possibly known how much would happen from that one action.
• Vapor Trail: Played with. When the family encounters Pluto in the middle of the street, Adelaide leaves the car and tries to reason with him, at which point Jason senses a trap and gets Gabe and Zora to evacuate the car. It's at this point that we see a thick fuel trail between the car and Pluto, who's holding a match. While most examples of this trope involve malfunctioning cars spewing fuel, the Wilsons' car runs fine, and it's implied that the trail was Pluto's doing.
• Virtual Assistant Blunder: When Kitty is attacked by the Tethered, she tells her digital assistant, "Ophelia", to call the police. The device instead plays "Fuck Tha Police" by N.W.A.
• Wham Line:
  • Jason asking ”How many of everyone is there gonna be?” after finding out they are not the only ones with Tethered doubles.
  • Red telling Adelaide that she could have taken her with her that night on the beach.
• Wham Shot:
  • When the Tylers are killed, not by Red and her family as expected, but by doppelgängers of themselves. This is the first indication that the horror extends beyond the immediate protagonists.
  • The final flashback, as Adelaide remembers strangling the original Adelaide and imprisoning her underground so she could escape and live her life.
  • The line of Tethered holding hands across the country that ends the movie.
• What Are Records?: When Gabe and Adelaide are arguing about if they should put out some Home Alone-esque traps to stop the other beings, with her saying that Micro Machines aren't going to get rid of them, Jason (understandably) doesn't know what Micro Machines are, and Zora doesn't know what Home Alone is.
• With My Hands Tied: One of the first things Red does to Adelaide is handcuff her, and thus she spends the rest of the movie with severely impaired hand mobility (while still being able to kill Nix, with her own scissors nonetheless!), which only ends when she kills Red and takes the key from her. The flashback revealing that Adelaide is the Tethered shows that it was retaliation, as Adelaide handcuffed Red to a bed before leaving to steal her identity.
• White Shirt of Death: Adelaide wears a white shirt and hoodie when the Tethered invade, which gets progressively more blood-soaked as the film goes on, foreshadowing that she is a Tethered.
• Women Are Wiser: Along with Red leading the Tethered attack and Adelaide being forced to step up for the protection of her family, all the dads do sillier things than their wives.
• The Worf Barrage: Justified with Zora and Jason, but played straight with Gabe. Zora and Jason survive their encounters with their Tethered, and Zora's is an extremely vicious killer and very fast. However, this makes at least some sense because Zora and Jason are half-Tethered. Gabe, however, is cornered by Tex, Tethered Josh, with a broken leg, and somehow manages to get the upper hand on him and kill him, despite the fact that Tex apparently has the ability to pull a fire poker out of his brain.
• Would Hurt a Child: We see one boy's corpse had his neck severed and he perished, confirming that even very young children are being killed by the Tethered!
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Zigzagged with Adelaide. While she does kill one of the Tethered Tyler twins (albeit in self-defense), she can't bring herself to finish off a dying Umbrae (who was critically injured after Zora violently threw her off of the car), and tries to reason with Pluto not to harm them (who ultimately dies by inadvertently backing into the fire he started by mimicking Jason's actions). She even says a few Little Nos as he was doing it.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: When the Tethered first break into the house, Gabe immediately tries to offer them money, his boat, and everything he has. Notably, he still does this even after Red makes it very clear that it is not a regular home invasion.

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"Be careful."