Fridge / Us

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance:

• In one of the film's posters, we see a contrast between the main characters and their Tethereds, both groups joining hands like the chain of paper dolls that Red makes. Notably, in the "good" family, Adelaide is the only person who is not giving the viewer a reassuring smile, and in both families, Adelaide and Red are the only two whose expressions are identical.
• When Red and the Tethered versions of the Wilson family invade the house, Red tells a story about a girl and a shadow. She talks about how, unlike her, the girl got warm food and presents on Christmas. We later learn that the Tethered were trapped underground by their link. So how did she know about the world above ground? It's because she's actually the real Adelaide, who as a child was forced underground by her Tethered counterpart.
• Adelaide knowing about and explaining the Tethered's Kill and Replace plan to her family makes a surprising amount of sense, considering the Adelaide we've been following for the whole movie is a Tethered.
• The poster depicts Red looking out from behind a mask of Adelaide's face, in reference to the Tethered's goal to Kill and Replace their counterparts. It's also foreshadowing the fact that Red was the original all along, which is further foreshadowed by her crying.
  • Another poster merely consists of scissors in someone's grip. The gloved one is covering the ungloved one, possibly foreshadowing the reveal that the Adelaide we've been following the entire time is the Tethered. Bonus points for the ungloved hand being the one to actually hold the scissors.
• The way that Red tells her story as a little fairy tale makes sense because she spent her childhood speaking in the real world. Once she was kidnapped, she entered a world with no speaking, and so her storytelling would remain childlike.
• The Tethered's weapon being golden shearing scissors. In Greek myth, the Fates cut the thread of a person's life — what tethers them to this world — with scissors. The Tethered want to kill their originals to destroy the Psychic Link, hence cutting the thread, making this especially meaningful.
  • Also, the scissors are symmetrical, with the handles resembling two heads back to back, made of two identical pieces bound together to move in tandem. A very apt icon of the Tethered and their nature.
• Jason's unusual behavior and interests may be because he's half-Tethered. If Red's story about her children being born odd is true, then it implies that those born with Tethered genetics are born with high chance of behavioral issues or disorders.
  • Hitching off of this, and while not as obvious as Jason, Zora’s behavior hints at her being half-Tethered as well. She displays a severe lack of empathy to the Tylers after they die (asking if they can have their car since they were all dead, for example) and she tends to act in a similar way to her mother, being very quiet and non-talkative with the twins, as well as killing off the twins’ Tethereds a bit too easily.
• It makes sense why the Tethered were considered a failure if Red's theory on them being made by the government is true. They're too dependent on others, judging from the influence they receive from their counterparts and electing Red, the original, at an implied young age to be their leader. It's made clear from the first Tethered appearance at the end that he's been standing in place for an entire day without any food or water. Barring the fact they seem to have a natural desire to Kill and Replace their real selves, it would be especially difficult for the government to pull a Kill and Replace with a clone who needs 24/7 supervision, especially one that can't speak or talk like a normal human being who would needed to have to be taught.
  • The man was standing in place because he was the Jeremiah 11:11 Tethered. It looks as though Red commanded each Tethered to take their place in the Hands Across America recreation once they killed their counterpart.
  • It seems like a Frankenstein situation; the government had these people created for a purpose, without considering that the copies would also be human with normal human development and needs.
• Notice how Jason's Tethered counterpart is named Pluto. Like his sister Umbrae (Tethered Zora), Pluto's name sticks to the theme of shadows and darkness (Umbrae means shadow), as the dwarf planet Pluto is the furthest from the sun and gets its name from the Roman god of the underworld. Pluto is also the name of a well known Disney character. Pluto the dog walks on all fours, in contrast to the other animal characters in the Mickey Mouse cartoons. Similarly, Pluto is the most animalistic of the Tethered, shown several times walking on all fours himself.
  • The names Red gave her family also make some sense when you realise that she's the real Adelaide. Abraham would be a reference to Abraham Lincoln, probably the most iconic US president and no doubt someone Adelaide would have learned about before being replaced. Pluto, as mentioned above, is the name of a Disney character, and Adelaide could have been a fan of Disney cartoons. Umbrae's, name however, is the odd one out, as most American children don't speak a word of Latin, unless by some strange miracle she named her after the home decor company Umbra from Toronto, as the company opened in 1979 and she was replaced in 1986, giving her enough years to remember the name of said company.
• In the climax, Adelaide enters the Hall of Mirrors and immediately heads toward a hidden door in the wall that hasn't been seen before. Of course she knows about it, she's actually the original Tethered, and came out that door when she swapped places with the real Adelaide.
  • It should also be noted that although we see a bunch of doors and other passages in the underground, Adelaide doesn't even check any of them, but heads straight to the Tethered base.
• The Tyler's Tethered don't immediately attack the Wilsons or try to murder them. This is because they must be friends with their version of the Wilsons thanks to the Tethered's Psychic Link and with Red, being the leader of Tethered society. They would know how important killing their counterparts would be to their friends.
• When Adelaide kills Red, she turns downright feral, impaling her and then going the extra mile by wrapping her handcuffs around her neck until it snaps. This is also the last sign outright telling the audience that Adelaide was the Tethered the whole time. So far, all of the other Tethered, other than those of the Wilsons, have wasted no time in killing their counterparts, as shown on the news report. With the Tylers, however, Red wants her counterpart to suffer before killing her, as shown in their final fight where she obviously could have finished Adelaide at any time unlike Adelaide, who wastes no opportunities in trying to kill her. A clone created to Kill and Replace a person would have a natural instinct to quickly kill their target so they can take control of their life.
  • Related to this, one might wonder why Red toys so much with Adelaide, considering that the entire plot was kickstarted by her wanting revenge on her clone, but when you think about it, this may very well be part of the revenge. Red wants Adelaide to become feral in a twisted way, to show both of them who is the real one, the one who doesn't get an unnatural urge to kill the other. In short, Red wants to unmask Adelaide before herself as the true monster all along.
• When the family has lunch together, Adelaide is eating strawberries while the rest of the family eats fast food, demonstrating how she is not like the rest of her family.
  • After having been forced to eat nothing but raw rabbit meat for the first ten years of her life, she's probably a vegetarian.
• The Itsy-Bitsy Spider is relevant to the plot when you think about events from Adelaide’s perspective. She gets out of the underworld (climbs up the water spout). Then, she’s lured back down there by Red and nearly beaten (down came the rain and washed the spider out), but then Adelaide kills Red (out came the sun and dried up all the rain), and then Adelaide returns to the surface (the itsy-bitsy spider went up the spout again).
• In the last fight Red gracefully dodges Adelaide's attacks and slices at her, a marked contrast to the other Tethereds' fighting style, running at their victim and stabbing them in the head or neck. This is because Red is a normal human, and she can't take the damage a Tethered can. She also knows she can't take Adelaide out in a single stab, so she weakens her before attempting to land the killing blow.
• The Tethered specifically using rabbits as their sole source of food makes some sense. Rabbits are infamous for being notoriously fast breeders, meaning that a large rabbit population can provide a theoretically endless supply of food.
• Red's line of "We're Americans," makes perfect sense. They were created by a government cloning project that uses American citizens, ostensibly for the United States to control. They were literally created by Americans for Americans.
  • It's also clever wordplay: United States. "US".
• The reason the real Adelaide is behaving like a Tethered throughout the movie is because she was trapped in a hellish world for over 30 years, and it drove her completely mad. Being cooped up underground with no real human contact made her animalistic and psychotic. She's insane that she convinced herself that she is a Tethered, and after so long, the distinction doesn't really matter.
• Josh Tyler's Tethered counterpart Tex, while still terrifying as the rest of the Tethered, also comes off as sorta comical and even a bit cartoony. He shares a name with well-known animator Tex Avery, and Tex Watson — the right-hand man of the Manson Family.
• Ophelia, the Alexa-equivalent device the Tylers own, is more than a coincidental name. In Hamlet, Hamlet's love interest Ophelia goes mad with grief after her father, Polonius, is killed. In her grief-stricken state, she hands out flowers, with the flowers being symbolic of different things. She later drowns herself. The namesake of Kitty's Tethered, Dahlia, is also a flower. While Dahlia does not kill Kitty herself, Kitty is killed while asking Ophelia for help by someone named after a type of flower.
• Why is Jason the only one who seems to suspect that Adelaide is a tethered That swapped places with her original? With how much he loves trying to perform stage magic, it’s likely he knows and recognizes a few tricks — such as swapping objects and people with identical ones in such a way that no one notices the switch.
  • Additionally, the place Red takes Jason to requires going through a house of mirrors, which are important for several tricks involving optical illusions.
  • Another connection between stage magic and the Tethered’s plan to swap places with their originals: by the time of the Tethereds' attack, the House of Mirrors has been renovated with a theme based on Merlin the Wizard. “Wizard” and “Magician” are synonyms, and as such, are used interchangeably in some cases, and only when “Adelaide” goes back to the hall of mirrors is she finally able to finish her “trick”.
• Why is Red the only Tethered to speak? Because she's the only one who ever learned how.
• The significance of Luniz' "I Got 5 On It" as a motif: in the family unit of four (Adelaide, Gabe, Zora, and Jason), Red, more than the other Tethered, is the fifth 'family member'.
• Thinking more about the house of mirrors:
  • The original dressing as a Native American "Vision Quest", complete with a feathered Chief, hints at themes of colonialism and cultural appropriation — the way that Adelaide stole Red's identity.
  • Later, it's been updated to a magical forest with a Merlin-esque wizard — hinting that the final act of the story is akin to completing a ritual/spell, but also that the confrontation between Red and Adelaide is akin to a magic trick: for instance, a shell game...
• All of the Alice in Wonderland motifs.
  • The infamous white rabbits, being seen at the beginning and end of the movie. Alice famously follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole and into Wonderland. The tunnels under the carnival are filled fit to burst with rabbits, and rabbits are naturally burrowing animals who make tunnels to begin with.
  • In Alice in Wonderland, the two characters of the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts are often mistaken for one another, despite being from two entirely different books, much like how Addy and Red could be mistaken for the same person.
    • The Queen of Hearts is famous for her proclamation of "Off with her head!" Throughout the movie, Red is seen cutting the heads off of things with her scissors: the rabbit doll, the paper dolls she makes, and even how she focuses on slashing the throats specifically with their scissors.
    • An often-overlooked element of Carroll's novel is that the Queen's death sentences are never carried out — as soon as she is out of earshot, the King of Hearts pardons them one by one. Similarly, despite Red's ruthlessness, none of Adelaide's family ends up dead by the end of the story.
    • Red's name could be taken from the Red Queen, specifically in Through the Looking Glass. In chess, a pawn piece can become a queen if it crosses the board to the other side, much like how Red, after being made a pawn in Addy's ploy to gain access to the surface, became the Queen of the Tethered.
    • The name "Adelaide" is taken from Adelheid, meaning "noble kind or type".
  • The second book, where the Red Queen is from, specifically has Alice go through a magical looking glass to enter the dream world where the book takes place. And how does Red first end up in the underground? Walking through a funhouse full of mirrors!
  • When Alice first encounters the playing cards, the Queen has ordered them to paint the white roses in her garden red, matching her theme. Adelaide's wardrobe goes through a similar transformation by the end of the film.
• Adelaide's ballet recital solo that we see flashbacks to was a modified version of a pas de deux, a dance that usually requires a partner — unbeknownst to anyone present, she did have a partner, since Red was following her motions underground. This is spelled out a bit more in an extended version of a scene where Kitty asks Adelaide about her dancing, since Adelaide mentions it being a pas de deux and explains what that means.
• In the flashback, we see that the escalator Adelaide used to travel to the surface only goes down — a reflection of the system that has been always rigged against her, and the rest of the Tethered, and which one must fight against to get even a chance of a good life.
• The final lines of Adelaide's flashback is her sitting in the back of a car, listening to her (Red's) mother and father sniping at each other for briefly losing their child:
  Rayne: Look at you.
  Russell: It's not my fault she left.
  Rayne: Look at you.
  Russell: That's not my fault she — well, look at me? Look at you. LOOK AT YOU!
  • We then cut to adult Adelaide, reflecting on what she's done. The symbolism in that transition is deep:
    • Russell's lines — deflection from his neglect by trying to spread the blame — seem to become Adelaide's own inner train of thought. A conversation between the sadistic little girl she once was ("Look at me?") and the vicious, traumatised adult she became ("Look at you").
    • Lighting as a marker of the contrast between the past (young Adelaide hiding in darkness, shrouding her intentions) and the present (adult Adelaide in the light, her true self exposed to her). This also parallels with the final cut ending of Peele's Get Out (Chris escaping into comforting, familiar dark night) and the alternate ending (Chris safe and yet trapped within the glaring white walls of a prison).
    • Adelaide immediately turns to Jason. Unlike her childhood self, there is no barrier between child and parent — they are able to look one another in the eye and (in Jason's case at least) get a glimpse of what they truly are.
    • Like her childhood self, Adelaide briefly smirks, gleeful at having gotten away with it — implying that this ordeal has caused her to backslide into her Tethered nature.
    • Jason, meanwhile, hides behind his mask. Where his mother is revelling in the fact that she beat Red and successfully replaced her, he has been left with the uncomfortable knowledge that he and Pluto had more in common than appearance — and that this is what led to Pluto's death. Red notes that Adelaide could always have taken her with her and lived as sisters, and maybe a similar thought is going through Jason's mind, but he had to kill Pluto to save his family, just as Adelaide killed Red to save him.
    • As Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs” plays, we pan over the sight of the ambulance — which is, not unlike Adelaide's clothing, a white figure marked with red — and feel the cognitive dissonance (remarked on by Universal Studios President Mark Knobloch) of being both safe and hopeful while also seeing the evidence of the Tethered's mass slaughter. But even the lyrics themselves imply that the danger is far from over:
    "Inside every man lives the seed of a flower
    If he looks within he finds beauty and power..."
    • The song creates further contrast between the lyrics' original meaning (symbolising the rise of an idealistic youth in the "Flower Child" Hippie generation, connected to grand gestures such as Hands Across America) and its new, grim connotation connected to the visual of hundreds of triumphant bloody-handed Tethered standing in a catatonic state; and the pleasant, poetic, intelligible symbolism of the music in contrast to the dissonant and stressful syllables of the opening theme.
• The classic encapsulation of a conflict of tribalism is the "us vs. them" mentality, which could summarize the struggle between the Tethered and their originals. So why is the film just called "Us"? Well, the Red/Adelaide switch throws a major wrench in the conflict delineation when we learn that a Tethered has been fighting for the surface and a surface person has been fighting for the Tethered, shifting the dynamic from "us vs. them" to "us" on both sides! Also, neither the surface nor the Tethered are responsible for the dichotomy and inequality in the first place, reflecting how the conflict is ultimately misdirected—to win, the dynamic ought to be that "Us" refers to the Tethered and surface folk united against the system (the title also sounds like "U.S." as in "United States") that bound them together. Red was haunted by the fact that her Tethered never thought to join her as an equal on the surface—the solution that could have solved the problem more justly.
• The first time we see the funhouse encounter, the scene ends with Addy's horrified face looking at her double before her. But that camera shot was probably a huge hint as to what was happening—in order to get that frontal view of Addy's terror, we'd have to switch to her Tethered's POV, and later scenes show the double turning to face Addy, reinforcing that. Just by the use of the camera, the film was giving subconscious hints to the switch that took place even in the lowest-context view of the encounter. We literally switched to viewing the film through the double's eyes way back at the start.
• During Red and Adelaide's fight, Red moves gracefully and efficiently and lands several hits on Adelaide, who swings wildly in frustrated primal fury. The shots of Adelaide and Red as children directly contrast them—Adelaide danced beautifully while Red practically threw herself around the hall while mirroring her. But by the end of the film, when the switch is revealed, this gains new meaning. Adelaide, who successfully stole her way to passing as a graceful human, has lost her coordination and poise now that she's threatened by the woman she stole the life of, and Red, the girl broken and tortured by her loss, has regained command and skill. The real dynamic of the fight is a woman fighting against her guilt and her past, and being openly reminded of her nature as a Tethered impostor and thief, exposed for her baser nature in the face of exposure and failure. Red may have lost the fight and her life, but she got into Adelaide's head before she did so—by wordlessly reminding her exactly where they started. This also exposed Adelaide before her son Jason and gave Adelaide a witness to haunt her—another victory for Red.
• During the scene in the psychologists' office, after "their daughter" is found nonverbal and not acting like herself, the mother can be heard crying while saying "I just want my little girl back", while "Adelaide" looks at her through the cracked door. As an early scene it might just seem an example of "Adelaide's" trauma, but knowing she's a Tethered, that holds a very loaded double meaning because that isn't her little girl, and "Adelaide" knows it.

Fridge Horror:

• The fact that the kids are technically half-Tethered due to being born of Adelaide. Whether that will cause any issues down the line in their life has yet to be determined.
• Why is Red’s voice so hoarse? Because when the Tethered!Adelaide choked her Untethered counterpart, she likely crushed her throat and permanently damaged it.
  • Alternatively, her voice is just hoarse from lack of use after so long among the non-vocal Tethered.
• Red's coming upon the hide-a-key during the home invasion is surely no coincidence. This is her family's house. She knows where to find the key because she's seen it there before.
• Remember when Red talked about that creepy fairy tale? How the princess met a prince and had kids? And her shadow met a brute and had monsters? Considering their Psychic Link, how do you think they came together and had kids?
  • Take this another step further — what does the very existence of the kids imply? if we take Red's story at face value, then the kids aren't clones, but rather the "mirroring" shown in the Tethered goes all the way to reproduction, meaning that when the two Tethered come together in the same way as their "original" counterparts, then they make the exact same kids, with the exact same link. If that's the case, how many generations of Tethered have there been since what ever government facility abandoned them? Has the government even been monitoring them, or did they assume they couldn't reproduce and would die in a single generation?
• When the Wilsons drive up to their burning car, they don't notice Red sneaking up behind them. Was she simply planning to to grab and subdue the closest one, or did she know that Jason had figured out their mirroring and let her son die so she could capture Adelaide's?
• All of the rabbits will most likely die from starvation in the underground because all the Tethered moved above and there is no one left to take care of them. The Tethered have no reason to go back below for their original food source, so unless the rabbits have access to food and water, they will most likely all die.
• It seems like the Tethered can easily track down their counterparts due to their psychic link. If that's true, then there is no place on earth to hide from those monsters. You can have plastic surgery and change your name, and your clone will still be able to find you.
• If what the main entry says re: Evil Feels Good is true, then every single loving, fun, gratifying sexual experience Adelaide ever had up top was the equivalent of rape and sexual assault for Red. Even if that trope doesn't apply, it would still produce the same effect, since Red was being forced to have sex with someone she didn't know because Adelaide was doing so.
• Red was handcuffed to one of the bunk beds but wasn't given a key; she likely had to break the bones in her hand to get free.
• The Tethered only take their place in the Hands Across America recreation after killing their above-ground counterpart. When the helicopter shot at the end shows hundreds - if not thousands - of Tethered linking hands and covering miles of territory, that's basically the movie's body count.
• The very troubling implication that, up to the final minutes of the movie, Adelaide had repressed her own memories of escaping the Tethered shelter and swapping places with Red until just after killing Red. Especially because, with Red's theorizing that Tethereds and their counterparts share a soul, Adelaide will have felt an unexplainable sense of dread and pain her entire life — the way a Tethered experiences their counterparts' on the surface — which ended the instant Red was dead. In the final moments of the film, what she's feeling, having killed her double, is elation and relief.
  • Indeed, all her life, Adelaide has been fighting to suppress that sense of dread and pain, and has been striving to seem happy, upbeat, and normal, and such is the life of an African-American woman such as her that anybody around her who has noticed her doing this has considered that to be perfectly normal behaviour. Adelaide, and everyone she knows, takes it for granted that she'd feel like that most of the time. This is arguably the greatest Fridge Horror of the whole film.
• Further to the above point — horribly enough, Adelaide is living proof that the Tethered experiment can work, and a Tethered can replace the original human they copied, so long as it happens early enough in development. Unlike other Tethered, Adelaide can socialize, resist (most of) her violent urges, and speak intelligibly (even if she retains certain personality traits, such as a proclivity to violence and an estrangement from non-Tethered humans). But this success is a hollow victory, since the cost is condemning Red to the life she would otherwise have led.
• Red outright states that she doesn't love Abraham, implying that Pluto and Umbrae are the children of a mutual sexual assault, neither parent having total say in their actions. At first, you'd think that this would lead to the logic that all Tethered relationships are like this, deepening the horror of their existences. However, the other Tethered couple we see interact, Tex and Dahlia (mirrors to the Tylers) seem at least somewhat happier in their relationship, never displaying the thinly-veiled frustration and contempt that Kitty and Josh have, and Dahlia breaks down when Tex is killed before attempting to get revenge by killing Zora. With the revelation at the end that Red and Adelaide switched places and Adelaide was the Tethered one, that may be why; Red was never meant to be with Abraham or any Tethered in the first place. If true, it makes sense why Abraham seems so depressed in comparison to his family and sad when Red says she doesn't love him; in the horror of their existence, he would have been denied even the comfort of a matched partner that the others had.
• If you want to have sympathy for the Tethered or Red in particular, consider this: the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake happened while she was in those tunnels, running less than 10 miles from the epicenter of California's second "Big One". Honestly, it's amazing all those tunnels didn't collapse.
• Both Fridge Horror and Fridge Logic, We know the Tethered ate rabbits, but what did they drink? If they are clones, shouldn't they need water too? If not? How did they deal with dehydration?
  • They drink rabbit blood. Or presumably they drink from the same source as they hydrate all their rabbits from.
    • All of these questions assume that Tethered anatomy is a perfect match for their counterparts — which is not guaranteed, since they appear able to take much more damage than a surface human, up to and including a self-performed Caesarean section. They may eat when their counterparts eat, but who says they need to?
    • If Red's theory about the origin of the Tethered is true, and the tunnels really are government installations, there's almost certainly access to water, possibly even showers and bathrooms, but it's a moot point. The Tethered can't possibly have survived this long if they have anything resembling the nutritional needs of their counterparts. Even ignoring the total lack of vegetables or grains, rabbit is actually not a very good source of protein either. The rabbits are most likely descended from lab animals, and the Tethered only eat because their counterparts need to eat.
• Dahlia has scars on her face even before she first mimics and then inflicts the cuts of Kitty's cosmetic surgery. Dahlia likely underwent whatever the Tethered equivalent of plastic surgery is, whether carried out by another Tethered or self-inflicted, without any anaesthetic.
  • Following that vein, Jason's double, Pluto, has a mass of scar tissue around his mouth that never gets a proper explanation. Could Jason have gotten some sort of dental correction/surgery that, like Dahlia, he had to attempt performing all on his own? Without aid or even anesthetic?

Fridge Logic

• After meeting up with Red in the classroom, Red spends several minutes explaining the origins of the Tethered. Why does she do this? Both Red and Adelaide know all of this, given the fact that Adelaide was the Tethered one all along. Nothing Red says should be much of a revelation to her.
  • It seems possible that Adelaide may have repressed bits of her past.
  • Adelaide was only a child when she switched places with Red. While she may have understood how horrible the underground was, she may not have understood why she existed. Red could also be using this as a "remember who you really are" Breaking Speech.
  • Adelaide had no language until she came above ground. It's possible there was information about the Tethered and their origins underground somewhere, but until Red went down there, none of the Tethered (including Adelaide) could understand it.
  • Red could have just been flat out taunting her, explaining what she had learned and what Adelaide should already have known, and perhaps hoping to elicit some sort of "I know!" reaction from her to force her to admit to what she had done.
• The Tethered eat nothing but rabbits, but what do the rabbits eat? For that matter, if the Tethered truly are an abandoned government project and thus no longer receiving funding or oversight, who or what is supplying them with exact or close-enough replicas of their human counterparts' clothing? Where did they get that many matching red jumpsuits, fingerless gloves, and fancy pairs of scissors?
  • Not sure about the rabbits, but it's been suggested that the scenes where the Tethered are wearing the same clothes as their regular counterparts are just how Red pictures it and not what it actually looked like.
• The Tethered badly break Gabe's leg upon breaking into the house. He's shown limping several times, but other than that, it never affects — or it seems, even clouds — his ability to perform extremely brutal stunts, such as killing Abraham (especially on the water!) or Tex. Sure, it's a shout out to Funny Games, but it just seems to create unnecessary plot holes.
  • Who says his legs are broken? They may have gotten hit by a baseball bat, but they're never stated to be broken, and they don't look broken.