We’ve all been living upside down. That’s the point Jesus drives home in his Sermon on the Mount. Our priorities are backward. Rather than reflecting the kingdom of God and its king, our lives and choices often reflect our utterly twisted and selfish hearts.
This is also a theme that runs through Jordan Peele’s sophomore film, Us.
As a horror film, Us contains many intense and disturbing scenes (rated R for violence and language). But the film’s most disturbing feature is its incisive social—and even theological—commentary that emerges as the plot progresses.
Blood on Our Hands
Us opens with a slow zoom on a TV playing a commercial for a 1986 charity event called “Hands Across America.” It features red silhouettes of identically drawn people, holding hands in apparent solidarity for the poor and marginalized. This real historic event becomes an interpretive key for the remainder of the film, which is ostensibly about a violent intrusion into one middle-class family’s vacation. (Spoilers follow!)
The film follows the Wilson family—Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), Gabe (Winston Duke), Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and Jason (Evan Alex)—as they ward off attacks from “the tethered” (or “shadow people”) who rise from below ground in hopes of untethering themselves from their more fortunate, above-ground doppelgängers.
In order for her and her family to survive, Adelaide must either kill or be killed, as her double (“Red”) seeks retribution for her less fortunate upbringing. The inevitable result is increasingly bloodstained hands, as the plot builds to a climax in an underground classroom with walls decorated by various red handprints. Notably, however, Adelaide spends roughly half the movie with her own hands tethered by handcuffs, perhaps a symbol of her bondage to selfishness in seeking only the welfare of herself and her family.
Own Worst Enemies
We are, more often than not, our own worst enemies. Peele himself has indicated that he wanted this film to explore the duality within and the “guilt and sins we bury deep within ourselves.” The horrors we hide and the sins we try to submerge, Peele’s film suggests, will catch up with us eventually. There will be a reckoning. This is illustrated both by Adelaide’s white shirt, which gradually accumulates red handprints left by her own and her victims’ blood, and also by the use of antagonists who are simply the “shadow selves” of the traditional good guys.
The film is asking: Are those we view as our enemies really any different from us?
After Adelaide literally chases Red down the rabbit hole, the final twist is revealed: Our seeming protagonist is actually an antagonist. She assumed the identity of Adelaide some 30 years earlier by dragging her below the surface, and taking her spot above. The lines separating good and evil are thus blurred beyond recognition.
The film is asking: Are those we view as our enemies really any different from us?
But that is precisely why Us packs a memorable punch. It accurately indicts us for our tendency to scorn the imago Dei when we cast our neighbors as below us, less worthy, less human. The film exposes our tendency to erase “them” and concern ourselves only with “us.” This sinful refusal to love our neighbor reveals our own inhumanity, not theirs. It’s the kingdom ethics of the Sermon on the Mount—flipped upside down.
Horror of a Zero-Sum World
At one point Red exclaims, “We are Americans!” Is Peele’s title Us a double entendre, hinting at the current climate of the United States?
As it so often is, the horror genre is here used to explore societal horrors. In Peele’s last horror film, Get Out (2017), the societal horror concerned America’s unresolved racial tensions. In the case of Us, it’s the horror of a society increasingly characterized by dog-eat-dog, zero-sum game where one can win only if others lose, where the oppressed and the oppressors are always reversing roles.
Playing off familiar “upstairs/downstairs” tropes of class division (e.g., Downton Abbey), the have-nots in Us (“the tethered”) rise from tunnels hidden underground, in search of a better future. But their hope hinges on casting down those who live above. The assumption is that the “below” and “above” people could never coexist peacefully; they can only trade places or kill each other.
The film exposes our tendency to erase ‘them’ and concern ourselves only with ‘us.’ This sinful refusal to love our neighbor reveals our inhumanity, not theirs.
The tethered lack cognitive speech and communicate through primal grunts and groans, underscoring the way they’re seen by the above-ground people (as subterranean and sub-human monsters akin to zombies). Red is the only exception; she can speak, albeit with a disturbingly coarse and raspy inflection, and she acts as the spokeswoman for the tethered. A distorted messiah figure, Red believes her vision for liberating her people came from God himself. Here we see a sort of anti-Christ who mimics the biblical savior while perverting his mission. Jeremiah 11:11 is the film’s divine imperative: “Therefore, thus says the LORD: Behold, I am bringing disaster upon them that they cannot escape. Though they cry to me, I will not listen to them.”
While Red believes her mission is to speak up for and lead her fellow “shadows” on a retributive mission, it is not grace or compassion they seek, but disaster for their unsuspecting doppelgängers above. In a twisted perversion of “Hands Across America”—which sought to spur compassion between the haves and have-nots—Red orchestrates a version of the human chain that’s forged in blood: The have-nots getting their revenge on the haves, at last.
Descent to Become One of Us
As she descends into the depths of a dark underworld to rescue her child, Adelaide provides a distorted picture of Jesus, who left paradise to reclaim a people for himself and call us out of darkness into light (1 Pet. 2:9). But unlike fire-poker-brandishing, wrathfully defensive Adelaide, Jesus humbled himself and took on the likeness of the lowly and humble (Phil. 2:7-8) in order to save us. Instead of descending to earth to flaunt his superiority and take our lives in judgment, he willingly laid down his own life and then rose so that we might rise with him (Col. 1:8). If ever someone had the right to look down on others and see them as undeserving of dignity, God did. Yet instead of destroying or demeaning us, he dignified us. He took on our flesh and redeemed us.
Instead of destroying or demeaning us, God dignified us. He took on our flesh and redeemed us.
Sadly, we so often don’t follow God’s example of amazing grace. In our own lives and relationships with others, we’re often more likely to withhold grace than extend it. As fallen humans, we are experts at elevating ourselves at the exploitative expense of others. We naturally gravitate toward zero-sum, survival-of-the-fittest, kill-or-be-killed ways of living. But this is in stark contrast to the ethics of God’s kingdom, which calls us to turn the other cheek (Matt. 5:39), to love our enemies, and to pray for our persecutors (Matt. 5:44).
Among other things, Peele’s Us reminds us that the those who have received mercy and grace from God—which is all of us who believe—should not withhold mercy and grace from others. To do otherwise is horror indeed.