Spoilery Thoughts on Us

In keeping my review of Us clean of spoilers, there was only so much I could say about it.  So, here am I again to discuss a couple of the movie’s finer points in more detail.  Definite spoilers ahead, starting now!

First of all, maybe it's just me, but it felt like the trailers didn’t show much of Winston Duke after the initial “they look like us” meeting with the Tethered, so I had Gabe pegged as the most likely to be killed in one of those early “we’re not messing around” deaths.  As such, I was so tense whenever he was in danger and was pleasantly surprised when he made it through the whole film.  Considering the fact that he gets his knee bashed in early on, it’s impressive that he manages to survive.

Gabe escaping death is surprising, and really, the whole family’s survival seems a little incredulous at first, like protagonist plot armor.  With Kitty, Josh, and their daughters, their Tethered creep silently into the house and instantly kill him.  Stab in the neck, stab in the back, stab in the gut – no muss, no fuss.  But with the Wilsons, their Tethered are forever taking their sweet time, toying with them when they could just kill them.  Pluto sits in that closet with Jason waiting to see his magic trick, Umbrae stands on top of that car and then just stares at Zora, and Abraham puts Gabe in a bag and drags him onto the boat.  You don’t really doubt that the Tethered ultimately plan to kill the Wilsons, but they drag out that plan in a way that the rest of their kind don’t.  The Wilsons are an exception – even when they go to Kitty and Josh’s house and wind up having to fight the Tethered there, Adelaide is taken by them, not killed.  Kitty’s Tethered in turn threatens Adelaide with her scissors but never uses them.

This might feel cheap, a way to prolong the terror and let the heroes cheat death, not just by being brave, resourceful, and determined, but by continually getting chances that the other characters aren’t given.  However, it never gets eye-rolly for me, because these moments are accompanied by others that signify something bigger is going on here.  Red is the only Tethered that can speak, and at times, as terrified as Adelaide is, she seems almost familiar with Red – when Jason traps Pluto in the closet, Adelaide hears the Tethered boy’s shouts and tells Red, “That’s yours,” as if they’re two moms hanging out during their kids’ playdate.  At critical moments with both Umbrae and Pluto, Adelaide is ever so slightly maternal with them, quietly soothing Umbrae as she dies and trying to talk Pluto down from lighting up the car.  Kitty’s Tethered looms over Adelaide, getting her scissors right up in Adelaide’s face, and then she abruptly stops, carving along her own jawline instead.  Something is up with Adelaide, and because of it, she and her family are given, time and again, these seconds of reprieve in which they’re able to escape death.

There were different points of the film when I pondered the possibility of Red and Adelaide having switched places when they met as children in the house of mirrors (in part because I was aware that we hadn’t seen the shot from the trailer of little Red choking little Adelaide.)  Then towards the end, when Adelaide starts grunting/making animal sounds as she finally kills Red, I wondered briefly if Red’s consciousness passed into Adelaide’s body.  So, when that final flashback came, revealing that the girls had switched all those years ago, the Tethered child trapping her twin down below and returning to the surface on her – her parents think she’s unable to speak because of the trauma from being lost at the carnival – I was surprised, but not surprised.  After all, if I’d been supposing it as a possibility, it was plausible enough.  For me, the only place where it really strains credibility is in the scene in the “classroom” where Red gives a long exposition about the Tethered.  Why would she tell Adelaide all this when they both know Adelaide is really one of the Tethered?  But it fits in well enough with everything else, and it brings up interesting ideas about environment and opportunity, that the “soulless” Tethered child thrives on the surface, becoming Adelaide in her own right, while the trapped human underground, becoming Red, regresses and plots revenge.

Best of all, I find that this swap provides the justification for the “plot armor.”  It’s why Red is different, less half-formed than the rest of the Tethered, why she’s even able to form the plan for all of them to come to the surface and kill their counterparts.  It’s also, in my mind, why killing the Wilsons is more complicated than killing anyone else.  Josh and Kitty’s Tethered kill functionally, without thought or reaction, but for Red, this is personal.  It’s a reckoning.  First, there’s the fact that this is definitely revenge on Adelaide for switching places with Red and leaving her down there (“you could have taken me with you,”) and Sweeney Todd will readily tell you that good revenge can’t be rushed.  And Red has plenty of rage to direct toward Adelaide.  After all, Adelaide is the only person on the surface who already knows about the Tethered and knows what happens to Red down below with her every action.  But at the same time, having experienced what it’s like to live as one of the Tethered herself, I imagine Red does have at least one small flicker of sympathy for Adelaide’s childhood decision to switch places.  I mean, she has to understand the feeling of being willing to do anything to get out of there, no matter what. 

It all adds up to this intense link between them that can’t just be severed quickly.  Whether it’s to savor her revenge or out of hints of sympathetic understanding/kinship, Red can’t merely dispatch Adelaide and be done with it.  And since she’s the one directing the others, that connection extends outward.  Just like we see these hints of maternal compassion from Adelaide towards Umbrae and Pluto, Red probably recognizes that Zora and Jason are, in a way, half-Tethered themselves.  And so, her Tethered children aren’t so quick to kill Adelaide’s.  (I dunno about Gabe – he maybe gets a minor pass just for his romantic connection with Adelaide, or being Zora and Jason’s father?  No part of him is Tethered, but the whole rest of his family is.)  It’s why Kitty’s Tethered threatens Adelaide but never actually stabs her – on some level, she recognizes that Adelaide was like her once, and that seems to hold her back.  I’m still thinking about the implications of the Adelaide-Red twist, but this aspect of it is something that I really like.