The final twist in Us – that Red and Adelaide switched places as children and have effectively been living each other’s lives – forces a reassessment of everything you’ve seen so far, inspiring new sympathy for ‘Red’, and bringing an uncomfortable new dimension of humanity to the Tethered. It’s a reframing that brings the whole notion of villainy into question. “The protagonist in the movie is the surrogate for the audience. I wasn’t doing my core theme any justice if I wasn’t revealing that ‘we’ have been the bad guy in this movie, we’ve been following the villain,” Peele elaborates. “I say villain lightly because I think there are many experiences of the film, and I think a lot of people go through a question of ‘what is good and evil?’ Does that even exist? Both characters are loveable and terrifying based on the lives they’ve led. They’ve inverted their paths.”
Us (2019), dir. Jordan Peele