I don’t have many memories of my parents happy. In fact, my childhood memories of my parents remain in a constant state of alert, where happiness always felt fake, waiting for the bottom to fall out. Maybe that’s why my biggest takeaway from Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature, Us, wasn’t purely its visceral horror of a young mother fighting off her doppelgänger, but how it deftly navigates the mentality of being a child whose parents never properly got along. The duality within Us doesn’t just extend to issues of race and class, but our own history as individuals and the generational mistakes, specifically surrounding our parents, that we hope never to make ourselves. 

Note: Spoilers will happen from this point on – you’ve been warned.

We first meet Adelaide (played by Madison Curry) as a child in 1986 attending a carnival with her parents. Her dad plays carnival games, at one point winning her a t-shirt, but it’s more evident that he’s interested in playing the games himself than actively bonding with his daughter. Addie’s mother is perpetually frustrated, believing she can’t even use the bathroom because her husband won’t watch their child. This is a family that’s been fractured for years and what should be a fun family bonding experience looks like little more than a last-ditch effort to fix the unrepairable.  

In an effort to escape her squabbling family Addie is drawn to the beachside funhouse that holds her double. Coming after her parent’s recent squabble, which she watches with silent stoicism while walking behind them, this interaction with Red is the first division in Addie’s personality. Her parents chronic unhappiness and Addie’s need to escape forces her into a situation where she is literally kidnapped and chained somewhere else, a “Sunken Place” where the Addie who believed her parents might be able to transcend their issues is forever gone and in its place is her mirror image. 

The two Addies act as two halves of a child of divorce. Where children often feel literally torn apart by their squabbling parents, the dueling Addies are literally on different planes of existence. When the mirror Addie is found by her parents she doesn’t know how to speak, yet her mother assumes she is traumatized by being lost. This Addie, already growing up in a world of violence and chaos, seems confused yet not unfazed by her parents’ constant fighting. Like many children of divorce or trauma, she’s sent to a therapist, with Addie’s mother saying, “I just want my little girl back.” Her parents are both unsure of what their daughter has endured but also fail to see their own complicity in the matter. As far as they know, Addie is affected by the events in the funhouse, not their own distaste for each other – or the fact that acrimony between them is what drove her to get away from them in the first place.  

The mirror Addie grows up, becoming the “perfect” child and woman, played by Lupita Nyong’o. As Red – the original Addie – recounts her life to mirror Addie in the film’s climax, the duality of a divorced child comes to fruition. We learn that in the real world Addie is a ballet dancer with a happy family, while Red has suffered pain, isolation, and silence in the world of the Tethered. Though Addie has secrets and lies in her memory, she has presented herself as a normal, unaffected woman. As far as most can see, her parents’ unhappiness hasn’t tainted her. Her secrets are more psychological, buried and frightening. For Red, despite missing years of her parents’ deteriorating relationship, the damage was done well before that and has only manifested further with her time underground. They are both damaged women by the effects of their upbringing;’ mirror Addie is just better at hiding it.  

Adelaide Wilson doppelgänger Red (Lupita Nyong’o, foreground) and Zora Wilson doppelgänger Umbrae (background, left) in “Us,” written, produced and directed by Jordan Peele. (Credit: Universal)

The film’s presentation of romantic relationships after Addie’s childhood is also fascinating from a divorced perspective, as Addie’s marriage to Gabe (Winston Duke) continues this idea of perfection and a rejection of her parents’ unhappiness; she’s avoided becoming her parents. Yet there are subtle chinks in their relationship that imply Addie hasn’t avoided all the issues her parents had. She remains guarded and closed off, and he attempts to brush aside Addie’s distress at visiting Santa Cruz, having been completely blindsided by her admission of what happened to her in her past. In all their time together she never told him what happened in the funhouse, keeping portions of her life a secret from him and leading to questions of trust issues between the pair.  

This is contrasted with the relationship between Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker). These two openly seem to hate each other, with Kitty mentioning she sometimes dreams of murdering him. Their jokes vaguely carry an air of complacency; there’s no love, they’ve just yet to actually divorce. Yet when their respective dopplegängers, Dahlia and Tex, arrive, it shows their surface disdain for one another appears to be deceiving. As Kitty lays bleeding to death on the floor, the camera pans over to Josh from her perspective. She seems to be genuinely upset that he’s gone and the last few moments of her life are of her dragging herself across the floor trying to get closer to him.

When it comes to the relationships between the dopplegängers, Tex and Dahlia, as well as Red and Gabe’s double, Abraham, there is absolutely no love presented between them. When Tex dies Dahlia feigns crying before starting to laugh, and Red is more intent on confronting Addie than caring about her children or husband, speaking of them as burdens she has been cursed with rather than family she truly loves. For Addie, the relationships of the Tethered is what happens when one absorbs all the worst lessons of a parents’ divorce. Cynical isolation is the result. Relationships aren’t posited on love but control and dominance. For a child of divorce, this is the world’s greatest nightmare: to not only have the same damaged relationship as one’s parents, but one that is worse and that keeps the cycle going. As someone who reiterates regularly that love doesn’t exist, this element of Us is the most frightening, that every relationship can only be controlling and doomed to failure.  

This makes Us’ ending a bit of a fairy tale, with Addie and her family escaping the Tethered. Addie kills Red (or does she?) and, in essence, lets go of her past traumas. She’s able to now be a committed mother and wife, breaking the cycle of sadness her parents endured. But with the knowledge that Addie IS the Tethered, and that Red’s vengeance was justified, the movie ends with a sly bit of cynicism. That children, regardless of how well they hide it, will always be scarred. The question is can they avoid showing it to the ones they love? And, as Addie’s son Jason proves by putting down his mask in the final scene, can the next generation finally get things right?