After Jordan Peele overwhelmed audiences with Get Out, moviegoers have for quite some time been anticipating the release of the writer/director’s followup Us, which hit theaters this week. Real spoilers ahead. There are many different scene amid the Wilson family’s nightmarish excursion that will make you jump out of your seat, however the scariest scene in Us by a long shot is the minute when their doppelgängers — a.k.a. the family’s “Tethers” — touch base amid a power blackout amidst the night. The suspense is paralyzing, and the way this happens quite from the get-go in the movie will just increase the sense of fear you feel while watching it.
An adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) senses that she may have another kept running in with her Tether, Red, when she returns to Santa Cruz for a family get-away. She tells her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), on their first night that she’d had haunting experience there as akid back in 1986, which Gabe attempts to forget about as an irrational fear. At that point, the power goes out, in a classic horror movie turn, reminiscent of Halloween 4. Despite the fact that you realize that a duplicate family appears based the Us trailers, their landing is way freakier when you really observe everything play out.
“There’s a family in our driveway,” Jason (Evan Alex) tells his parents and his sister, and you can tell that whatever is concerning to happen is truly not great. It resembles the moment when you’re on an exciting ride that is going to go down a major drop, and you realize you can’t stop it. For a few minutes, the indistinguishable family stands menacingly still outside, in spite of Gabe’s insistence that he’s going to run them off and afterward that he’s going to call the cops. At that point Jason’s conceal Tether Pluto slithers away like the beasts in The Grudge, and Gabe’s twin, Abraham begins breaking in through the front entryway, harming Gabe simultaneously.
Pluto and sister Zora’s shrewd twin, Umbrae (Shahadi Wright Joseph), both flee into the darkness, leaving audiences at the edge of their seats pondering what will come straightaway. That sort of anticipation never really breaks all through the rest of the film, since Us is classic horror movie that pursues a predator vs prey formula. Toward the start of the movie, when you first observe the family of Tethered twins in all red, you truly don’t have the foggiest idea what’s in store, particularly since the trailers don’t explain who they are exactly or what they want from the Wilsons.
The image of the family clasping hands at the top of the garage may help you to remember that famous image from The Shining, of two indistinguishable twin girls remaining in the foyer like statues. Peele could have utilized Kubrick’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel as inspiration, since he likewise incorporated an unpretentious Shining Easter egg in Get Out, as per Time.
In Us, the first appearance of the Tethered is just the beginning of the nightmare. Not only do they look creepy as hell, but you know without a doubt that there’s so much more to come.
