Film

Here’s Why Fans Think Jordan Peele’s Next Film ‘Us’ Is Connected To ‘Get Out’

With Us's first trailer dropping yesterday, theories are popping up across the internet, and some are pretty convincing.

by Jared Richards  27 December 2018
Jordan Peele's Us

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Yesterday, Jordan Peele disrupted everyone’s holiday cheer by dropping the foreboding trailer for Us, his upcoming and highly anticipated horror film.

Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker, Us follows a family on holiday who are followed and stalked by their dopplegängers. The trailer’s below.

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It looks truly terrifying, which isn’t exactly surprising — Get Out, Peele’s 2017 directorial debut, wasn’t sold as a horror, but it was filled with plenty of scares among the social commentary on living as an African American in a violently racist country.

Now that the Us trailer’s been out a day, online sleuths are beginning to think that the two films will take place in the same universe. Admittedly, we don’t have much to go off just yet, but that hasn’t stopped people from going all-in.

Before that, though, everyone’s trying to guess the plot. Fans reckon the dopplegänger’s are a physical manifestation of a past familial trauma, given the film’s promotional inkblot posters. Us‘s tag-lines, ‘Nightmare From The Mind’ and, with this trailer, ‘Watch Yourself’, support that.

There’s a heap of Tweets which somewhat convincingly spell out possible plots — to avoid potential spoilers, we’re linking to them here, here and here.

Beyond the obvious parallels between Get Out‘s stolen bodies and Us‘s violent doppelgängers, there’s a few cinematic allusions in the trailer. Driving features heavily in both, and the up-close shot of Nyong’o crying is reminiscent of one of Get Out‘s most famous scenes.

Other astute fans noticed the link between the many rabbits featured in one shot and Get Out‘s repeated use of Flanagan & Allen’s 1939 classic ‘Run Rabbit Run’. Of course, it could just be an Easter egg. Or a red herring. Or, you know, just a director’s motif. Though, back in 2017, Peele told film journalist Kevin McCarthy he’d “weave in the [Get Out] universe in my next movie”.

Either way, it’s clear that conceptually, the two have links. Just as Get Out saw white people hypnotise African Americans to hijack and subjugate their bodies and minds, Us‘s violent mirror family could easily be an extension of the ‘sunken place’.

The repeated appearance of scissors suggests a severing between the two halves — one caused by trauma. Over on Twitter, fans are convinced the ‘severing’, as the dopplegängers are being referred to in press material, are another way for Peele to continue exploring ‘double consciousness’, W.E.B Du Bois’ influential race theory of how African Americans see themselves two-fold: as themselves, and as themselves through their oppressor’s eyes.

But the biggest link between the two films, arguably, is the brief moment towards the trailer’s beginning, where the family’s son doesn’t understand that Luniz’s iconic 1994 song ‘I Got 5 On It’ is about weed. To some, that suggests the boy’s been sheltered from black culture — or that he and the family are actually white, and have undergone the transplant surgery in Get Out.

We’d say it’s a long bow, but there’s one small moment that makes it seem a lot more likely. In the car, Nyong’o’s character tries to teach her son how to stay in rhythm to the song, but is noticeably off-beat herself. And everyone knows being off-beat is just about the whitest thing in the world you can be.

We’ll find out if any of these theories ring true when Us drops in the US on March 15. Unfortunately, there’s no Australian release set yet.