'Us' reflects a mirror image of 'The Twilight Zone'

Major spoilers for "Us" (and some decades-old episodes of "The Twilight Zone") are ahead.

In Jordan Peele’s horror hit “Us,” Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), a wife and mother of two, is haunted. During a visit to the Santa Cruz, California, pier as a child, she was briefly separated from her parents and stumbled upon an eerie funhouse — and her doppelgänger, Red. She hasn’t been the same since.

Now, as an adult returning to that same beach on a vacation with her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and two children, her fears have returned. Stirred by the memories of that fateful night, Adelaide confesses what she saw to Gabe. “My whole life I feel like she’s still coming for me,” she reveals. A disbelieving Gabe cracks a joke, but moments later, Red (also Nyong’o) and the counterparts of the entire family descend on the house, determined to claim what they believe is rightfully theirs.

“Us” is awash in cultural references and cinematic nods, but perhaps more than anything else, it feels like “The Twilight Zone,” the classic TV series that Peele is reviving next month on CBS All Access. In creating Adelaide and Red, Peele has reimagined a classic character and trope found in that anthology series: the protagonist forced to reckon with another version of him or herself, and the desperate need to be someone else.

The twisted path that connects “The Twilight Zone” to “Us” leads most readily to the Season 1 episode “Mirror Image,” which Peele has cited as an inspiration for his film. In it, Millicent Barnes (Vera Miles) waits at a bus station, and realises she has crossed paths with her doppelgänger. Only she can see the curious figure; no one else at the depot believes Millicent’s claim, and she slowly begins to unravel.

Millicent explains to Paul, a man waiti­n­g for the same bus, that there must be a p­a­­­r­a­llel universe and each person has a co­­­u­n­t­erpart. For unknown reasons, the two worlds can converge, allowing the cou­n­­terparts to enter our realm. “In order to su­r­vive,” she continues, “it has to take over — replace us, move us out, so that it can live.”

The doppelgängers in “Us” aren’t ex­plicitly described as coming from parallel universes, but Red calls her connection to Adelaide a “tethering,” an unshakable bond — and the movie makes it clear that once the two meet for the second time, as adults, they cannot coexist peacefully.

A version of this conflict between selves plays out heavily across many other “Twilight Zone” episodes. Season 5’s “Spur of the Moment,” for instance, follows Anne, an 18-year-old engaged to a stuffy but father-approved investment banker, who encounters an older woman in black while horseback riding. By the end of the episode, it’s revealed th­at the miserable woman is Anne 25 years la­t­er, trying to stop her younger self from ma­king the mistake of marrying the wrong man. And in “Nightmare as a Child,” a young girl suddenly appears outside Helen’s apartment door; the girl turns out to be her younger self, there to remind her of a long-buried trauma that occurred when she was a child, and to warn her about how it will come back to haunt her in the present.

Throughout “Us,” Adelaide shares with those “Twilight Zone” characters and others a psychological unraveling — there are flashbacks to her childhood soon after the hall-of-mirrors encounter, in which she overhears her parents confessing their worries about her to a therapist. At the beach, Adelaide’s eyes dart uncomfortably as she tries to maintain a dull conversation with the vapid Kitty (Elisabeth Moss), and she has an anxiety attack when she briefly loses track of her son.

On the other side of the mirror, Red’s moti­vations echo facets of “Twilight Zone” con­undrums, too. There are traces of the Tet­hered in “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”; the Major — like Red — is not con­tent to remain trapped in a giant cylinder, and is desperate to rally the others to escape. “The After Hours,” in which department-store mannequins institute a rotation where one of them gets to live along humans for a month at a time, gets at the same how-the-other-half-lives ideas as “Us.”

Both episodes approach those yearni­n­gs for a better life in a decidedly more ele­giac fashion than “Us,” which uses viol­ence to demonstrate the overthrow of the r­u­ling class. When Red and the others at­t­ack Adelaide’s family at the house, she po­i­ntedly describes Adelaide as having a sh­a­dow that lives a much less cushy life­s­t­yle. While Adelaide had celebrated happy Ch­r­i­s­tmases, married a “handsome pr­ince” and had lovely children, Red’s existence was the opposite: cold, empty, sad.

Later, in their final showdown, Red ex­p­­r­e­sses even more bitterness. “You could ha­ve taken me with you,” she grunts, referring to their first encounter in the funhouse. But Adelaide didn’t. Instead, as we learn in the movie’s twist, Adelaide is actually Red, and Red is actually Adelaide — just as Millicent is ultimately replaced by her doppelgänger in “Mirror Image.” This reveal brings more questions than answers: What are we to make of the fact that Red swapped places with Adelaide, and we’ve been unwittingly rooting for her all along? Is there a class below the Tethered, waiting to overthrow them next? Are any of the characters, whether Tethered or not, actually good?

Whatever the conclusion, it’s meant to unsettle us, like the best of Serling’s “Twilight Zone” episodes. 

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