In Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed film “Us” the main characters can be differentiated from their “evil” twins by the latter’s lack of verbal language. However, what they lack in verbal language, is compensated for by their advanced use of symbols and body language.

Director Jordan Peele is well known for his Academy Award winning horror film Get Out, a film which dealt with important issues such as racism in a creative and ingenious way. Therefore, when Peele’s second horror film was released, it was expected to also address an underlying social issue. Needless to say, Peele’s fans will not be dissapointed. Another ingenious movie, one that is terrifying but at the same time highly original. Us is about a woman, Adelaide, who returns with her husband and two children to the beachfront home where she grew up. She is haunted by a traumatic childhood experience in which she found her doppelganger. Adelaide becomes increasingly worried that something evil is coming to get her and her family.

The film opens with young Adelaide going missing from her parents for a few minutes when in a mysterious shed she faces her doppelganger, a young girl named Red who looks just like her. Cut to about 20 years later, Adelaide, still traumatized about what happened, returns with her husband and children to the beachside house. As seen through flashbacks, Adelaide has developed PTSD after this encounter, which led her to develop selective mutism.

When we first meet the doppelgangers — also known as tethered — led by Adelaide’s now grown doppelganger, we notice an important difference. While Adelaide and her family use normal, verbal English, the tethered use verbal noises, facial expressions and body language to communicate. In other words, they lack the ability to speak. However, Red is the only one who can speak, though slowly and with a broken voice, making her special and the true leader of the rebellion. Before trying to kill the family and take their places, Red reveals how the tethered lived in the shadows, in a bunker below the human world, following their counterparts’ every move. They lived in misery while the people above them lived freely, and they desired that freedom for themselves. As Red was considered special due to her speaking ability, she becomes the leader of the rebellion. Yet, despite lacking a verbal language, their level of communication through symbolism, sounds and body expressions was more than enough to almost accomplish its linguistic goals.

The tethered successfully organized an armed rebellion, one in which they created matching red uniforms, rose to the surface strategically and after killing their human counterparts, grabbed hands symbolically in an almost endless line. Further adding to this symbolism, the last act of their plan, was grabbing hands in an almost endless line alluding to the Hands Across America symbol which had represented unity when released in 1986. It was a symbol Red had taken from a shirt she took from Adelaide in that first encounter those many years ago. It was a message to the world that the tethered, united, would rise. That symbol sent a strong and terrifying message to the world.

However, the distinction between the tethered and the real humans goes beyond the presence or lack of verbal language. Indeed the fact that the tethered, except Red, cannot use verbal language, is the main thing that divides human from doppelganger. Yet, this conversation goes deeper than that, revealing a real world issue in the struggle between tethered and humans. Specifically, the fear that U.S. Americans have of the “outsider,” who, as Peele explains in the film, can be in fact “us.”

As Peele explained in an interview, “We need to look at our own faces. Maybe the evil is us.” Thus, the language barrier in the film takes a new, deeper meaning, as it could be representative of the real language barrier between U.S. Americans and who they consider as outsiders.

The final twist revels this theme further, as, we learn that Red was actually the real Adelaide, who as a child, had been choked by the real Red who then trapped her down in the earth. The real Red then escaped and took Adelaide’s place. That is why Adelaide stopped speaking when she was a child, because she had never spoken in the first place. Moreover, that’s why Red knew how to speak, as she had lived the first 10 years of her life as a human.

This revelation meant that in fact the tethered, or the “outsider/other”, could become just like “us” when raised in the same environment. The real Red became human, while the real Adelaide, despite being a tethered now, still kept her humanity as represented in her language. She led an uprising based on symbolic and body language, languages that Jordan Peele wanted to emphasize as being equally or even more effective than conventional language.