She is one of “the tethered.” When she told her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) earlier in the movie that she has no idea why she wandered off from her father at the Santa Cruz boardwalk some 30 years ago, it’s because she never did wander off. Our Adelaide, who viewers likely coded in their head as “Good Lupita,” has all along been the one born to the tunnels of doppelgangers. For as this is occurring, we witness crosscuts to the first scene and get a confirmation that only the most astute viewers guessed: The Adelaide we’ve been following the whole film is not the little girl who got lost in the opening sequence. In the final moments, he is having flickering doubts of who his mother is, but his suspicions are not nearly so dire as those experienced by the audience. Nevertheless, it was down there where Jason saw Adelaide not just kill her doppelganger, ostensibly credited as “Red,” in a moment that audiences cheered, but do so while becoming every bit as wrathful and cruel in her execution as the other doppelgangers whom Jason accurately described as “us.”
By his side in a car headed south is his mother Adelaide (a ferocious Lupita Nyong’o), who went into the bowels of hell to retrieve him like a maternal Orpheus with the good sense to not look back. Young Jason Wilson (Evan Alex) is tempted to do just that in the final seconds of Jordan Peele’s Us. It’s easy to judge someone even as they sit right next to you.