Us

In 1986, young Adelaide Thomas wanders alone into a beachside hall of mirrors called Vision Quest while on vacation in Santa Cruz. The lights go out. She hears whistling that echoes her own perfectly, then turns to find her exact double staring back at her. The scene cuts to black.

Decades later, Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong'o) reluctantly returns to the Santa Cruz area with her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two children, Zora and Jason, for a summer vacation. At the beach with their friends the overbearing Tyler family, Jason briefly glimpses a bloodied stranger standing with arms outstretched — an early casualty of something already in motion. Adelaide panics when she loses sight of Jason near the old funhouse and forces the family to leave. That night she confesses her childhood trauma to Gabe: a girl who looked exactly like her. The lights go out. Jason looks outside and says there's a family standing in the driveway.

Four figures in red jumpsuits stand hand-in-hand in the dark — doppelgängers of each Wilson. Red, Adelaide's double, is the only one who speaks, in a raspy, fractured voice. She tells a parable about a princess and her shadow: one raised in comfort above, the other condemned to suffer below. She explains the Tethered were created by shadowy forces to control the people on the surface, then abandoned underground, left to mimic lives they'd never get to live. The Wilsons are separated and terrorized — Gabe dragged to the boat, Zora hunted through the dark, Jason trapped in a deadly mirroring game with the burned, mask-wearing Pluto. Each fights back. Gabe kills Abraham in a struggle on the water. Zora outruns and outsmarts Umbrae. Jason exploits Pluto's mirroring instinct to lock him in a closet. Adelaide frees herself and beats Red back long enough to escape. The family flees by boat.

Seeking help, the Wilsons arrive at the Tylers' home to find the entire family slaughtered by their own doubles. After killing the Tyler doppelgängers, they commandeer a car and turn on the news: the invasion is nationwide. Across America, people in red jumpsuits are murdering their surface counterparts and joining hands in a vast human chain — a grim, bloody recreation of the 1986 charity event Hands Across America.