As the family drive away her son looks at his mum strangely like he's wondering something. Adelaide turns to meet his eye and smiles, we know from her creepy smile that actually this isn't the 'real' Adelaide, this is the actual Tethered!
We discover that Adelaide was born a tethered, only to eventually escape and switch places with the real Adelaide. We only learn this in the final few moments of the film, and in the script, the swap is even sadder than what was in the finished film.
In the film's final reels, however, as the Wilson family flees Santa Cruz in their car, a flashback reveals that Adelaide has been Red, who in reality switched places with her in the funhouse, all along. To make the switch, Red strangles Adelaide unconscious, permanently damaging her vocal cords.
Jason looks at Adelaide in the car—who we now know is a Tethered—and some sort of acknowledgement passes between them. This seems like an indication that Jason seemed to realize that his mother was actually one of the Tethered.
Warning: Spoilers for the film Us. “How you could have taken me with you,” Red wistfully states to the Adelaide that has taken over her life. All that you have, all that you are, all that you've become — you took from me.
Jason does not have a scar at the end of the movie. Another, clearer explanation is that Jason knows about Adelaide's true nature, as he heard the final fight between her and Red. He knows that she's still his mom, but also knows that she may have done something terrible in her past.
The tune she's whistling is “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” — the last song she had stuck in her head before she was kidnapped. (The song also invokes the slaves' ascent to freedom by “crawling up” the water spout, i.e. the sewers, to their escape.)
However, the rabbits hold a deeper meaning too. Rabbits commonly symbolize rebirth in human culture as explained by their usage around Easter to signify the rebirth of Jesus Christ. In the case of Us, the rabbits symbolize the rebirth of the Tethered who are now rising up to take their place in society.
Jordan Peele's Explanation Of Us's Scissors Explained
Peele added that in Us he explored various things relating to the duality of human beings and “the guilt and sins that we bury deep within ourselves”, so scissors are a visual representation of the duality of humanity.
The Hollywood Reporter noted that Nyong'o worked hard to find Red's frightening voice, basing it on a real-life medical condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia, in which muscle spasms cause breaks and interruptions in one's speech patterns. This condition can be caused by emotional or physical trauma.
“It's a symbol of aggression, a screaming mission. You cannot miss it.” With her life stolen away by Adelaide, Red nurses her anger for years. It's no surprise that when she unites the Tethered as a revolutionary army, ready to kill off their surface-world selves, she clothes them in the color of her rage.
But aboveground, the many Tethers have joined hands together in a mirror of Hands Across America, the 1986 event meant to raise money and awareness of hunger, which stretched a 6.5 million-person chain (almost all the way) across the Lower 48.
Why did Jason put his mask back on at the end of Us?
Jason's silence and the act of pulling the mask over his face implies that he is choosing to remain silent about Red's secret, but it leaves a very important lingering question. Jason could be accepting of who his mother was and the implications of what she had done, or he could remain quiet out of fear.
Pluto wears a mask to cover up the burns of the accident. This would explain why Jason is often wearing a mask throughout the film. Pluto's death is by self-immolation, which reinforces this as well. Several other small details speak to Jason's potential swap.
This order is behind the movie's biggest plot twist: Chris was lured into the lair of a secretive cult that will force him to undergo a procedure to transfer a white person's mind into his young, healthy body as they did with other innocent black men in the past.
The ending of the film reveals a shocking twist, where the protagonist we've been rooting for is actually the villain. The film's deeper meaning revolves around the class divide, with the Tethered representing the oppressed and the above-ground counterparts representing the privileged.
Since the clones are purposefully tied to their above-ground counterparts — they share a soul, so to speak — the Tethered are forever linked to their originals. Forced to mindlessly mimic their counterparts, the Tethered live empty lives.
At first, it appears that Adelaide is now stuck mirroring Red — having totally swapped places with her and becoming a Tethered herself — but that seems to change after her dance performance. The movie seems to suggest that Adelaide and Red became untethered after they both danced at the same time as children...
Red then continued to live aboveground and eventually married Gabe and had two children, with everyone believing she was the real Adelaide—and the movie seems to imply that Red repressed her origins as a childhood trauma and believed she was Adelaide too.
The ending of Us reveals that Adelaide is actually Red, her Tethered clone. Audiences learn that when Adelaide was a child, she came across Red in the hall of mirrors at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz, which is the haunting and memorable opening scene.
Most of the Tethered don't escape because they don't have Adelaide's clarity and ambition, but Red is a normal child, with every reason to explore until she finds her way out.
In Us, Jeremiah 11:11 reads as, "Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them." Narratively this is represented through Adelaide's duplicate, Red, who represents the evil she and the other ...
Often, rabbits symbolize rebirth, which fits with the intentions of the Tethered to start a new chapter living on the surface. But, connecting with Peele's greater theme of duality, rabbits are often used as test subjects, which represents the lives of these Tethered as an abandoned experiment.
The use of scissors as a weapon in the Tethered attack seems a direct reference to these paper dolls, Hands Across America, and the way scissors can quickly separate two connected things.
