Following on from the compellingly creepy trailer that dropped during last Sunday’s Super Bowl, Jordan Peele has now unveiled a new poster for Us, and it’s really something to behold.
The image brings us Lupita Nyong’o wearing the same red outfit and glove to feature in much of the movie’s promotion so far, but this time, the actress is also holding an unnervingly realistic mask of her own face. The person beneath the mask has less prominent eyebrows and a psychotic expression on her face, suggesting that this is the violent doppelgänger of Nyong’o’s character Adelaide Wilson, and that the mask represents Adelaide herself. At the bottom of the poster, we see the film’s tagline, “Watch Yourself.”
As well as being a great design in its own right, the poster does a fine job of following through on Peele’s claim that Us is a film about “the simple fact that we are our own worst enemies.” In channeling this concept, the director has said that he had to create “a new horror mythology and a new monster,” arguing that “monsters and stories about monsters are one of our best ways of getting at deeper truths and facing our fears as a society.”
The monsters in question have been named “The Tethered,” and in the film’s trailers, we see there’s one doppelgänger for each member of the Wilson family, which also includes Winston Duke as Gabriel “Gabe” Wilson, Evan Alex as Jason Wilson, and Shahadi Wright-Joseph as Zora Wilson. We’ll likely find out more about more about the strange beings that stalk this family when Us hits theaters on March 22nd, 2019, though not before its SXSW premiere on March 8th.
