Film

It’s Time To Admit That ‘Ophelia, Call The Police’ Was The Most Iconic Scene From ‘Us’

The only thing better is the 'I Got 5 On It' remix.

by Michelle Rennex  24 April 2020
us fuck the police scene

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It’s been about a year since Jordan Peele’s box office smash, Us, hit cinemas.

Refreshing the old and tired horror genre full of nothing more than the convoluted Conjuring universe and gore-filled Saw films, Us was the smart psychological horror-thriller that we all so desperately needed.

But beyond giving us the greatest horror hip-hop remix of all time with ‘I Got 5 On It’, Us also made us jump, think, and somehow even laugh while we were in cinema just trying not to shit ourselves in fear.

In case you need a refresher, Us focuses on the story of Adelaide Wilson and her family, who are attacked by a group of doppelgängers while on vacation.

As the story progresses, we learn that the lookalikes are actually a group of underground dwellers called “the Tethered” — essentially, a group of soulless shadow people who exist to simply follow the every move of their above-ground counterparts.

At the end of the film, we find out that Adelaide is not who she says she is at all. As a child, young Adelaide accidentally switched positions with her Tethered, Red, who was raised as a human and learned the skill of talking to become the Adelaide we knew for the majority of the film.

As a result of young Adelaide being stuck underground, she eventually caused a Tethered uprising which gave us the action (and horror) of Us. One of the action-packed scenes that we see is when the innocently dumb Tyler family are slain by their Tethered family. While death is rarely ever a funny thing, the use of ‘Ophelia’ made this moment truly iconic.

In this scene, Kitty tries to get her husband, Josh, to check outside their holiday home after hearing rustling outside. After joking around about seeing OJ Simpson outside in the bushes, Josh calls for his Alexa/Siri-style smart speaker device to turn the lights on and play Beach Boys. In response, Ophelia plays ‘Good Vibrations’.

Obviously heavily reliant on their Ophelia system, the two argue over the sound level of the music and as ‘Good Vibrations’ continues to ring out, the Tethered kill off each member of the Tyler family.

Struggling for breath, Kitty crawls over to her dead husband laying on the ground. After asking the killers to “please, stop”, Ophelia mistakes Kitty’s pleas as a device request, promptly stopping the music.

Realising that she could call for help using the hands-free system, Kitty asks Ophelia to “call the police”. Instead, making the tense moment darkly funny, Ophelia confuses the request and plays ‘Fuck The Police’ by N.W.A as Kitty’s Tethered slits her throat.

It was a real Black Mirror moment for sure, but it was made even funnier because it’s something that isn’t that far off from actually happening.

Honestly, we’ve all felt that moment before: Siri confusing a simple command for something else and now you’re in a panic trying to cancel a call you never wanted to make. Or someone saying anything that sounds slightly like the word Alexa in another room, which triggers your Echo Dot search — something I felt in a Zoom meeting this morning when my Alexa went off as I tried to pitch this article.

Hell, to rub salt in the wound, Jordan Peele even gave the device name a double meaning, as he often does. Turns out that Ophelia (Ofelia)  literally means “who assists or who helps”. Guess she wasn’t really all that helpful that time, though.

Rewatch the hilariously dark moment in full here: