Critically and commercially successful, it made $255 million worldwide on its $20 million budget and was critically praised for Jordan Peele’s screenplay and direction, Lupita Nyong’o’s performance and its musical score.

Critical reviews for the film on its release were generally positive with Monica Castillo of RogerEbert.com giving the film four out of four, writing that “Us is another thrilling exploration of the past and oppression this country is still too afraid to bring up. Peele wants us to talk, and he’s given audiences the material to think, to feel our way through some of the darker sides of the human condition and the American experience” while Richard Brody of The New Yorker stated that “Us is a horror film – though saying so is like offering a reminder that The Godfather is a gangster film… Genre is irrelevant to the merits of a film… what matters is that Peele cites the tropes and precedents of horror in order to deeply root his film in the terrain of pop culture – and then to pull up those roots.”

On release its commercial success saw it make $29.1 million on its first day – one of the best ever for a horror film and much higher than Peele’s previous film Get Out – before it went on to earn $71.1 million at the box office, debuting at No. 1 and becoming the second best opening for a live-action original film after Avatar ($77 million in 2009), as well as the best ever opening for an original horror film not based on a known property and the third-best total for a horror film after It ($123.4 million in 2017) and Halloween ($76.2 million in 2018).

Jordan Peele created the film to primarily explore the concept of American privilege with him stating that “the biggest disservice we can do as a faction with a collective privilege like the United States is to presume that we deserve it, and that it isn't luck that has us born where we're born. For us to have our privilege, someone suffers. That's where the Tethered connection, I think, resonates the most, is that those who suffer and those who prosper are two sides of the same coin. You can never forget that. We need to fight for the less fortunate."

Today, it stands on Rotten Tomatoes at 93% and its critical consensus reads: “With Jordan Peele’s second inventive, ambitious horror film, we have seen how to beat the sophomore jinx, and it is Us.”