In writer-director Jordan Peele’s chilling Nope, a struggling, Black-operated ranch that supplies horses for Hollywood productions faces an additional threat in the form of an extraterrestrial being that likes to suck animals and people up into the clouds. The Haywood ranch is a family-run operation, with OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) doing most of the work with a glum diligence while his upbeat sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), handles the people-interfacing duties. Though the siblings are hardly on the best of terms, when it comes time to face down the alien presence, they unsurprisingly rediscover a familial bond.
Set almost entirely in a sprawling green valley where there are few natural hiding places, Nope finds clever ways to communicate menace in the mundane. In an early scene, a power outage on the Haywood ranch is accompanied by a shower of small metal objects that seem innocuous until one kills Otis (Keith David), OJ and Emerald’s father. Not long after, the siblings visit a cheery theme park run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star who talks glowingly of his years on a hit 1990s sitcom but whose barely hidden trauma (caused by an on-set attack by the show’s chimpanzee that Peele gleefully teases in the opening scene), darkly undercuts his show-must-go-on persona and foreshadows later events at the park.
Like in many films by M. Night Shyamalan, whose twist-centric modus operandi has some similarities to Peele’s, Nope is at its most eerie in the early stretches when the characters are still trying to understand what’s happening around them. Strange noises like strangled screams emanate from the sky while the electricity flickers, the ranch’s horses whinny in panic, and something that really looks like a classic UFO flits among the clouds.
Once the Haywoods piece together an idea of what they’re facing, though, the film turns into something of a caper packed with meta references to the power of imagery. Seeing an opportunity to turn the struggling ranch around, Emerald decides to get footage of the UFO that they can sell. After OJ inadvertently reveals to Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), an electronics store clerk hired to help the Haywoods set up security cameras around the ranch, what they’re doing, Angel volunteers his services for the UFO hunt. Emerald then ropes in Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), a legendary cinematographer who just so happens to have a self-built, hand-cranked IMAX camera, by promising a shot of “the stuff dreams are made of.”
The problem they encounter with trying to get footage of a malevolent alien entity, of course, is staying alive while doing it. Peele puts together a string of tense near-escape scenes that confidently twist together thrilling danger with tension-bursting humor and a sense of inexplicable strangeness. He also coaxes strong performances from each of the actors, nicely playing Kaluuya’s stoicism against Palmer’s scattered, weed-vaping bounciness.
Race factors into Nope, though on a subtler level than in Peele’s earlier features and work on Key and Peele. At one point, Emerald gives a speech to a film crew about how the jockey riding the horse captured by Eadweard Muybridge’s early stop-motion film was Black. Meant as both uplifting message and canny marketing (the Haywoods run the only Black-owned ranch of its kind in show business), the speech ties into a running theme about the lengths people will go to preserve something meaningful on film, whether the history of Black people in early cinema or evidence of first contact. But it’s a somewhat muddled message.
One of the most simultaneously comedic and unnerving scenes in Nope occurs when a motorcycle-riding paparazzo comes looking for alien footage, appearing like an unearthly creature himself with his reflective, never-removed helmet. But while that character seems meant for ridicule, he’s just chasing the same fantasies (wealth, internet fame) as the protagonists. Similarly confused is the gruesomely extended and bloody flashback narrative about Jupe’s chimpanzee disaster. Initially seeming to warn of the dangers of fame-chasing and satirizing the ways comedy dulls tragedy (a superb, darkly funny monologue by Jupe imagines how it would have played on mid-’90s Saturday Night Live), that whole strand of the film ends up just dangling there like a meta-narrative from a different film.
Nope is structurally closer to Peele’s Us than Get Out. Both films are superbly horrifying nail-biters about families in danger. Their tightly coiled plots are also paired with and subverted by fantastical meta-commentaries about society that don’t completely cohere but have a winning go-for-it audaciousness. But while Nope pushes all the thriller buttons quite effectively, it’s more inconsistent in its attempts to construct something coherent behind the scares.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
