OnScreen Review: "Nope"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
After hitting it big with the comedy sketch show Key & Peele, Jordan Peele has deftly pivoted to becoming one of the most critically acclaimed and appointment-viewing directors in Hollywood after Get Out and Us. His latest horror film, Nope, is an alien sci-fi horror that puts a unique twist on having a close encounter. Right now, Peele is in the business of making original content films, which is becoming a lot rarer than it used to be, but he has earned that cache after the success of his previous two movies. Nope is actually about creating or capturing original content and monetizing it.
Otis “OJ” Haywood Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald “Em” (Keke Palmer) find themselves struggling to keep the family company afloat in the wake of the father’s (Keith David) death six months ago. Their family owns and operates one of the longest running horse wrangling companies in Hollywood, with their claim to fame being that their great-great-great(?)-grandfather was the horse jockey in the famous Horse in Motion pictures captured by Eadweard Muybridge, the first motion picture.
With movies and horses in their blood, so to speak, OJ isn’t ready to just give up the family business and leave their family farm out in the remote hills of California, even though he has received an offer from their neighbor, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child-actor now running a carnival theme park next door. With odd electrical occurrences and spooked horses disappearing, the Haywood siblings discover that there is a UFO hiding in the clouds above their valley and they decide to set about trying to capture it on video to make a financial windfall in the process.
OJ, in particular, in tied to his family’s roots on this farm, his sister, less so. Their father involved OJ far more in the day-to-day business, and Em is largely untethered to the family business. In fact, when we are first introduced to her, she shows up late on a movie set to run through their safety spiel around the horses and even uses the moment for some self-promotion, trying to make her own name in the Hollywood game. Kaluuya and Palmer are a great contrast in how a brother and sister can be family and so opposite in their personalities. Kaluuya’s OJ is just not a people person while Em is very outgoing, but together when they are alone, they still have a sibling repartee and familiarity that feels really authentic in an older brother, younger sister kind of way.
So despite the offer from his neighbor, and despite the presence of a UFO, OJ is not willing to get the heck out of dodge like most people would be. He also has a connection with his horses, having grown up on the ranch with them and isn’t going to simply abandon them either. There is a stubbornness to his character, really with both Haywood siblings, that drives them to try to capture this spectacle on camera. Their efforts end up roping in Angel (Brandon Perea), a local Fry Electronics salesman, and famed cinematographer Antlers Holst, portrayed by the wonderfully gravely-voiced Michael Wincott.
Spectacle is a big part of Nope. OJ, Em, Angel, and Holst want to capture this impossible shot and are willing to go to great lengths to achieve it, but they are not the only ones interested in creating spectacle to capture people’s attention. Steven Yeun’s Ricky also has some familiarity with the unexplained phenomenon in the sky, too, but he also has a trauma from his past that he carries around with him and has buried the effects of that trauma so deeply that he does not seem to have learned his lesson from it. The opening of the film involves a flashback to a fake television show in the late 90s that Ricky was on and a chimp gone wild on set, which is revisited later on in the film. The connective tissue to the main narrative is a little strained, but there are definite ties to humans attempting to tame something wild in the name of show, a tale as old or older than King Kong, also a primate.
Get Out and Us, but Us in particular, were unconventional hits. Nope is another unconventional horror thriller from Peele. It has a lot of unsettling moments, thrills, and some genuine scares, but it is not a straightforward, mindless summer blockbuster or a film that is made to hit the checkpoints of a streaming service’s algorithm. Most of the film takes place on a farm far removed from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. And yet it also a story that has a massive scale. Hoyte van Hoytema is the cinematographer, someone who has worked frequently with Christopher Nolan, and his inclusion is perfect because he captures the grandiosity and beauty of the sky and the surrounding countryside of this valley that most of the film takes place in.
This movie obviously shares DNA with quite a few older films, like Shyamalan’s Signs, but it really feels like a blending of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws. You can’t help but watch this film and think that these connections and working with a DP like Hoytema are deliberate, like Jordan Peele is announcing himself as an event filmmaker and making his future intentions and ambitions known. For the most part, he succeeds. Despite all of that shared DNA, Nope is its own unique thing. This is an alien movie, but it is, oddly enough, not an invasion movie. It’s a surprisingly fresh take on UFOs and aliens, which I was not expecting going in.
(It also needs to be said that this film is one of the best ever at deploying the use of its title in the story, with impeccable drops of “Nope” littered throughout the movie.)
Nope is a big event summer release, but it is far from a crowd-pleaser. There has been nothing in Jordan Peele’s work as a director to date to suggest to anyone that it would be. It’s still a fun time, but it’s not afraid to challenge its audience or to leave some story elements unanswered. It may not resonate with everyone like Get Out did as an unexpected hit, or Us did as a highly anticipated follow-up, but its arguably more ambitious in its scale than those previous films. Until further notice, my answer to anything from Jordan Peele is “Yep.”
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars