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It’s surprising how little information about writer/director Jordan Peele ’s “Nope” has leaked since it was first announced. There have been a few trailers that show what may or may not be the film’s primary threat, and the marketing team has done a very good job with posters of its main cast members looking up at the sky and uttering the film’s title. All that thirst for capitalistic box office gain comes with a price, namely that it builds hype and an audience expectation that may not be met once the finished product is unveiled. This invariably leads to whiny complaints on Twitter and a plethora of think pieces I have no desire to read, even if I didn’t like the movie.  

I’ve always had begrudging respect for a filmmaker who refuses to cater to a viewer’s pre-ordained expectations, even if said viewer is yours truly. It’s why I attend David Lynch movies despite never being a fan of the director’s work. So, I’ve been replaying a throwaway line of dialogue in my head as a potential explanation for how “Nope” is constructed and executed. In response to a pitch for his services, cinematographer Antlers Holst ( Michael Wincott ) tells Emerald Haywood ( Keke Palmer ) that he “makes one movie for them, and one for me.” This is a callback to John Cassavetes ’ philosophy/excuse for appearing in trash—the pay allowed him to finance the movies he wanted to create. 

After the massively entertaining, Oscar-winning calling card of “ Get Out ,” Jordan Peele moved toward a hybrid of audience pleaser and filmmaker’s jones with “ Us .” That film was less blatant and required more work on the audience’s part, which made it fascinating for some and frustrating for others. It was also powered by a career-best performance by Lupita Nyong’o, whose dual role was unshakably strange and multilayered. There is no equivalent performance in “Nope” to anchor viewers, and it’s about three times as messy, but I got the feeling that Holst is Peele’s stand-in, that is, the director is revealing to us through a character that he made this film to amuse and please himself. If that is true, then Holst’s final scene says a lot about his creator; it’s a moment of self-sacrifice in lieu of the perfect camera shot. 

Prior to the pitch for work scene, Holst and Emerald met on the set of a commercial he was shooting. She arrived late to assist her horse-wrangler brother Otis Jr. ( Daniel Kaluuya ) with the animal hired for the ad. That shoot goes awry, but not before Peele drops some breadcrumbs that will lead viewers through the forest he’s built for us to get lost inside. He also includes a nice cameo from nighttime soap opera legend Donna Mills . Speaking of cameos, the opening scene of “Nope” features Keith David as Otis Sr., head of Haywood Hollywood Horses, the family business. The Haywood’s ancestors were the first Black stuntpeople and animal wranglers in Hollywood, going back to the earliest days of movie making. That seems like an extraneous detail, but nothing is truly extra in a Jordan Peele movie.

The rest of the cast features Steven Yuen as Jupe, a barker who runs an alien-based carnival of sorts out in the same middle of nowhere the Haywoods have their ranch, and Angel ( Brandon Perea ), a techie specializing in surveillance equipment he sells out of a Best Buy clone called Fry’s. Jupe is the survivor of a horrific freak accident on a television show that had the first use of a certain type of animal. Angel is hired to install fancy cameras on the Haywood ranch so that Otis and Emerald can be the first to capture “the Oprah shot” of a specific event I won’t reveal. All this focus on being the first to do something! Again, no detail is completely extra in a Jordan Peele movie.

With “Nope,” Peele continues to explore and repeat certain elements of his prior works. Like “Us,” there’s a Bible quote that may be another breadcrumb to follow. This time it’s Nahum 3:6, which says “I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.” There’s also a focus on animals, with horses playing a major role here. Unlike the deer in “Get Out” and the rabbits in “Us,” symbols of creatures being preyed upon, Peele reverses the power dynamic by turning into prey the most dangerous predator of all. There’s also the unusual use of an inanimate object; in “Us” it was scissors, in “Nope” it’s a fake horse and those weird, swaying air-filled things every used car dealer seems to have.

“Nope” is not as good as “Get Out” or “Us,” but it’s definitely Peele’s creepiest movie. He’s always been more Rod Serling than Rob Zombie , and that’s most evident here. There’s humor to be had in the minority characters’ reactions to horror (yes, they say “nope” the way most people would say “oh HELL NAW!”), but the director really leans into Hitchcock’s tenet about suspense vs. surprise. The wait for something awful to happen is always worse than when it does. Additionally, Peele remains a master of misdirection, offering fleeting glimpses of something that’s amiss or keeping the most brutal violence just beyond our view. The sound mix on this is aces, and I’ll never tire of horror movies that center on Black protagonists who are more than just fodder for whatever’s killing everybody.

Peele also gets good performances out of Kaluuya and Palmer, who believably work the sibling angle with all its longstanding grudges, in-jokes and patterns based on who’s older. Wincott wields his wonderful voice as a force of nature. Yuen seems to be off-kilter and the movie’s weak link, but the more I thought about his plotline, the more his performance made sense. I think he’s the film’s biggest breadcrumb in terms of figuring it all out. As for the special effects, they’re interesting, to say the least.

Truth be told, “Nope” reaches a conventional end point that would probably be more satisfying to most audiences had the journey been more tuned to the usual ways these stories are told. After my IMAX screening, there was a smattering of audience applause but I heard lots of grumbling. Call me a sadist if you must, but this is my favorite type of audience reaction. One particularly angry guy behind me on the escalator said “I can’t wait for the critics reviews calling this ‘splendid’!” “Nope” isn’t splendid, but it is pretty damn good. I had a lot of fun trying to figure it out. It’s a puzzle with a few pieces missing; standing back from it, you can still see the picture. But does it give the viewer exactly what they want? See the title.

Available in theaters on July 22nd.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Nope (2022)

Rated R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images.

135 minutes

Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood

Keke Palmer as Emerald 'Em' Haywood

Steven Yeun as Ricky 'Jupe' Park

Brandon Perea as Angel Torres

Michael Wincott as Craig

Barbie Ferreira as Nessie

Donna Mills as Bonnie Clayton

Terry Notary as Gordy

Jennifer Lafleur as Phyllis

Keith David as Otis Haywood Sr.

• Jordan Peele

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Nicholas Monsour
• Michael Abels

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‘Nope’ Review: Hell Yes

Jordan Peele’s genre-melting third feature stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as brother-and-sister horse wranglers defending the family ranch from an extraterrestrial threat.

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By A.O. Scott

The trailers for Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” one of the most feverishly anticipated movies of the summer, have raised some intriguing questions. Is it a western? A horror film? Science fiction? Satire? Will it fulfill the expectations raised by Peele’s first two mind-bending, zeitgeist-surfing features, “Get Out” and “Us,” or confound them?

I can now report that the answer to all of those questions is: Yup. Which is to say that there are some fascinating internal tensions within the movie, along with impeccably managed suspense, sharp jokes and a beguiling, unnerving atmosphere of all-around weirdness.

“Nope” feels less polemically pointed than “Us” or “Get Out,” more at home in its idiosyncrasies and flights of imagination even as it follows, in the end, a more conventional narrative path. This might be cause for some disappointment, since Peele’s keen dialectical perspective on our collective American pathologies has been a bright spot in an era of franchised corporate wish fulfillment. At the same time, he’s an artist with the freedom and confidence to do whatever he wants to, and one who knows how to challenge audiences without alienating them.

In any case, it would be inaccurate to claim that the social allegory has been scrubbed away: Every genre Peele invokes is a flytrap for social meanings, and you can’t watch this cowboys-and-aliens monster movie without entertaining some deep thoughts about race, ecology, labor and the toxic, enchanting power of modern popular culture.

“Nope” addresses such matters in a mood that feels more ruminant than argumentative. The main target of its critique is also the principal object of its affection, which we might call — using a name that has lately become something of a fighting word — cinema.

Peele’s movie love runs wide and deep. There are sequences here that nod to past masters, from Hitchcock to Spielberg to Shyamalan, and shots that revel in the sheer ecstasy of moviemaking. A sketch-comedy genius before he turned to directing, Peele never takes his performers for granted, giving everyone space to explore quirks and nuances of character. He also shows an appetite, and an impressive knack, for big effects. The climactic scenes aim for — and very nearly achieve — the kind of old-fashioned sublimity that packs wonder, terror and slack-jawed admiration into a single sensation.

Movies can be scary, enchanting, funny and strange. Sometimes they can be all those things at once. What they never are is innocent. While this movie can fairly be described as Spielbergian, it turns on an emphatic and explicit debunking of Spielberg’s most characteristic visual trope: the awe-struck upward gaze .

“Nope” starts with a cautionary text, drawn from the Old Testament Book of Nahum, which describes God’s threatened punishment on the wicked city of Nineveh: “I will make a spectacle of you.” Our beloved spectacles — like most of the other artifacts of our fallen world — are built on cruelty, exploitation and erasure, and “Nope” is partly about how we incorporate knowledge of that fact into our enjoyment of them. In the first scene, a chimpanzee goes berserk on the set of a sitcom, a moment of absurd, bloody terror that becomes a motif and a thematic key. The ape is a wild animal behaving according to its nature even though it has been tamed and trained for human uses.

The same can be said for the horses who serve as Peele’s totems of movie tradition. He invokes what is thought to be the very first moving image, captured by the 19th-century inventor and adventurer Eadweard Muybridge , of a man on horseback. Emerald ( Keke Palmer ) and O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) claim the rider as their ancestor. They honor his legacy by holding onto the business started by their father, Otis Haywood (Keith David), a ranch that supplies horses for television and movies.

O.J. — it’s short for Otis Jr. — is the main wrangler, a laconic, sad-eyed cowboy more comfortable around horses than people. His sister is more outgoing, and one of the offhand delights of “Nope” is how credibly Kaluuya and Palmer convey the prickly understanding that holds siblings together and sometimes threatens to drive them apart.

Strange things are happening on the ranch. The power cuts out, a mysterious cloud lurks on the horizon, and freakish storms drop detritus from the sky. A horse’s flank is pierced by a falling house key, and Otis Sr. takes an improbable projectile in the eye. Is there a flying saucer haunting the valley? Emerald and O.J. suspect as much, and so does their neighbor, an entrepreneur known as Jupe (Steven Yeun) who has turned his corner of the valley into a Wild West-themed tourist trap.

The possible U.F.O. hovers around the edges of the action for a good while, kind of like the shark in “Jaws” — or the spaceship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” — adding an element of danger that throws human interactions into comical and dramatic relief. As in “Jaws,” a fractious posse forms to deal with the threat, including Angel (Brandon Perea), an anxious techie, and Antlers (Michael Wincott), a visionary cinematographer who shows up at the ranch with a hand-cranked IMAX camera. Jupe, whose back story as a child actor connects him to that wayward chimp, is a bit like the mayor of Amity — less a villain than the representative of a clueless, self-serving status quo.

He’s also a showman, and as such an avatar of the film’s ambivalence about the business of spectacle. Emerald, O.J., Antlers and Angel, by contrast, are craftspeople, absorbed in matters of technique and concerned with the workaday ethics of image-making. This is the place to note Guillaume Rocheron’s haunting, eye-popping special effects, Hoyte van Hoytema’s lucid-dream cinematography and Nicholas Monsour’s sharp editing, and to encourage you to think about the hard work and deep skill represented by all the names in the final credits.

Peele, of course, is both craftsman and showman. He’s too rigorous a thinker to fall back on facile antagonisms between art and commerce, and too generous an entertainer to saddle a zigzagging shaggy-dog story with didacticism. Instead, he revels in paradoxes. The moral of “Nope” is “look away,” but you can’t take your eyes off it. The title accentuates the negative, but how can you refuse?

Nope Rated R. Scares and swears. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Nope review – Jordan Peele’s brilliantly horrifying ride to nowhere

The director’s elliptical follow-up to Us stars Daniel Kaluuya as a California wrangler defending the family ranch from a deadly threat from above

A t a key moment in this self-consciously deconstructive slice of spectacular cinema from Jordan Peele, writer-director of Get Out and Us , a character theorises that the monster (whatever it may be) is at its most dangerous when being looked at . It’s an idea that’s as old as the Greek myth of Medusa (one gaze will turn you to stone) and that resurfaced in 2018 in Susanne Bier’s post-apocalyptic chiller Bird Box (one look will make you kill yourself). It’s even cheekily echoed in Adam McKay’s recent Don’t Look Up , in which Trumpian politicians insist that destruction-by-comet can be avoided by simply refusing to stare death in the face.

In Nope , horse wrangler/trainer Otis “OJ” Haywood Jr (an understatedly intense Daniel Kaluuya ) tries to dodge the deadly attentions of whatever skybound phenomenon is terrorising his California ranch by studiously avoiding eye contact. OJ’s family, which includes ill-fated father Otis Sr (Keith David) and fame-seeking sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), proudly sell themselves as direct descendants of the unnamed jockey featured in Eadweard Muybridge ’s late 19th-century images of a rider and horse – a precursor of modern cinema (“since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game”). Now the Haywood ranch provides horses for film and TV productions (“the only black-owned horse trainers in Hollywood”), although struggling OJ may have to sell their stock to former child star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), who runs a nearby theme park. But then mysterious signs in the sky offer either an unexpected opportunity, or a “bad miracle” …

Despite there being extensive spoilers everywhere about what OJ is up against, it’s best to see Nope unprepared and spend a healthy amount of time wondering “WTF is going on?!” Suffice to say that Peele draws on a wide range of influences, from the awestruck human befuddlement of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the eerie, angelic forms of the Japanese TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion , and (accidentally?) the far-too-pleased-with-itself silliness of M Night Shyamalan’s The Happening . He also picks up cine-literate threads from Antonioni’s swinging 60s parable Blow-Up , Sidney Poitier’s 70s western Buck and the Preacher (a poster for which hangs on the ranch wall), Katsuhiro Otomo’s 80s manga Akira (which Peele was once tapped to remake) and even Ron Underwood’s cult desert-bound 90s monster movie Tremors . More importantly, he rips off (or “pays homage to”) the iconic chase sequences from Jaws , with inflatable air dancers standing in for those floating yellow barrels that made Spielberg’s shark all the more terrifying when unseen.

From this rich stew, Peele cooks up an elliptical (and sometimes frustratingly paced) yarn about our habit of staring in stupefaction at danger, disaster and trauma. This is hardly news to cinemagoers who have spent a century happily gawping at the fiery wrath of early biblical epics ( Nope opens with an Old Testament threat to “make you a spectacle”) and the modern chaos of disaster hits such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno . More recently we had the end-of-the-world loops of Interstellar , with which this film shares ace director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema, a man who knows about capturing the cataclysmic on screen. Sure enough, the character who most verges on caricature is an eccentric Ahab/Quint-like cinematographer (Michael Wincott) who uses not a harpoon but a hand-cranked camera to “capture” this prize beast after surveillance-cam techie Angel (scene-stealing rising star Brandon Perea) discovers that his quarry eats electricity for breakfast.

There’s a neat irony in conjuring an Imax-friendly essay on the perils of gazing. And beyond the surreal sci-fi spectacles and gorgeously rendered night-time vistas, Nope ’s warnings about enraging an opponent – whether it’s a startled chimp or an amorphous sky blob – by looking it in the eye strike a down-to-earth chord in a racially divided world (perhaps OJ’s adversary is a metaphor for white supremacy?). Yet Peele’s ability to balance these intriguing ideas with the brutally kinetic demands of blockbuster cinema is more uncertain, making this a better movie to argue about than to watch. Remember – Jaws may not have been “about” a shark, but it still moved like one. As with the brilliantly horrifying sitcom bloodbath that serves as Nope ’s attention-grabbing curtain-raiser, the film too often seems to be heading somewhere extraordinary, only to disappear into an ambitious conceptual hole that, while occasionally startling, is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.

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• Jordan Peele’s Nope is a breathtaking celebration of filmmaking as an art form

Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Steven Yeun

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

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With both Get Out and Us , Jordan Peele introduced the world to some of the monsters living inside his imagination that were born out of his deep-seated love for the horror genre. While Nope — Peele’s third feature with Universal — definitely runs on the distressing, disorienting energy his projects have become known for, it also feels like the director’s first movie that’s actually about filmmaking as a thrilling and terrifying art form.

Nope tells the story of the Haywoods, a family of Black ranchers who made a name for themselves raising stunt horses for film and television productions. While patriarch Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) always expected that his son Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) and daughter Emerald (Keke Palmer) would eventually take over the family business, none of them ever imagined that Otis Sr. would suddenly and quite mysteriously die after a strange encounter with an innocuous cloud. 

The Haywood siblings are still grieving in their respective ways as Nope opens on Otis Jr. (who goes by OJ) doing what he can to maintain Haywood’s Hollywood Horses and Emerald making it very clear that she’s ready to become a part of the showbiz in a non-equine capacity. Like with most siblings, there’s tension between OJ and Em that Nope brushes up against without veering too far off course. But their father’s death brings Em and OJ closer in a way that properly sets Nope ’s story in motion and illustrates one of the film’s most salient ideas about what it means to work in the entertainment industry — particularly as a person of color.

Unlike OJ, the family’s soft-spoken stoic who prefers the company of horses, Emerald inherited their father’s showmanship and deep pride in their great-great-grandfather, the unnamed Black jockey depicted in Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion cabinet 1878 card series. Blessedly, racism (or some anthropomorphization of it) is not the frightening menace that eventually gets Nope ’s characters uttering the movie’s title aloud. But the specter of it is present in the way Nope connects The Horse in Motion ’s jockey to his fictional descendants: skilled professionals whose talents go largely underappreciated and overlooked by others in the industry, like famed director Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott).

Even those willing to do business with the Haywoods, like former child actor turned local show cowboy Ricky Park (Steven Yeun), are hesitant to see them as more than the people who tend to animals — people so low on the call sheet that they’re almost invisible. That sense of being boxed in by others’ preconceptions is one of the ways Nope starts to build up an atmosphere of dread long before any of its human characters realize that they aren’t alone out there in the desert.

OJ doesn’t really want to believe his eyes when he witnesses something strange one evening while chasing down an escaped horse, and he’s loath to tell his sister. But he can’t deny hearing the sound of screams echoing through the canyons whenever one of the strange power outages that’s been plaguing their ranch sets in, and before long, Em, too, catches a glimpse of the alarming sight that put her brother on edge. If you’ve seen any of Nope ’s trailers or its very effective posters, then you likely know what kind of creatures its story revolves around. But instead of trying to present itself as a wholly new spin on the kind of film it appears to be, Nope exceeds by going a bit meta as its heroes realize that they’re going to have to fight for their lives using, among other things, cameras.

Peele has always had an eye for bold, visual storytelling, but there’s a majesty to Nope ’s sweeping shots of the California desert that feels reflective of his evolution as a filmmaker and of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s artistic sensibilities. Nope ’s striking, almost portrait-like shots of its heroes immediately call to mind Western classics like Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher as OJ and Em’s ranch becomes their new base of operations where they plan to photograph and document whatever it is that’s hunting them and their neighbors. But the slick and imaginative ways that  Nope  repeatedly reminds you of the danger that OJ and Em must face has much more in common with the likes of M. Night Shyamalan’s  Signs  and Joe Cornish’s  Attack the Block.

As characters, both OJ and Em are so firmly within Kaluuya and Palmer’s wheelhouses that they have a way of feeling like archetypical performances you’ve seen from them before, but it works within the context of Nope ’s slightly amped-up reality. Palmer in particular shines with an easy exuberance that feels entirely her own, and Kaluuya embodies the precise kind of laconic cowboy masculinity that defined the leading men of movies like George Stevens’ Shane .

Neither of the Haywoods feel quite like “real” people but rather like heightened personifications of artists hungry to become part of the movie-making business — no matter the cost. Foolhardy as their plan to stand their ground while documenting their confrontation with the creatures is, it makes a certain kind of emotional sense when you step back and look at Nope as a text about people pouring everything they have into getting the perfect shot.

Nope leaves itself far less open to interpretation than Peele’s previous films, and it’s better for it as the movie shifts gears in order to give itself ample time to show off its VFX budget. Nope lays all its cards on the table with a series of truly breathtaking and astounding set pieces that speak to Peele’s ability to conjure large-scale horrors that are just as nightmarish as the smaller, more intimate ones we’re accustomed to seeing from him.

Though its straightforwardness and focus on spectacle over subtlety might not quite be what audiences expect from a Monkeypaw feature, Nope ’s a strong entry from Peele and a sign that the director’s still got plenty of heat left to spare.

Nope also stars Brandon Perea, Terry Notary, Andrew Patrick Ralston, and Jennifer Lafleur. The movie hits theaters on July 22nd.

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Nope First Reviews: Ambitious and Well Crafted, but Possibly Jordan Peele's Most Divisive Film Yet

Critics say the writer-directors sci-fi thriller is thought-provoking and confidently made, but its big ideas and cerebral plot may leave general audiences wanting more..

TAGGED AS: aliens , First Reviews , Horror , movies

Nope marks the third feature from writer and director Jordan Peele , and the first reviews of the movie prove that Get Out and Us were no flukes. This time, the filmmaker is focused on a frightening science fiction story involving a horse ranch, a former child actor, and something mysterious lurking above the clouds. Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya , Keke Palmer ,and Steven Yeun within a praised ensemble amidst some spectacular visuals. But whether its script is brilliant or confusing is debated from one review to the next.

Here’s what critics are saying about Nope :

Does Nope confirm Jordan Peele as one of the great directors of our time?

With Nope , Peele once again proves that he’s not just one of the most interesting filmmakers working in horror today, he’s one of the most interesting filmmakers working, period. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

He continues to be one of the best in the business. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

This film really might be what it takes to etch him as, no, not the next Spielberg, but an event-level filmmaker that we’ve all been worried we were losing. – Cory Woodroof, 615 Film

How does it compare to Get Out and Us ?

While still full of profound and layered ideas, Nope is closer in execution to the horror-comedy mix of Get Out than Us . – Ben Kendrick, Screen Rant

Nope is arguably the most conventional horror film of his three directorial efforts. – Matt Rodriguez, Shakefire

Peele’s most assured, confident film yet… Nope may not be Jordan Peele’s best movie to date, but it is his most enjoyable. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

Compared to Get Out and Us , Nope is likely to prove more divisive… I fully expect it to be labeled his strongest and weakest flick in equal measure. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

Peele is capable of doing much better movies (as evidenced by Get Out and Us ), but Nope just looks like a cynical cash grab. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Is it as good as Us and Get Out ? Nope. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

It’s Jordan Peele’s weakest film. – Robert Daniels, Polygon

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

What other movies does it recall?

You can just about taste the DNA of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and… other films that have been made in the shadow of Close Encounters , like M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival . – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

What binds this movie so closely to Close Encounters of the Third Kind  has less to do with alien visitors, in the end, than with the fervent curiosity that they can inspire. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

It captures the same thrills, tension, and strong characters of movies like Jaws , while also setting itself up to be as iconic as sci-fi movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien . – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

It’s closer to Peele’s Super 8 than Peele’s Signs . – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

This movie reminds me of Tremors … That’s a movie with swagger. And Nope has a similar swagger that Peele was smart to use. – Mike Ryan, Uproxx

The film it most resembled in spirit is a small one, Theo Anthony’s 2021 documentary All Light, Everywhere . – Cory Woodroof, 615 Film

But is it also totally original?

Nope is unlike anything you’ve seen before. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

With stunning cinematic moments of pure dread, terror, and wonder, Peele has indeed delivered on his promise to bring audiences something unique. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

This frequently monotonous and unimaginative movie is an unfortunate case of hype over substance. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Is it scary?

The best horror movie of the year… building the tension to the point that it feels as if nowhere is safe. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

Peele is able to create one thrilling, scary scene after another. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

As a horror movie, Nope fails miserably to be frightening. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

How does the movie look?

Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema captures something so original visually that it is destined to become iconic. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR.com

Nope mostly delivers in terms of big-screen spectacle, visual oomph… and overdue iconography. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

The movie’s visual effects are adequate but definitely not spectacular for a movie concept of this scope. – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Does Nope have a compelling plot?

Nope doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary way. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

For all of the film’s escalating supernatural events, though, what’s less clearly drawn, and will likely prove less satisfying to a plot-hungry public, are the whys and hows of its conclusion. – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

It’s obvious that writer/director/producer Jordan Peele got this movie made without anyone stepping in to question the very weak and lazy plot of Nope . – Carla Hay, Culture Mix

Nope is an idea more than a story. It’s a collection of individually captivating scenes, as opposed to an intriguing whole. – Robert Daniels, Polygon

Is it more cerebral than entertaining?

Nope feels like something of a B-movie ouroboros, an unusually well-made and imaginative thriller that’s sometimes tripped up by its own high-mindedness. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Depending on your appetite for the heady and sonorous, it will either feel frustratingly perplexing or strike you as a work of unquestionable genius. – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

It will leave certain viewers more confused than exhilarated. – Ben Kendrick, Screen Rant

Peele’s strength is that he makes you lean in and talk about his film whether you like it or not. – Kathia Woods, Cup of Soul

But does it actually make any sense?

Nope establishes itself as something of an ethically minded Hollywood history lesson, with a particular focus on the industry’s long, brutal record of animal accidents and abuses on set. – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Nope gives audiences an unforgettable experience, but forces them to reckon with exactly what types of experiences they really want, and at what cost. – Cory Woodroof, 615 Film

While this might be his most bombastic film in terms of what he’s attempting to it, it’s also maybe his most understated in its messaging. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Even when parts of it don’t gel, Nope is a rapturous watch. – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

Logic often takes a back seat, and that has the unfortunate effect of lessening our involvement. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

It’s a puzzle with a few pieces missing; standing back from it, you can still see the picture. But does it give the viewer exactly what they want? See the title. – Odie Henderson, RogerEbert.com

Does the movie have any other major issues?

Events may happen to OJ and Emerald, but outside of the plot’s story beats, we don’t really know anything about them on an individual level. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

The characters would have benefited from greater depth and dimension. – Lovia Gyarkye, Hollywood Reporter

Peele is far too impressed with its handsomeness to work on populating it with fully felt characters. – Robert Daniels, Polygon

The film’s drawn-out pacing issues… leads to redundant and repetitive events and a comparatively (even compared to Us ) claustrophobic narrative. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Nope opens everywhere on July 22, 2022.

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Review: Say yup to Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope,’ the rare thriller Hollywood can look up to

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Given all the surreally unnerving sights there are to see in Jordan Peele’s “Nope” — a debris-choked windstorm, a weirdly undulating tunnel, a circular is-that-what-I-think-it-is gliding in and out of the clouds — it seems fitting that one of the movie’s most arresting images should be of a pair of eyes. Those eyes, wide and terrified, belong to a Southern California horse rancher named O.J. Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), who peers up from the darkness of a stalled truck as something very big and very bad looms overhead. Until now, during much of the story’s slow, suggestive buildup, O.J.’s gaze has been downcast and hard to read, reflecting an indifference that verges on exhaustion. It takes a lot to shock those eyes wide open, but what he sees now gets his attention, to say nothing of ours.

You probably remember Kaluuya’s eyes staring into the sunken-place void of 2017’s “Get Out,” a triumph of socially conscious horror that proved his and Peele’s breakthrough. Their latest collaboration, though also solicitous of your shivers, has something rather different in mind. The labyrinthine fun houses and shadowy, subterranean depths of “Get Out” — and also of Peele’s messier, more ambitiously scaled 2019 freakout, “Us” — have given way to a vast kill zone of wide open spaces and bright desert sunshine, shot in magnificently dusty vistas by Hoyte Van Hoytema (known for his frame-filling Imax work on Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and “Dunkirk”).

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And so while evil still lurks within, as it often does in Peele’s movies, here it also swoops and soars overhead in a cheekily outlandish story that the writer-director seems to have cooked up during an epic binge of “War of the Worlds” (both versions), “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “The Thing From Another World” (and its better-known remake, “The Thing”), “Signs,” “Arrival” and especially “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Peele is nothing if not a pop-culture savant, and here he drops any number of classic Hollywood allusions — the spinning cyclone from “The Wizard of Oz,” the cropduster sequence from “North by Northwest” — as easily as he tosses out a reference to “Saturday Night Live” and, by extension, the larger sketch-comedy world where he began his career.

But Peele’s movie love, sincere and sometimes goofy as it is (watch for multiple nods to the Dwayne Johnson action vehicle “The Scorpion King”), also comes with a serrated edge. Perhaps his most pointed citation here is to “The Horse in Motion” (1878), Eadweard Muybridge’s two-second black-and-white clip of a man riding a horse. In “Nope,” that jockey — a rare Black man in a white-dominated profession — is conceived as a distant relation of O.J. and his upbeat younger sister, Em (a terrific Keke Palmer), who run a Hollywood horse-wrangling business that’s been in their family for generations. (“Since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game,” Em beams before a visibly bored camera crew.) Even as it plays fast and loose with the facts, then, “Nope” establishes itself as something of an ethically minded Hollywood history lesson, with a particular focus on the industry’s long, brutal record of animal accidents and abuses on set.

This connection is driven home by a few horrifying if discreetly framed flashbacks to an old ’90s family sitcom whose chimpanzee star, Gordy, would appear to have been at least partially inspired by a real-life simian celebrity named Travis. If that doesn’t ring a bell, resist the urge to Google; you’re better off hearing Gordy’s story in the words of a former co-star, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun). Decades later, wearing a cowboy hat and a chillingly blank half-smile, Jupe now runs Jupiter’s Claim, a small Old West theme park in Agua Dulce. Not far away is the Haywoods’ lonely ranch, which has fallen on tough times since the mysterious death of O.J. and Em’s father (Keith David), and which Jupe wants to absorb into his cowboy-kitsch empire. All this is taking place barely 50 miles north of Los Angeles, in a stretch of desert that — with its bright-colored inflatable skydancers and pennant streamers — sometimes suggests a used-car lot and sometimes feels like a Hollywood dumping ground.

There’s a lot going on here, in other words, even before “Nope” turns our attention toward that giant disc flying ominously overhead, unleashes a hellish rain over the Haywoods’ ranch and cranks up the volume on its shrieking, juddering soundtrack. (There are moments when Michael Abels’ nerve-shredding score plays like a veritable symphony of human screams.) But if the story is a welter of subplots, tangents and ideas — to the point of being overly taken at times with its own conceptual daring — Peele’s visual craft shows an admirable finesse and discretion. He long ago absorbed the key lesson of “Jaws,” namely that what we don’t see is almost always scarier than what we do see, and that delayed gratification can amplify the power of suggestion. And so for a lengthy stretch he keeps his secret weapon a legitimate secret, with the unspoken assurance that everything (or at least a lot) will be revealed in due course.

In the meantime, you can savor the prickles of comic tension between O.J. and Em, and appreciate how Kaluuya’s and Palmer’s initially clashing rhythms — his slow and dour, hers fast and excitable — gradually come to complement each other as their characters join forces. You might also reflect on all the western iconography in Ruth De Jong’s meticulous production design, from the Haywoods’ dwindling stable of horses and the phony saloon exteriors of Jupiter’s Claim to the way that saucer in the sky, from certain angles, resembles the underside of a giant cowboy hat. “Nope” is a western in more than one sense, an idea borne out by Kaluuya’s taciturn heroism and the ragtag crew — including a friendly electronics-store employee, Angel (the likable Brandon Perea) — that soon comes together, mounting a brave stand against a nameless hunter that soon becomes the hunted.

As in “Us,” Peele shows a fondness for Old Testament scripture, opening here with a grim quote from the prophet Nahum: “I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, make you a spectacle.” That last word, “spectacle,” is crucial; it sets the stage for Peele’s inquiry into the business of exploiting Mother Nature’s creations — be they chimp or horse — for the purposes of mass entertainment. But it also suggests another kind of spectacle, the kind that transforms casual observers into camera-wielding obsessives, driving them to risk their lives and minds to prove that otherworldly phenomena exist. What binds this movie so closely to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” has less to do with alien visitors, in the end, than with the fervent curiosity that they can inspire. Some version of that obsession grabs hold of O.J., Em, Jupe and Angel; it also consumes a local cinematographer, Antlers (Michael Wincott, channeling Robert Shaw), who fuels their determination to capture incontrovertible evidence of what they’re seeing.

In some ways, then, “Nope” is a movie about the challenge of getting the perfect shot, an aim that Peele shares on a practical and artistic level — there’s no shortage of well-framed, jaw-dropping images — even as he cautions against it in the abstract. The four-letter title, which the characters mutter under their breath at moments of heightened anxiety, also functions as a kind of warning. In a sense, Peele wants to use a Hollywood genre template to mount a critique of Hollywood barbarism, to lay bare the callousness of an industry that grinds dreams into dust and exacts a lot of unseen collateral damage. And because the audience plays its part in this vicious cycle, Peele means to complicate the very act of watching, to suggest that it can have its moral costs as well as its undeniable pleasures. That’s one reason he implies rather than embraces the violence of his story’s darkest moments, turning the unspeakable into the unshowable.

All of which may leave “Nope” feeling like something of a B-movie ouroboros, an unusually well-made and imaginative thriller that’s sometimes tripped up by its own high-mindedness — and also, perhaps, by a closing stretch that struggles to bring Peele’s grand intentions together. Still, there’s no denying the richness of his ideas or the skill with which he taps into his inner Steven Spielberg, an inspiration that can seem tiresome in the wrong hands, but which here feels uniquely pointed and purposeful. One of Peele’s more subversive touches is to effectively weaponize the convention known as “the Spielberg face,” a term that, as unpacked at length by the critic and essayist Kevin B. Lee , describes Spielberg’s signature images of characters gazing up, in beatific wonderment, at the spectacle in front of them. In “Nope,” Peele’s characters keep watching the skies even at their peril, unable to tear their eyes away. You’ll know the feeling.

Rating: R, for language throughout and some violence/bloody images Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes Playing: Starts July 22 in general release

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‘nope’ review: jordan peele’s rapturous and suspenseful sci-fi ride.

A menacing force threatens a Southern California horse ranch in the director’s third film, starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Steven Yeun.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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Nope , Jordan Peele ’s latest offering, slinks and slithers from the clutches of snap judgment. It avoids the comfort of tidy conclusions too. This elusive third feature from the director of Get Out and Us peacocks its ambitions (and budget) while indulging in narrative tangents and detours. It is sprawling and vigorous. Depending on your appetite for the heady and sonorous, it will either feel frustratingly perplexing or strike you as a work of unquestionable genius.

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Release date: Friday, July 22 (Universal) Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Keith David Director-screenwriter: Jordan Peele

Even when parts of it don’t jell, Nope is a rapturous watch. This film, about a pair of sibling horse wranglers who encounter an uncanny force on their ranch, covers a wide range of themes: Hollywood’s obsession with and addiction to spectacle, the United States’ inurement to violence, the siren call of capitalism, the legacy of the Black cowboy and the myth of the American West. Aided by a strong cast, led impressively by Daniel Kaluuya , Keke Palmer , Steven Yeun and Brandon Perea, Peele plunges us into a cavernous, twisted reality.

Agua Dulce is a serene tract of Southern California, where large, billowy clouds appear to caress the tips of sandy, burnt-orange mountains. It’s also home to Otis Haywood Jr. (Kaluuya), or O.J. for short, and his father ( Keith David ). The two men spend their days caring for their stable of mares and stallions and running Haywood Hollywood Horses, the oldest Black-owned horse training service in the industry. After his father dies in a strange accident, O.J., a quiet wrangler, reunites with his estranged sister Emerald (Palmer), or Em, to inherit the business.

Em arrives to the shoot late, but her energy is infectious. She loves the spotlight and hungers for easy routes to fame. Most of the on-set crew are immediately taken by her boisterous energy, her toothy grin and talk-show-host delivery of fun facts: Did you know that the Haywoods are the direct descendants of the unnamed Black jockey in Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 The Race Horse , the first film ever made? Now you do.

Behind Em stands a tortured O.J., gripping the reins of his horse. In a later scene, he admonishes Em for her style, for promoting her multihyphenate career (actor-singer-stuntperson). Em reminds him that running the ranch is her side gig, not her dream. The Haywood siblings’ relationship bears obvious scars of past wounds, but Peele shortchanges audiences when it comes to why. Their suspicious communication style establishes their inability to work as a team, but the characters themselves would have benefited from greater depth and dimension. Kaluuya and an equally impressive Palmer wring as much as they can from O.J. and Em, but they needed another scene or two to burrow into the precipitating events of their fractured relationship.

When O.J. and Em begin piecing together why strange things have been happening on their ranch, their instinct is to make money off it. In their attempts to “capture the impossible,” they meet Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), a recently heartbroken employee at a big-box electronics chain. (Watching the three work together, brainstorming and testing strategies, may bring to mind the teamwork of the characters played by Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee in the 1972 film Buck and the Preacher , which inverted Hollywood’s tradition of the Western by casting Black actors in the main roles.) A late, and unlikely, addition to this rag-tag crew is Antlers Host (Michael Wincott), a cantankerous and revered cinematographer. Although their individual motivations seem different, each of them is driven by a desire for money, fame or some combination of both.

Full credits

Distributor: Universal Pictures Production company: Monkeypaw Productions Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Keith David Director-screenwriter: Jordan Peele Producers: Jordan Peele, Ian Cooper Executive producers: Robert Graf, Win Rosenfeld Director of photography: Hoyte van Hoytema Production designer: Ruth De Jong Costume designer: Alex Bovaird Editor: Nicholas Monsour Composer: Michael Abels Casting director: Carmen Cuba

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‘Nope’ Review: Jordan Peele’s Wildly Entertaining Blockbuster Is the Best Kind of Hollywood Spectacle

David ehrlich.

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How do we live with some of the shit that we’ve been forced to watch on a daily basis? Why are we so eager to immortalize the worst images that our world is capable of producing, and what kind of awful power do we lend such tragedies by sanctifying them into spectacles that can play out over and over again?

While Jordan Peele has fast become one of the most relevant and profitable of modern American filmmakers, “ Nope ” is the first time that he’s been afforded a budget fit for a true blockbuster spectacle, and that’s exactly what he’s created with it. But if this smart, muscular, and massively entertaining flying saucer freak-out is such an old school delight that it starts with a shout-out to early cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge (before paying homage to more direct influences like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), it’s also a thoroughly modern popcorn movie for and about viewers who’ve been inundated with — and addicted to — 21st century visions of real-life terror.

The only sci-fi movie that might scare and delight Guy Debord and Ed Wood to the same degree, “Nope” offers a giddy throwback to the days of little green men and hubcap U.F.O.s that hopes to revitalize those classic tropes for audiences who’ve seen too much bloodshed on their own screens to believe in Hollywood’s “bad miracles.” It’s a tractor beam of a movie pointed at people who’ve watched 9/11 happen so many times on network TV that it’s lost any literal meaning; who’ve scrolled past body cam snuff films in between Dril tweets; who’ve become accustomed to rubbernecking at American life from inside the wreckage.

Less acutely metaphorical than “Us” or “Get Out” and yet just as compelled by the sinister forces that hide in plain sight — along with the double-edged thrill of actually seeing them — “Nope” satisfies our morbid appetite for new horrors better than any multiplex offering in years, but only so that it can feed on our fatal inability to look away from them.

Having said that, “Nope” is also the least confrontational movie that Peele has made so far, its social criticism diffused to the brink of abstraction and joyfully couched in the kind of nervous laughter suggested by its title (which somehow gets funnier every time one of the characters says it aloud). Despite a few moments of deliberately conspiratorial handholding — including a winky scene in which someone announces that “we’re being surveilled by an alien species I call ‘The Viewer’” — it takes a minute to connect the dots between the various things that Peele is doing here.

There’s a good reason why “Nope” opens on the set of a 1998 sitcom minutes after the show’s lead actor, a chimpanzee named Gordy, has gone bananas and beaten several of his co-stars to death, but the rationale is never as explicit as the one undergirding the “Hands Across America” subplot from “Us.”

By the same token, it’s easy to figure out why grief-stricken animal wrangler OJ Haywood ( Daniel Kaluuya ) might want to sell the Agua Dulce ranch where his family has raised Hollywood picture horses since the movies were invented — in the present-day portion of the film’s prologue, a nickel rains down from the sky with such velocity that it kills OJ’s dad ( Keith David ), cutting a hole clean through his eyeball — but Peele doesn’t spell out why OJ might want to keep it. At this rate, it’s unclear if he even could keep it; OJ is too sad to do the job right, leaving his super-extroverted little sister Emerald ( Keke Palmer ) to keep Haywood Hollywood Horses from being put out to pasture.

The only thing that’s writ large from the get-go is the relationship between one era of spectacle and another, which Emerald articulates like a family motto in a rapid-fire monologue about the Black jockey who Muybridge photographed to create the very first assembly of motion pictures. Most people forgot his name in the shadow of that immortal shoot (and it would take Hollywood another 100 years to come back to the idea of putting a Black man on a horse), but Emerald and OJ remember it well: He was a Haywood too. Alas, even the most remarkable history isn’t enough to guarantee a future in show business, and that’s doubly true for animal wranglers in an age where studios would sooner animate whatever they might not be able to tame (it’s worth noting that Gordy, like many of the animals you see in the movies these days, is 100 percent CGI).

It’s only when OJ spots a silver disc shimmering through the sky above his ranch — an eerily magical stretch of air that Crayola might call “Day-for-Night Periwinkle” — that he finds his feet again. If no one wants to shoot real horses anymore, he’ll show the world something that it’s never seen before. Something wild. Something that no one else could ever hope to break. And so begins a UFO story that’s less interested in killing the alien than it is in capturing it on camera, even when the desire to see it might be strong enough to devour a city whole.

The process by which OJ and his more reluctant sister become amateur UFO hunters can be a clumsy one — the Haywoods team up with the tetchy, half-dumb Fry’s Electronics clerk (Brandon Perea) who sells them their surveillance camera, his character dragging weight until Peele finds the right use for him in the third act — but “Nope” does a quietly brilliant job of herding its disparate subplots in the right direction.

Instrumental to that success is the Haywood’s neighbor and business rival Ricky “Jupe” Park (the great Steven Yeun, all smarmy kindness and smothered trauma), a former actor who survived Gordy’s rage as a child only to profit from people’s morbid curiosity about it as an adult. Under his calm smile and cowboy veneer, we get the sense that Jupe is trying to assert some kind of control over the worst thing he was ever forced to watch; that he eagerly recounts the “SNL” sketch about the attack (for example) in the hopes that staring his demons in the face might blur his vision of it, soften its edges, and turn it into something he can live with.

Does that have anything to do with all of the horses Jupe’s been trying to buy lately? Time will tell, but wrangling nightmares into spectacles is dangerous business, especially when people can’t bring themselves to look away.

With great patience and tremendous craft, Peele steers these characters (and a handful of others) from one masterful set piece to the next, all of them flecked with popcorn-spilling jolts but more fundamentally driven by a profound sense of big-screen, body-rattling awe. On some level, “Nope” is Peele’s smallest film so far; almost the entire story takes place on the Haywood ranch and its surrounding areas. At the same time, however, it also feels like his largest. Sometimes literally: Hoyte van Hoytema’s 65mm compositions lend the carnage an intergalactic scale that makes even the film’s most familiar tropes feel bracingly new, and inspire a degree of holy terror that allows the grand finale to alternate between heart-in-your-throat horror and fistpump-worthy “Akira” references as cinematography assumes a hands-on roll in the action (Peele keeps the film’s self-reflexive streak to a low boil, but cranks it up to a delirious high in the dying minutes).

It doesn’t hurt that Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre, or that Kaluuya’s eyes remain some of Hollywood’s most special effects, as “Nope” gets almost as much mileage from their weariness as “Get Out” squeezed from their clarity. It’s through them that “Nope” searches for a new way of seeing, returns the Haywoods to their rightful place in film history, and creates the rare Hollywood spectacle that doesn’t leave us looking for more.

Universal Pictures will release “Nope” in theaters on Friday, July 22.

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Jordan Peele’s Nope, explained

Unpacking the spectacle at the heart of the movie’s mysteries.

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It’s gutsy to start a movie with a verse from Nahum, which is surely one of the Bible’s least-quoted books. But Jordan Peele likes a challenge.

So the text that opens Nope , the director’s follow-up to Us and Get Out , is Nahum 3:6: I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle. Buckle up!

Nope is a bloody, creepy UFO movie, unexpectedly gross in spots, with several different ideas knocking around in its head. Since the relatively straightforward Get Out , Peele’s work has moved away from simple explanation and toward discomfiting vibes, and that’s to its credit.

But that means audiences have to lean in and work harder, and have to be okay with mystery. That helps explain why some viewers may come away dissatisfied. TV and movies over the past several decades have coaxed us to expect explanations and puzzle boxes in our entertainment, and to be annoyed when creators refuse to reveal the trick at the end of the show. But Peele is happy to leave some things to our imaginations.

Which includes his gutsy epigraph. Nahum is one of the “minor” prophets of the Bible (which basically means the book he wrote is short), nestled in between Jonah — the guy who was swallowed up by a giant fish — and Zephaniah, who like Nahum mainly foretold destruction . The target of all three was Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which did indeed fall not long after the prophecies, taking the empire down with it. Just before this verse, Nahum describes Nineveh as a lion’s den, the “city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims,” a place with “galloping horses and jolting chariots,” full of bodies of the dead. Basically, Nineveh arrogantly chews people up and spits them out. So, Nahum says, God will do the same to Nineveh.

Nope is not set in Nineveh, exactly; it’s set in Hollywood. The action takes place in Agua Dulce, about a 40-mile drive north of Hollywood. There, siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) run Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, named for their great-great-great grandfather Alistair E. Haywood, who rode the horse in the first moving picture ever made . They train horses for movies. But following the untimely death of their father Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David), killed in a freak accident in which debris rained down from the sky, they’re running into hard times. Plus, the advent of CGI means the movies just don’t require real horses on set the way they used to.

Alistair Haywood’s character is Peele’s invention, though the film in which he rode a horse, made by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, is real. Actually, there were multiple films; the one that Peele intertwines Nope with involves a horse named Annie G. ridden by an unidentified but definitely Black jockey. History remembers the horse but has lost track of the jockey’s identity , which is sort of Nope ’s point. In one scene, Emerald proudly announces on a movie set that “since the moment pictures could move, we got skin in the game.” But nobody remembers Haywood unless she reminds them.

In any case, the Haywood ranch is just up the road from Jupiter’s Claim, and OJ’s been selling horses to owner Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) to keep the ranch afloat. Jupiter’s Claim is a goofy cartoonish amusement park lightly modeled on a fun-loving town from some old Western — and those in turn, let’s remember, were very lightly modeled on the actual West. Jupe, a former child star, picked up his nickname from his role as “Jupiter” on Kid Sheriff , a movie he starred in following a rather sudden end to a short-lived sitcom, Gordy’s Home . He now sustains a living chasing that fame any way he can: selling access to memorabilia, attracting tourists to Jupiter’s Claim, starring in reality shows with his family, and some … weirder pursuits.

But that’s in keeping with Agua Dulce, because there’s been a lot of weird stuff going on in the six months since Otis died. Electricity randomly browns out and audio slows down at nighttime, and the laws of physics occasionally behave strangely. And there’s something in the sky.

Yes, this is a UFO movie, or a “UAP” movie, since — as local electronics wiz and alien aficionado Angel (Brandon Perea) tells Emerald — the government switched to calling them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena after they “declassified all that alien shit years ago.” Call them what you want: Flying saucers in movies are often metaphors for invasion by unknown forces, or for paranoia that the government is keeping secrets from its people.

Peele knows all this, but with Nope , he isn’t doing pure homage. Instead, he scatters breadcrumbs along the way to his main point. This is partly a film about how frequently Black film history has been pushed out of memory. In the ranch house, you can glimpse posters for the films Duel at Diablo and Buck and the Preacher , the first Westerns that Sidney Poitier starred in and directed, respectively, in 1966 and 1972. Buck and the Preacher , in particular, was groundbreaking for casting Black actors as main characters. Coupled with the Haywood connection — and the fact that it’s still hard, 50 years later, to get a movie made starring Black actors that isn’t about trauma in some way — Nope points to Hollywood’s history of shoving inconvenient histories aside.

But that’s not all that’s going on here. Nope is centrally about how our experiences of reality have been almost entirely colonized by screens and cameras and entertainment’s portrayals of what it calls reality, to the point that we can barely conceive of experiencing reality directly, with honesty and without any kind of manipulation. It’s as if it sprung from the mind of any number of theorists, like Guy Debord, the philosopher who in 1967 wrote a book called Society of the Spectacle . “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail,” Debord wrote, “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

In his treatise, Debord goes on to posit that “the spectacle” — which he describes as sort of an all-consuming blanket of unreality that attracts our gaze and replaces our reality — more or less has colonized modern life. Our social life is not about living, but having.

And that’s all over Nope, from start to finish. Jupe’s offices are lined with posters commemorating TV and film history, from his earliest work all the way to an upcoming family reality show, all designed to keep eyes on him. He’s been courting the flying saucer, whatever it is, since its appearance six months ago, using Haywood’s horses to do so. And while he harbors a painfully traumatic memory of a chimp attack on the set of the short-lived Gordy’s Home , he can’t access it directly when explaining to Emerald and OJ; he recounts a Saturday Night Live sketch about it instead.

Jupe’s development of a “family show” at Jupiter’s Claim is just another harnessing of spectacle — in this case, the flying saucer — to get paying customers to his amusement park. He calls the unknowable creatures he believes are on board the saucer “The Viewers.” They are watching us , he thinks, unable to think of himself outside that paradigm. To be alive is to be watched, he believes. It’s when people stop watching you that you cease to exist.

Watching and being watched is everywhere in Nope . When OJ and Emerald first come to believe there’s a saucer in the sky, they head straight for the electronics store to get surveillance cameras, which Angel installs on their property. Angel, besotted with aliens because of TV (“Ancient Aliens, History Channel — watch that shit,” he tells them), rigs up a remote connection so he can watch at night from the electronics store. It’s like TV, till it’s real. The first night, as OJ dodges the saucer, a nearby coworker in the store, munching chips and hanging out, even breathlessly asks, “What happened to OJ?” As if he’s a character on a show, and not a real guy whose life is in danger.

OJ isn’t much for technology; unlike smartphone-toting Emerald, he still uses a flip phone, a clear sign that he doesn’t want to participate in this spectacle culture. When it comes for him, he knows not to look. He opts out. (Nope.)

But you can’t really opt out of a spectacle culture — it’s around you, and whether or not you want to participate, it tends to suck you in anyhow. When OJ and Emerald realize there’s some kind of a flying saucer in the sky, their first impulse is to film it, to own a representation of it. That’s not without reason, since they’ve grown up knowing that their family’s place in Hollywood history was essentially stolen from them by those more interested in the horse’s name than in Haywood’s. But their urge to get “the impossible shot” is greater than their urge to run away from the danger itself.

Yet it might help to explain why OJ is the first to realize that the saucer isn’t a saucer at all, at least not like the kind they’re used to seeing in the movies. It wasn’t crazy to assume the object in the sky was a ship carrying aliens. Many of the things we believe about the world around us and about our history come from representations of them on screens, not reality. (Debord again.) Our ideas of what war is like, what cities are like, what love is like, how the West was “won” — they all come through movies. They have since the pictures started moving, as Emerald puts it.

And as time has gone on, we’ve grown more hungry for bigger, better representations. The mirror ball that spooks the horse on set is a VFX ball , a key tool for digital video artists in making today’s spectacle-driven CGI blockbusters.

Which is why it matters what we see. But OJ gets it: the saucer is alive, and it isn’t trying to help them or study them or warn them. It just wants to eat them. It’s less saucer than spectacle to gawk at. And it has a screen-shaped rectangle at its heart which, as we see at the start of the movie, contains Muybridge’s film of Haywood riding the horse. But it’s insatiable. It wants blood. The spectacle consumes all.

There are other deliciously unexplained breadcrumbs scattered throughout Nope , which could be clues or references or just delightful red herrings. There’s a tiny reference to Poltergeist when the alien arrives. There’s also a tennis shoe that balances on its heel, for no apparent reason, during Gordy’s on-set rampage; it later shows up in Jupe’s back room of memorabilia. The name of the TMZ reporter who shows up on a motorcycle — with a mirrored helmet, no less — is listed in the film’s credits as “Ryder Muybridge,” which is obviously a reference to the man who shot the film starring Alistair Haywood and who has gone down in history with all the credit. (Emerald is desperate that he not steal their impossible shot.)

In the end, of course, there’s a great irony to Nope , and one of which Peele is undoubtedly aware; he ends the film, after all, with the “impossible shot” being captured as a still by an old-fashioned film camera. (Which is not a guarantee that they’ll be believed — you can fake a photo, right?) Nope is a big, very loud, very effects-driven spectacle. It’s a movie with a thousand references to the past. It’s also a riotously entertaining thrill ride that owes portions of its plot to some of Hollywood’s most successful summer blockbusters, Jaws and Independence Day . It’s part of the culture; it can’t stand outside of it.

But it functions at least a little bit as a warning, or maybe a prophecy, or a call for a reboot, or a reminder to care about what, or who, gets our attention. When midway through the film, the saucer rains guts and blood down on the ranch house, you have to think of Nahum’s words: “I will cast abominable filth upon you.”

A culture built on spectacle can only get more spectacular, coaxing us to always look at it, to never tear ourselves away, to gorge ourselves on it. The impossible trick is to just say nope.

Nope is playing in theaters beginning July 21.

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Jordan Peele subverts expectations (again) with 'Nope'

Aisha Harris

Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in Nope. Universal Studios hide caption

Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in Nope.

When the first trailer for Nope dropped, viewers almost immediately swarmed social media trying to interpret the opaque montage of shots – shots which revealed virtually nothing about the plot of the movie. This is partially of Jordan Peele's own doing, because his first two feature films as a writer-director, Get Out and Us , set up high expectations for twisty, multilayered social commentary by way of popcorn thrills. Even more so it's a product of the current cultural landscape, where seemingly every big movie or TV series is laden with twists and Easter eggs and spoiler-y cameos, lending itself to fervent Reddit threads breaking down the creator's underlying meaning.

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Jordan peele looked into the mirror and saw the evil inside 'us'.

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The horror, the horror: "get out" and the place of race in scary movies.

Peele surely knows by now what audiences anticipate from him and other filmmakers like him, which is probably why – once again – he's managed to subvert our expectations. Nope isn't so much a plot-twisty experience to be meticulously deconstructed as it is a consistently surprising one. It's a journey that's less social commentary-forward than its predecessors, yet still stacked with plenty of meaning to tease out after you've left the theater.

First and foremost, he wants us to be in awe. And on that front, he doesn't disappoint.

The film opens by quoting a Bible verse from the book of Nahum: "I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle," followed by a quiet, eerie scene involving an animal that's best left unsaid for first-time viewers; the better to creep you out in the moment. Eventually, Nope drops us into the world of OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer), a pair of siblings dealing with the loss of their father Otis, Sr. (Keith David) while trying to maintain the family business. Haywood Hollywood Horses is their company, a horse wrangling outfit that's worked with TV and film productions for years and is based in the small California desert valley town of Agua Dulce.

Mysterious events and sightings from above begin to occur on the family's ranch, and the hard-hustling Emerald sees an opportunity to make some extra cash by getting the perfect shot of a UFO to sell online. Soon, she and OJ have tricked their land out with camera gear with the help of Angel (Brandon Perea), a tech salesman and quirky supernatural enthusiast who has a plethora of time on his hands. (His actress girlfriend just broke up with him, much to his dismay.) But the UFO poses more of a threat than they initially realize, and soon the three find themselves on the offensive and enlist the help of an old-school filmmaker – the kind who still shoots on actual film – played by Michael Wincott.

Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!

Not my job: jordan peele gets quizzed on the teletubbies.

True to Peele's sensibilities, Nope seems to be borrowing from a plethora of cinematic references: Spielberg (particularly Jaws and E.T. ), M. Night Shyamalan ( Signs ), and Alien , just to name a few. Kaluuya plays OJ almost like the strong, silent cowboy heroes of Old Hollywood westerns, a man of few words unless the occasion truly calls for it, and the kind of guy who keeps his feelings close to the vest. This contrasts nicely with Palmer's fast-talking, looser Emerald; she's the firecracker in this powder keg, injecting energy, wit, and comedic relief into a character whose ideas on how to keep the family's legacy alive run up against her brother's intentions.

As the movie trots along, the plot is always a couple steps ahead of where the mind may go, and – at least upon first viewing – not all of the threads necessarily hold together if you think about them for too long. (For instance, a storyline involving Steven Yeun as an amusement park owner and former child star is very effective in echoing the movie's themes, but could also have been more developed.) I also suspect that, like Us , this will stir up a lot of debate about what message Peele might be trying to impart to his audiences, though I'd argue there's less there there to debate over in this case. (On the other hand, maybe that in itself is something to ponder.)

This is not to say Nope is slight; with this movie, he's contributing a new entry to the rich history of Black westerns (the Sidney Poitier-directed Buck and the Preacher is visually referenced, for one) and tapping into themes about a cultural obsession with taming nature and profiting off of pageantry. It's also significant to note how Peele playfully speaks to Black audiences and their frequent responses to horror movies through the clever title and OJ and Emerald's actions – like Regina Hall's ever-skeptical Brenda in the Scary Movie franchise, these characters are wary and smart about situations that are obviously ominous. "Nope" isn't just a phrase, it's a way of survival.

But the aims strongly prioritize thrills and mood-setting. Aesthetically, this is his most ambitious feature yet, with intensely crafted action sequences, breathtaking visuals courtesy of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, and a superbly immersive sound design by Johnnie Burn. Peele seems to be having more fun with his audience than ever before as a feature filmmaker, and in turn, it makes for a fun watch.

In an era of sequels, prequels, reboots, and franchises-within-franchises, it's refreshing to see a filmmaker working in this mode, evoking familiarity while keeping viewers on their toes. Nope has only solidified my anticipation for anything and everything Peele does next.

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‘Nope’ Review: Jordan Peele’s UFO Drama Has a Mood of Exciting Unease but an Arbitrary Story

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play horse-ranch siblings who try to photograph a close encounter in a movie that, for all its skillfully ominous atmosphere, begins to fly in all directions.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Jordan Peele ’s “ Nope ” is a tantalizingly creepy mixed bag of a sci-fi thriller. It’s a movie that taps into our fear and awe of UFOs, and for a while it holds us in a shivery spell. It picks the audience up and carries it along, feeding off spectral hints of the otherworldly. Yet watching the movie, you can just about taste the DNA of Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and “Nope” mirrors the trajectory of other films that have been made in the shadow of “Close Encounters,” like M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival.” Here, as in those films, the anticipation works better than the payoff. 

Daniel Kaluuya , an actor so skillful he seems to overhaul his spirit with every role, plays the central character, Otis Haywood Jr., a sweet-souled but recessive and taciturn country fellow who goes by the nickname of OJ. Early on, he reunites with his feisty chatterbox sister, Emerald ( Keke Palmer ), on the California horse ranch the two have inherited from their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), who in one of the film’s first scenes dies during a mysterious shower of inanimate debris. For several generations, the ranch has rented out horses to the entertainment industry, with the Haywoods serving as on-set wranglers and horse whisperers. But OJ is looking to sell the business and cash in.

Before he gets the chance, he walks out of the Haywoods’ beautiful farmhouse, stepping into the bright starlit night to chase a horse that has leapt the fence of its training arena. What he sees and hears in the distance is freaky in the extreme: a crowd, lit by floodlights, that seems to have assembled like some outer-space cult. Before long, the signs grow weirder: a cloud that doesn’t move (and hasn’t for weeks). Wind that funnels down into a small tornado. And, finally, a dark svelte object that glides through the air like nothing of this earth. The film’s title plays, amusingly, off that most casual of contempo buzz phrases ( nope! ), and how it perfectly expresses our incredulity in the face of the otherworldly. 

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Of all the fanciful phenomena that rational people claim not to believe in (ghosts, demons, monsters, the theory that Joe Biden stole the election), UFOs hold a special place. Simply put, there’s a lot of evidence for them. I don’t mean the kind of evidence cited by the folks who think that Ed and Lorraine Warren, of the “Conjuring” films, are paranormal documentarians. I’m talking about the mountains of filmed footage of UFOs, a lot of which is fake but not all of it. Of course, just because a flying object is unidentified doesn’t mean that it came from outer space. Yet the best UFO footage, which is available by the clipload on YouTube, exerts an uncanniness that can’t be explained away. You look at caught-on-the-fly images of gliding spacecraft, or lights dancing in the sky, and think, “Wow, what is that? What if ?” Those thoughts have only been encouraged by recent reports leaked by the U.S. government that acknowledge just how many flying objects there are that even military experts can’t identify, some zipping through the air with a technology no one recognizes.

“Nope” has a seductive mood of unease that makes the film feel, for a while, like something new: the first UFO thriller of the cellphone-ready, I-saw-it-online, how-can-you-not-believe-your-own-eyes? era. This is Peele’s third feature, after the landmark racial-paranoia nightmare “Get Out” and the ambitious but muddled doppelgänger fantasy “Us,” and for a while he draws on his skill at leading us down detours that become hypnotic lost highways. 

In a way, the whole setup is a bait-and-switch, as Peele lures us into the quirky lives of OJ and Emerald, taking note of the fact that their business, Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, has deep roots in racial pride. It seems that the Black jockey who appeared for a few seconds in one of history’s earliest film clips was the great-great-grandfather of Otis Sr. (That’s part of their spiel to potential clients.) Kaluuya, so sly, communicating mostly through his sharp gaze, and Palmer, whose fast-break aggro style acquires more heart as the movie goes on, make the Haywoods adult siblings we feel invested in, and the film introduces a couple of other key characters: Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star who now runs a Wild West theme park called Jupiter’s Claim (that’s where the space-cult show was), and Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), a techie salesman at Fry’s Electronics who helps the Haywoods set up a surveillance system to record the alien spaceship that appears to have settled in over their property.

It’s a flying saucer that resembles a giant undulating sand dollar, and if you had to use one word to describe it that word would be “hungry.” OJ and Emerald decide to photograph it; if they can land the perfect shot and sell it to the right media source (they have Oprah in mind), it could make them rich. But how do you catch a phantom spaceship on film? You call the jaded analog cinematographer Antlers Holst, played by the veteran croaky-voiced hipster actor Michael Wincott.

As they launch the plan, “Nope” itself starts flying off in different directions. It’s part of the film’s design — and, in a way, its racial consciousness — that OJ and Emerald are too mistrustful of mainstream white society to get any authorities involved. So we’re spared the sort of meddlesome-U.S.-government boilerplate plot that weighed down a movie like “Arrival.” Yet “Nope” doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary fashion. There are memorable touches along the way, like the monster image of a praying mantis on a surveillance camera or, as the electricity goes out, the way Peele slows down Corey Hart’s ’80s kitsch classic “Sunglasses at Night” to evoke the dread of a world stopping in its tracks. Yet for all these suspenseful felicities, logic often takes a back seat, which has the effect of lessening our involvement.

The spaceship, for instance, will suck you into its membrane hole if you look right at it…and sometimes if you don’t. The details of the Haywoods’ strategy to film the thing are never fully sketched in. When Emerald dots the property with inflatable tube men, it makes for a grabby image, but the point of these super-fake decoys is barely established. What’s more, the most disturbing scene in the movie — a flashback to Ricky’s ’90s cable sitcom, which turned into an impromptu horror set when the chimp who played the lovable Gordy went on a bloody rampage — turns out to have nothing to do with…anything. When the spaceship finally unfurls its freak flag, it looks like a pirate galleon made out of a giant ripped bedsheet, which is a little spooky and a little innocuous. “Nope,” like “Signs” and “Arrival,” will probably be a major hit, and it confirms the power of the Jordan Peele brand. But it also confirms that making movies with too much chaos and sprawl is threatening to become part of that brand.

Reviewed at AMC Empire, July 19, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 135 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release of a Monkeypaw Productions production. Producers: Jordan Peele, Ian Cooper. Executive producer: Robert Graf.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Jordan Peele. Camera: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Editor: Nicholas Monsour. Music: Michael Abels.
• With: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Keith David, Wrenn Schmidt. 

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Nope, review — audaciously weird spectacle is Jordan Peele’s most supersized film yet

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Danny Leigh

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Jordan Peele does not scare easily. For many directors, being hailed as a saviour of cinema might nudge them towards safety first. Nope. And for proof, see Nope , Peele’s most supersized movie yet. Consider the prologue. Stanley Kubrick opened 2001 with primal apes about to evolve into humans. Peele begins his space odyssey with an enraged chimpanzee in a party hat. But the party is over. The whole scene hums with menace and WTF-ery, staged on the wrecked set of a TV show. Something has clearly gone very awry.

That Peele can riff like this on a cinematic giant is part of why his movies are an event. Another is the splash made by his 2017 triumph Get Out , whose star Daniel Kaluuya returns here as Otis Haywood Jr, a horse wrangler for the entertainment industry. Peele’s debut was a shot in the arm for the movie business, a take-no-prisoners satire of race wrapped in a midnight crowd-pleaser. His second film Us divided opinion (I rated it even higher than Get Out ). But that breakthrough has kept studio hopes pinned to the director. Now in the midsummer box office feeding frenzy, he unveils a blockbuster of aliens among us, a grandly ambitious sci-fi-horror-thriller. All of Hollywood’s favourite things, whatever Hollywood is in 2022.

It is still the client base for Otis and peppy younger sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer). Early on, the pair inherit Haywood’s Hollywood Horses after the sudden death of their father. The business has been in the family since before movies were movies. The anonymous black jockey in the (actual) 19th-century photographs of cine-pioneer Eadweard Muybridge? A (fictional) ancestor.

What is often seen as Peele’s blessing-and-curse is already evident: the sheer abundance of his storytelling. Five minutes in, real film history has been spliced into the imaginary, loaded with chewable stuff about America and the moving image. Two adult children must confront life without a parent. And don’t think we’ve forgotten the chimp.

Answers take shape on the ranch. A spoiler warning is due. In fact, the whole movie is best seen without knowing anything in advance. If you’re still reading, a clue lurks high above the Haywoods’ California homestead: a lone, unmoving cloud. But in a film tied up with everything we spend time staring at — social media, virtual reality — who watches clouds? Of course, that changes when horses start to vanish. And horses are just the beginning.

This being the 21st century, Otis and Emerald’s first response is neither to befriend the visitors nor go to war as the world has before. Instead, they plan to film them — and monetise the footage. Peele has his own plot in mind. As mayhem breaks out, the back catalogue of American movies is knowingly quoted. Nope is nothing if not its own film, but it also takes the form of bloody horror. The shadow of a million Westerns falls across it too. (Steven Yeun co-stars, running an Old West theme park.) And most of all there is Jaws : Spielberg evoked in sly deadpan and gliding death.

But Peele is more than a recycler. At the heart of Nope is a whole pop culture of his own invention, one of fictitious 1990s sitcoms and their second lives on YouTube. The coup isn’t just the fun involved, but how complex themes of viewership and consumption brilliantly fuel a big-screen fairground ride.

Could the focus be tighter? Sometimes. But better a busy head than an empty one. Would an old-school producer hurry Peele along? Probably. And how many ideas would be lost in haste — how much of some of the most audaciously weird spectacle to ever see the inside of a multiplex? No, flaws and all, the beauty of Nope is being two things at once. Art and cheap thrills, popcorn and provocation, blockbuster and brainfood: the old, mixed-up formula that is still cinema’s secret weapon.

In UK cinemas from August 12 and in US cinemas now

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• <i>Nope</i> Is a Resplendent Spectacle Packed With Way Too Many Ideas

Nope Is a Resplendent Spectacle Packed With Way Too Many Ideas

T he best part of writer-director Jordan Peele ’s atmospheric science-fiction extravaganza Nope is the beginning, an introduction—after a brief prologue—to a world unlike any most of us have ever seen, and a character rich with possibility. In that early sequence, we meet Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ Haywood, part of a family who has run a working ranch for generations. We’ll later learn that the business, Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, provides beautiful, well-trained horses for movies and television, and for years it’s been a lucrative operation for OJ’s father, Otis (Keith David), as it was for his father and grandfather before him. But very early in the film, as Otis sits astride a white steed named Ghost, disaster strikes. Just before it does, OJ notes the gathering of some strange clouds, and he hears a weird howling in the sky—given Peele’s penchant for biblical references and imagery, it could be the sound of apocalyptic horses freed from their riders and out for vengeance.

The next thing OJ knows, his father has been struck by an invisible something. A minute ago Otis had been crowing over how well the business had been doing, and now he’s slumped in the saddle. OJ rushes him to the hospital, to no avail. Later he stares in disbelief at the small projectile that killed, or helped kill, his father, cleaned up and housed in a baggie. This scene shows, beautifully, how a life can change in a minute, and sets up a challenge rich with dramatic possibilities: OJ now has to take the reins of a successful family business—a Black-owned one at that, with a reputation to uphold—and as Kaluuya plays him, dutiful and sensitive but a bit reticent about facing the world, we can see he’s not sure he’s up to the task.

Nope could have been all about that, or about that but also layered with elements of sci-fi horror. But the early promise of Nope doesn’t lead where you expect. Instead, it leads to dozens of unexpected places, which is oddly less gratifying. What OJ sees in the sky, and what it wants with humans, becomes a little clearer with each passing scene. There are other players in this drama: OJ’s outgoing and magnetic sister Emerald ( Keke Palmer ), is better at facing the public than he is, but she wants nothing to do with the business. (OJ’s work demands that he know how to handle animals and deal with the human egos of show business, and it’s the latter that throws him.)

Ricky “Jupe” Park ( Steven Yeun ) is a former child star who runs a schlocky Old-West tourist attraction near the Haywood ranch, but who has designs on an even bigger enterprise. He’s also scarred, it appears, from a childhood run-in with a murderous chimpanzee, a story Peele hints at in Nope ’s prologue and fleshes out later in a terrifying flashback. The other characters hovering around the vast, fringey margins of Nope include the employee of a local Best Buy-type store, Angel (Brandon Perea), and a cocky weirdo cinematographer with the assertively eccentric name Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott). At one point we’re treated to some grainy footage he’s obsessed with, which appears to show a boa constrictor getting ready to devour a tiger. This is the movie’s way of proving he’s a man of sick tastes, but it’s also an image we can’t unsee.

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And then there’s the mysterious thing in the sky that no one is supposed to talk about until after they’ve seen the movie. It’s a thing with a hole. There are certain things it doesn’t like. It follows no rules but its own, until Otis learns that maybe it will follow some rules, and how much you think those rules make sense—even in the highly subjective world of science fiction—will dictate how much pleasure you get out of Nope.

Because Nope , enjoyable as a spectacle but conceptually barely thought through, is all over the place. Peele can’t take just one or two interesting ideas and follow their trail of complexity. He likes to layer ideas into lofty multitextured quilts—the problem is that his most compelling perceptions are often dropped only to be obscured by murkier ones. He has an eye for dazzling visuals, but it seems he comes up with the visuals first and tries to hook ideas to them later. In this case, he decides those inflatable tube dancers you see outside used-car lots might be cool to use somehow, but their effectiveness, visually or in terms of moving the plot forward, is debatable.

Contrary to popular opinion, horror movies don’t necessarily have to be about anything: we’ve all read enough treatises on how 1950s horror films were really all about fear of the Communist threat to last a lifetime. Sometimes great horror films are about nothing more than our own shadowy inner lives, playing on fears that seem silly in the daylight but become much more overwhelming at night. Peele’s movies don’t have to be about anything—it could be enough that their imagery is often haunting, and inventive, by itself. One thing’s for sure: he’s comfortable with grand orchestrations, and he enjoys filling the expanse of a movie screen. There are plenty of gorgeous images in Nope, including one that Peele makes us wait for: the sight of Kaluuya, a regal actor, on the back of a horse, a glorious Elmer Bernstein-inflected score swirling around him, as sizzling and dramatic as a setting desert sun. Peele loves movies, all sorts of movies. It seems he loves making movies, too.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

But in Nope —as in his last feature, the otherworldly horror film Us —he makes us believe he’s working up to some complex and powerful thesis only to switch gears every 20 minutes or so and jerk us in another direction. And to leave us, in the end, wondering what it all means. The wondering is supposed to be the point. Peele, it seems, is one of those “It means what you think it means” filmmakers, which delights some audiences but comes off as a copout for viewers who want to know what a filmmaker is thinking, because ostensibly those thoughts are more interesting than anything we could come up with on our own. Peele’s best film, his debut Get Out , worked both as a twisty horror fantasy and as a contemplation of whether we can ever be a post-racial society. (The grim answer, at least for now, is no.) And elements of his 2019 Us were pure genius: who else would think of using sunlight-deprived semi-zombies as a metaphorical element in a parable about class complacency?

But Peele’s ideas and aims became more scattershot as that film wore on, and the same is true of Nope. Maybe the point of Nope —or one of its points—is that it’s folly to believe we can control nature, especially the nature of other galaxies. It also appears to be a comment on our modern hunger for increasingly extravagant stimulation, online or elsewhere. Or maybe the main point is just to walk out thinking “Wow!” But if you’re left un-wowed, you’re not alone. Nope means what you think it means, but there’s no shame in wishing it could mean just a little more.

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