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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

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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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Nope Review

Peeling back the american dream..

Nope hits theaters on July 22, 2022.

Equal parts comedic knee-slapper and white-knuckle thriller, Jordan Peele’s Nope is a farcical love letter to Hollywood, and to the American dream. It is, at once, a no-frills version of exactly what its trailers are selling — a film about objects falling from the sky, and characters catching glimpses of something sinister in the clouds — and yet, it’s entirely unlike its straightforward marketing, which provides hints of plot, but skillfully disguises its tone. It’s wonderfully spoiler-proof (though you won’t find major details here that haven’t already been revealed), in part because it’s completely unlike Peele’s previous work, both thematically, and in the evolution of his craft.

Nope follows Hollywood horse-wranglers Otis “OJ” Haywood Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald, or “Em” (Keke Palmer), who, after the violent death of their father Otis Sr. (Keith David) under mysterious circumstances, find contrasting ways to move forward. For OJ, who witnessed Otis Sr.’s death up close, it’s a matter of silently and diligently keeping the business afloat. For the more outgoing Em, it’s about leaving their ranch behind and marketing her various talents to anyone who’ll listen — including OJ’s cowboy hat-sporting business partner Ricky Park, aka “Jupe” (Steven Yeun), an actor-turned-entrepreneur who runs a Western-themed carnival. Though, as a former child star, he has some (highly publicized) traumas of his own.

Trauma is, perhaps, the one thing Nope has in common with Peele’s blazing race-horror debut, Get Out (in which Kaluuya’s character, Chris, is inhibited by his mother’s death), and with his class-thriller follow up Us (which reveals both the physical and emotional scars of its “tethered” doppelgangers), but this time around, the theme is at once more central and more satirical. Compared to Peele’s other work, Nope has a much deeper reading of the ways OJ, Em, and Jupe carry their burdens — often told through lingering, piercing close ups of each actor’s nuanced performance — and yet, the way their suffering factors into the story is shockingly cavalier (though not without reason).

As much as Nope is about characters threatened by what could be a flying saucer, it’s also about what drives their responses to events like mysterious power failures, and an assortment of mundane objects raining down from above. Whether or not they’re in it to save the world, or even to survive, what they ultimately want is to capture the spectacle of this UFO, repackage it, and sell it for a fortune, as middlemen in a long lineage of entertainment. Which, of course, is not to suggest that Peele takes a casual approach to the material — it’s one of the most genuinely edge-of-your-seat summer movies in quite some time — but it also can’t help but read like a introspection of Peele’s own hand in modern Hollywood, and its Black Horror resurgence.

What's the best horror movie of 2022 so far?

For one thing, Peele has the gall to kick things off with a Bible verse ( Nahum 3:6 ) that immediately invites subtextual scrutiny, but turns out to be hysterically, grossly literal, before deploying the image of George Washington on a $1 coin in a particularly grisly context. What exactly is Peele saying here? Knowledge of his previous films might imply an invocation of genocide or slavery, America’s original sins , and while those readings are seldom far from the movie’s lips, it’s the melding of American history with monetary value — the most superficial reading of them all — that ends up the most important. Get Out and Us have already been echoed and imitated poorly, even in their short lives ( Antebellum , Cracka , Karen , Them ; the list goes on), so it stands to reason that Peele might, on some level, question what his images even mean, and what his place might be within cinematic history.

That history is front and center from the moment we meet Em and OJ, who introduce themselves as movie royalty. Some of the very first moving images, captured by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878, were of a Black jockey riding a horse , and while Muybridge is world renowned, and even the horse’s name is well-documented (Annie G), the rider remains anonymous to this day. Through fantasy, Peele seemingly course-corrects this deep-seated erasure of Blackness in Hollywood history: the Haywood siblings claim to be the descendants of this jockey, a Bahamian man, and their continued horse-training in an age of CGI is, in part, a means to keep the jockey’s and their father’s legacies alive — or at least, that’s how they sell it. The text gives us no reason to doubt their claims (it’s a background detail for the most part), and they themselves seem to believe it. But the more the film unfolds, the more the question of its veracity seems to creep in through the corners of the frame, given what Nope ends up being about.

On one hand, it’s an ode to filmmaking, and to the power of moving pictures. Em and OJ know people won’t believe what they’ve seen in the sky unless they capture convincing images, for which they enlist the help of both mousey tech retail cashier Angel (Brandon Perea), who helps them set up security cameras, and raspy-voiced documentarian Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), who’s introduced working on a Steenbeck editing machine , and who speaks in riddles and platitudes, but is obsessively dedicated to capturing the perfect shot on celluloid. Nope’s affinity for analog technology is something cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema ( Interstellar ) pours into every IMAX frame, imbuing it with a sense of warmth, texture, and tactility. However, this affinity is something the film also turns its lens back towards, in moments that ride a fine line between parody and introspection (at one point, it seems as if the fate of the world rests on Holst’s ability to hand-crank an enormous IMAX camera, a bizarre analog fantasy that no celluloid aficionado actually has, which makes it all the more uproarious). It seems to ask: what, or who, is this love for cinema, and of crafting images, actually in service of?

Because, on the other hand, Nope is about the carny spirit of American myths, and the American dream. And what’s more American than Hollywood?

Nope: Character Posters for Jordan Peele's New Horror Movie

Given the siblings’ industry involvement, Nope abounds with logos and terminology that play as in-jokes about movie making — not to mention, as rallying cries when our protagonists concoct increasingly detailed plans to capture the UFO on film. However, their grand scheme also involves the numerous tube men seen in the marketing (or sky dancers, or Tall Boys), an ostentatious hallmark of car salesmanship. At every turn, even their most sincere efforts have slimy undertones, albeit with deeply relatable motives. Will warning the world of this threat have an altruistic outcome? Sure. Will it also make them rich and famous? Absolutely. They’re heroes with a huckster spirit, as much cowboys as they are climbers. Even the way Jupe retells his real-life horrors comes disguised in layers of pop culture commodification (the nature of his story is best discovered for yourself, but let’s just say Terry Notary is in the opening credits for a reason; if you know, you know).

And yet, stylistically, Nope is hardly a dressing down of studio filmmaking. If anything, it’s a testament to Peele’s craftsmanship, that he can both project an uneasiness (if not an all-out disdain) for the blockbuster as a concept — images, stories and spectacles as a money-first endeavor — while also making one of the most purely entertaining pieces of popcorn cinema this year. It’s a film that has its cake, eats it too, and absolutely deserves to, ramping up the tension with every subsequent scene (thanks in no small part to Michael Abels' unsettling score).

Peele’s sounds and silences (courtesy of designer Johnnie Burn) are where most of his chills are conjured, thanks to a rumbling aural landscape that demands a big-screen experience. And while he deploys horror’s traditional tools, like dark corners and jagged music, for most of his fake-out scares, he trades in the cinematic language of the Western for his most genuinely unnerving moments. Wide open spaces feel menacing, because of how and where he stages his actors. Mountains, rather than containing memories, hide something monstrous, and the wistful nostalgia of on-screen galloping is something he immediately robs of its beauty and power, given the UFO’s seeming affinity for beaming horses into its hull (the design of this apparent saucer is, initially, shocking in its simplicity, but by the end, you may as well call it “Biblically accurate”).

At times, Nope is a Spielbergian nightmare, not only for the occasional sci-fi conceptions that harken back to The Beard’s work, but because of the way Peele captures people at their most awestruck — albeit in a wackadoo context, where it becomes clear just how tongue-in-cheek his take on an alien invasion movie really is. He also has a nod towards E.T. that ends up hilariously shocking, during a chilling and ingeniously staged Jupe flashback that seems poised to tie into the film’s conspiracy musings, but turns out to be both hollow in its plotting, yet absolutely foundational from a character standpoint.

Few in mainstream Hollywood are working on Peele’s level from a purely craft perspective, the biggest testament to which is the way he still manages to slow down amidst the satirical bombast and connect you to his characters, often through the way he directs and captures performance. Palmer, who’s shouldered with balancing dire stakes and a casual façade, turns Em into a rich and multifaceted career-hopper through body language alone, vaping and hitting on women as a shield for whatever emotions she refuses to face (in a climactic moment, when she eventually stares down her lingering fears of loss, the result is cinematic gold). Yeun, one of America’s underrated gems, has rarely been more hauntingly enrapturing, especially with so little screen time. And Kaluuya, Peele’s not-so-secret weapon in Get Out, returns once more to guide us on an entire rendezvous using reaction shots alone. It’s his lingua franca this time, given OJ’s commitment to steering silently out of everyone’s way, muttering more than he projects, and looking steadfastly ahead when most horror characters would be peeking over their shoulder (it’s the epitome of an “acting is reacting” performance, given how inward Kaluuya turns).

What makes Nope work as both satire and sincere blockbuster is how downright persuasive it is, emotionally and aesthetically. It makes you cheer not for a rousing stand against oblivion, but for the gaudy pursuit of money and stardom, even at the cost of your own traumas. Beyond a point, the eye in the sky may as well be a hovering manifestation of lifelong pain, but rather than defeating it, Peele’s characters do what most in the modern American gig economy have been conditioned to with their every trait and experience. They find a way to monetize it, and the result is a f***ing rollercoaster.

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A hilariously bleak vision of the American dream, Jordan Peele’s Nope is a farcical love letter to Hollywood filmmaking. A sci-fi-horror-comedy that builds cinematic myths before casually knocking them over, it’s one of the most effective and purely entertaining summer blockbusters in years, from a studio director at the peak of his craft.

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The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery. The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery. The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.

• Jordan Peele
• Daniel Kaluuya
• Keke Palmer
• Brandon Perea
• 2.3K User reviews
• 400 Critic reviews
• 77 Metascore
• 43 wins & 172 nominations

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• Otis Haywood Sr.

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• Trivia The very early clip of a jockey riding a horse, which Emerald claims features her and OJ's ancestor, is a real 1878 animated series of photographs, one of the first moving images ever, which has come to be called Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (1878) . Sallie Gardner is the name of the horse; the two jockeys were listed as being named "C. Marvin" and "G. Domm." Neither of their identities are known, though they very well could have been black as Emerald claims. In those days many jockeys were black, such as thirteen of the fifteen jockeys racing at the first Kentucky Derby in 1875.
• Goofs While it is true that avoiding eye contact will sometimes prevent animals from attacking, that does not apply to predators hunting their prey.

Antlers Holst : This dream you're chasing, where you end up at the top of the mountain, all eyes on you... it's the dream you never wake up from.

• Crazy credits At the very end of the credits, a cartoony image/advertisement appears: "Come ride through Jupiter's Claim, as seen in Nope, at Universal Studios Hollywood, only on the World-Famous Studio Tour."
• Connections Featured in Super Bowl LVI (2022)
• Soundtracks La Vie c'est Chouette Music by François d'Aime Lyrics by Pierre Billon Performed by Jodie Foster Courtesy of Cinemag Bodard By arrangement with Editions Montparnasse

User reviews 2.3K

• rvscript-64946
• Aug 8, 2022
• How long is Nope? Powered by Alexa
• July 22, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
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• Firestone Ranch, Agua Dulce, California, USA (Haywood Ranch)
• Universal Pictures
• Monkeypaw Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $68,000,000 (estimated)
• $123,277,080
• $44,366,910
• Jul 24, 2022
• $171,235,592

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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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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• <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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‘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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‘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. 

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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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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Jordan Peele Invades the Western With ‘Nope,’ a Thrilling Salute to Spectacle

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Early in Nope , Jordan Peele ’s thrilling new horror movie, a woman named Emerald Haywood ( Keke Palmer ) tells a story. She and her brother OJ ( Daniel Kaluuya ) are horse handlers and ranch owners by trade, who parlay their animal wrangling skills on TV and film shoots, which is where we meet them today. But the ranch is a family business, passed down to them by their father, the late Otis Haywood (Keith David), and by his father before him. Go back far enough in their family line and you’ll meet the man Emerald tells us about in her story: the Black jockey captured in Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 photographs of a galloping horse, which, strung to together, became one of the earliest known examples of stop-motion photography — essentially, of movies. We know the name of the horse: Sallie Gardner. We know the name of the owner of the horse: Leland Stanford. What we don’t know is the name of the man astride the horse. This is the story Emerald tells us — before telling us about her side hustles and where we can find her on social media. A girl’s gotta eat. What’s any of this got to do with aliens? In Peele’s movie, everything. Nope is in large part a movie about what cannot be tamed, and spectacle — our dire, damning hunger for it — is at the top of that list. (Aliens — animals, broadly — make for a very close second.) The point of opening a movie like this with a reminder about the birth of movies isn’t just to school us on where Black people fit into that history, though that’s obviously very much to the point; even the set decor of Nope underscores the notion, down to a poster in the Haywoods’ ranch for the classic, too-little-known Black western Buck and the Preacher — a reminder that the history of movies is still in need of all kinds of intervention. 

But Peele, a director who’s made a name for himself by infusing horror with healthy spoonfuls of Black common sense and a love of movies, has even more ideas up his sleeve. A lesson of Muybridge’s work was that the camera, stopping time, could see things that the human eye could not. Images are evidence. You want proof of how a horse gallops, of the instant when none of its hooves are touching the ground? Only a photo can convince you. You want proof of UFOs? You want the first stakes in that evidence before it’s ripped out of your hands, destined to become the property of a curious, shameless, hungry public? Well, you better hope those aliens are in your backyard — which, as it turns out for Emerald and OJ, they are.

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Maybe the siblings should consider themselves lucky. The day that we see them on a movie set with one of their horses, named Lucky, is the same day that the former child star Ricky Park (Steven Yeun) offers to buy Lucky — in fact, to buy their entire, family-owned ranch — off of their hands. When that day becomes night, the Haywoods learn why. There’s something in the sky: something making their horses go wild and disappear into the night. If you’ve seen horror movies, you know the signs. A cloud that doesn’t move by day. Brown-outs and strange noises at night. They install video cameras around their remote, lonely property, tucked away in the northern California hills, and on the roof of their house. But the suspense is not in the question of why. Emerald asks her brother early on if he thinks there’s a spaceship hovering over their front yard. All he has to do is nod yep .

Nope is not the kind of movie to obscure what it’s “about” — that’s one of the most satisfying things about it. It’s a little like the M. Night Shyamalan classic Signs in that way. That movie knew that we know the signs. It doesn’t build toward a climactic reveal of the UFOs at its center: It reveals them halfway through, in — what else? — video footage taken from on the ground, not unlike the kind that the Haywoods soon want to create. The pleasure of Shyamalan’s movie isn’t in seeing where the signs lead, which is toward the inevitable, but rather in watching its characters try to make sense of those signs, try to integrate what they’re seeing into their understanding of the world, to the point of these mysteries inspiring a crisis of faith. 

Nope is similar, only it’s about the crisis of looking. What do you do when you hear tell of some awful, incredible, little-known event — a long-ago murder or freak accident, the kind of deep cut that’s only barely persisted in the cultural memory? Many of us cannot help but look it up. What’s the first thing you do when some foreign object in the sky flits over your head, just out of sight? You look up. 

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Peele’s ingenious idea is to use that instinct against us. It’s more than a matter of unidentified flying objects. It’s a matter of lore, of violence — of horror, of course. Peele has rightly been noticed for his profusion of movie references, his almost scholarly, but in no way didactic or merely referential, skill at reminding us of the bedrocks of the genre. Nope is another masterclass in this trend in his work — just look at his approach to the mere idea of the UFO. The flying saucer myth is alive and well in this movie. But it wouldn’t be Peele if that trope went unrevised. 

Peele’s career as a director has been overly defined by the term “social thriller.” Less remarked-upon, but equally important, is his unabashed investment in symbolism, the kind of high-concept thinking that can push a movie along the axis of its ideas, distinct from its emotional logic or its genre satisfaction. At its best, as in Get Out, Peele merges that impulse with his well-honed knowledge of tropes and his incredible sense of humor to create something as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, a movie that can end with a classic, villainous infodump without feeling overwhelmed and deflated by explanation. Us , his solid second thriller, falls prey to the latter: the concept and action were almost at odds with each other, resulting in a movie with too many symbols and too strong of a need to talk us through them, whereas its action was already doing enough. 

Nope is like the cosmically perfect stepchild of the two. Peele brings the concept and the beautifully achieved terror together — including a sequence halfway through the movie, beginning when a live show goes wrong and ending with a sickening twist on a house of horrors. It’s segment of the movie that uses every resource available to threaten the senses, from the clashing thuds of heavy rain to one of the most eerie examples of a movie scream that I think I’ve heard. This is a movie that knows the power of images. It has learned, from the greats of the genre, that what we fear most is what can’t be seen, what’s merely implied. All the camera has to do is trace an arc across the sky and you’ll believe something is there. (Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who shot Dunkirk — an IMAX movie, like this one — was a perfect choice for this project, able to carve daring, evocative shapes onto the screen through what feel like the simplest means.)

None of it would work without people. Palmer and Kaluuya could not be better. Palmer is down in every way, as stylish and unflappable as Samuel L. Jackson or Jada Pinkett Smith, with a taste for stoner mayhem and, when the movie calls for it, action-movie know-how. She’s who you’d want to be in a movie like this. But you’re not Keke Palmer — sorry. She makes for a fun pair with Brandon Perea, who plays a tech-store clerk in name but is really this movie’s version of a video-store clerk: in on it, knowledgeable, reluctantly down, and ultimately in over his head. 

Kaluuya, meanwhile, offers us something else. His OJ is a man of few words who seems sterner than he is, though not out of shyness. It takes a while to realize the archetype he’s drawing from here, one that belongs to another genre — the genre that the character Antlers Holst, played by Michael Wincott, with his Eastwood growl, ought to remind you of. 

Nope may be a horror movie in which the most damning thing you can do is to look — but the key to the movie’s conceit is in the irony in wanting to be seen: in which the Black descendants of a man whose name has been lost to movie history find themselves eager to be handed the reins of their own story and given a chance to tell it themselves, for once. One of the terms that Emerald uses in describing her great ancestor, that Black jockey atop Leland Stanford’s horse, is “action hero.” She claims him as one of the first. And because of the horse, she goes further: He’s a Western star. Midway through, Nope dials back on the heightened frights of its horror to become something else. It becomes a story of invasion — not just of the extraterrestrial kind, but of the land-born, territorially offensive kind. It becomes a movie about protecting the homestead from the most invasive species of all: other people. It becomes a Western. 

What that means for Nope should be left to the movie to reveal. But it’s not the kind of thing that can be reduced to a plot point. It’s why, as you watch, that alien life form in the sky may start to resemble something a little familiar, a movie symbol born of these same landscapes, a totem of movie heroism. Then, like the movie itself, it becomes something else: an undulating, mocking paean to spectacle. You can’t help but look. But here, looks kill. 

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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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“Nope” Is One of the Great Movies About Moviemaking

By Richard Brody

The essence of the cinema is the symbol—the filming of action that stands for something else, that gets its identity from what’s offscreen. There’s plenty of action in Jordan Peele’s new film, “ Nope ,” and it’s imaginative and exciting if viewed purely as the genre mashup that it is—a science-fiction movie that’s also a modern-day Western. But even that premise bears an enormous, intrinsic symbolic power, one that was already apparent in a much slighter precursor, Jon Favreau’s 2011 film, “ Cowboys & Aliens .” Like “Nope,” Favreau’s film involves the arrival of creatures from outer space in the American West; there, it was already apparent that what the genres share is the unwelcome arrival of outsiders from afar (aliens are to Earth as white people are to this continent). Peele takes the concept many ingenious steps further.

“Nope” is a phantasmagorical story of Black people in the American West, the unwelcome among the unwelcome, and it’s set in the present-day West, namely, Hollywood and the Hollywood-proximate, the very heart of Wild West mythology. “Nope” is one of the great movies about moviemaking, about the moral and spiritual implications of cinematic representation itself—especially the representation of people at the center of American society who are treated as its outsiders. It is an exploitation film—which is to say, a film about exploitation and the cinematic history of exploitation as the medium’s very essence.

Peele’s film is set mainly on a horse farm in California, Haywood Hollywood Horses, that provides the animals as needed for movies and TV shows and commercials. Its owner, Otis Haywood, Sr. (Keith David), dies mysteriously after being hit by a bullet-like piece of space debris that showers the property. The farm is taken over by his two children, Otis, Jr., called O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya), and Emerald (Keke Palmer). Neither of the heirs, though, is entirely cut out to fill Otis’s shoes. O.J., who loves the horses and works devotedly with them, is something of an introvert; he isn’t the communicator—the on-set presence—that his father was. Emerald, who is very much a communicator, is an aspiring filmmaker and actor for whom the horses are just a job, and not a very pleasant one. To address the farm’s financial troubles, they sell horses to a nearby Western theme park. But, when the source of the space debris—a monstrous U.F.O. that sucks humans and horses into its maw and eats them—makes its appearance, O.J. and Emerald are forced to fight it. They’re also inspired, for the purpose of saving the farm financially, to film it, in the hope of selling the first authentic footage of a U.F.O.

I’m being especially chary of spoilers in discussing “Nope”; I greatly enjoyed the discovery of the plot’s daring and inventive twists and turns, along with the discerning and speculative ideas that they bring to light. By remarkable design, the movie is as full of action as it is light on character psychology. There’s no special reason why O.J. is taciturn or Emerald is ebullient, or why they’re able to marshal the inner resources for mortal combat with invaders from outer space. “Nope” offers the characters little backstory—at least, not of the usual sort. Rather, Peele pushes even further with a theme that he launched in “ Get Out ” and “ Us ”: the recognition of history—especially its hidden or suppressed aspects—as backstory. With “Nope,” Peele looks specifically to the history of the cinema and its intersection with the experience of Black Americans to create a backstory that virtually imbues every frame of the movie.

For the Haywoods, the crucial backstory goes to the birth of the cinema: the real-life “moving images,” created by Eadweard Muybridge in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, that are often considered the primordial movies. Muybridge was commissioned to study the movement of a galloping horse; the name of the Black jockey he photographed riding one of those horses went unrecorded. In “Nope,” Peele creates a fictitious identity for the rider—Alistair Haywood, the family’s forebear. Emerald tells the crew on a TV commercial, who are relying on one of their horses, that, when it comes to movies, the Haywoods have “skin in the game.” Acknowledging and extending cinema’s legacy while also redressing its omissions and misrepresentations of history is the premise of “Nope”: the responsibility, the guilt, the danger, the ethical compromise of the cinematic gaze.

The film-centric symbolism of “Nope” gives rise to the film’s distinctive, surprising sense of texture. “Get Out” and “Us” are films of a thick cinematic impasto, crowded with characters and tangled with action. “Nope,” made on a much higher budget, is a sort-of blockbuster—but an inside-out blockbuster. If the first two films are oil paintings, “Nope” is a watercolor of the kind that leaves patches of the underlying paper untinted. It’s set in wide-open Western spaces, and what fills their emptiness is power: political, historical, physical, psychological.

The movie is also filled with images—imagined ones, and also real ones, a visual overlay of myth and lore that fills the Western landscape with the history of the cinema. What embodies the invisible lines of power is the gaze, of the eye and of the camera alike. Peele has been, from the start of his career, one of the great directors of point-of-view shots, of the drama and the psychology of vision, and he pursues the same idea to radical extremes in “Nope.” Point-of-view shots are at the center of the drama; again, avoiding spoilers, the spark of the drama turns out to be, in effect, eye contact—the connection of the seer and the seen (including when they’re one and the same, in reflections). Alongside the intrusive intimacy of the naked eye, Peele makes explicit the inherently predatory aspect of the photographic image—the taking of life, so to speak—and the responsibility that image-making imposes on the maker.

There’s another bit of backstory that puts the filmmaker’s responsibility front and center. The movie begins with a scene in a TV studio, where an ostensibly trained chimpanzee performing with human actors on a sitcom runs amok. (This subplot reminds me of the horrific accident on the set of “ Twilight Zone: The Movie ,” in 1982.) A survivor of the chimp’s attack, which took place in 1996, is an Asian American child actor (Jacob Kim) who now, as an adult (played by Steven Yeun), is the owner of Jupiter’s Claim, the Western theme park to which O.J. has been selling horses. The jovial owner, called Jupe, has also had some contact with the U.F.O. and is also trying to profit from it, indifferent to the risks involved. Jupe’s space-horse show (something of a mysterious, invitation-only event) makes uncannily clear the predatory connection between viewers and, um, consumers.

Peele is seriously playful with the technology of movies in ways that recall Martin Scorsese’s “ Hugo .” The action of “Nope” pivots on the power and the nature of movie technology—the contrast of digital and optical images—and the creative rediscovery of bygone methods, as reflected in its very cast of characters, which includes a young electronic-surveillance nerd and U.F.O. buff (Brandon Perea) and a grizzled cinematographer (Michael Wincott). The TV commercial for which the Haywoods rent a horse is being shot in a studio, in front of a green screen (another empty visual space shot through with power), where a melancholy horse is standing still, stripped of its majestic energy, reduced to a mere digital emblem of itself, ridden by no one but manipulated by a desk jockey with no onscreen identity at all. Peele presents the C.G.I. on which “Nope” itself depends as a dubious temptation and a form of dangerous power.

Yet the crucial bit of backstory remains unexpressed: the question of why, of all the horse farms in California, the space creatures chose to target the one that’s Black-owned. The answer to the question is one that both demands expression and faces a silencing on a daily, institutional basis. The movie opens with a Biblical quote: a scourging prophecy, from the book of Nahum. In transferring the politics of “Nope” to the intergalactic level—a sardonic vision of the universality of racism—Peele also transfers them to an overarching, spiritual, metaphysical one. He offers a scathing, exuberant vision of redemption. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Western theme park Jupiter’s Claim. It also incorrectly described the space debris that killed Otis Haywood, Sr.

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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.

Movie Interviews

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

Code Switch

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.

• Keke Palmer
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