If you gave Jordan Peele a list of random cultural ingredients—some songs, a few television shows, a film genre or two, a variety of actors—chances are he could concoct a smart, funny, thrilling filmgoing experience out of the randomness. Peele makes pop-culture smoothie movies that are nutritious and delicious.
His debut as a writer-director, 2017’s Get Out, did this on a relatively modest scale. With 2019’s Us, the canvas impressively expanded. And now, with Nope, he fashions a verse of Old Testament scripture, a fictional 1990s television sitcom, a taciturn California cowboy, the 1958 novelty song “The Purple People Eater,” and many, many other pop-culture artifacts into a chilling, chuckling science-fiction Western. (Those of you who just experienced a shiver of Cowboys & Aliens PTSD, have no fear. You’re in better hands here.)
Daniel Kaluuya, Peele’s Get Out star, returns as OJ Haywood, who along with his father (Keith David) and sister (Keke Palmer) run a California ranch where the horses are trained to work in nearby Hollywood. As Palmer’s Em tells a commercial crew early on, the Haywoods are descendents of the Black rider atop the horse featured in Edward Muybridge’s 1878 photography experiment, considered the first motion picture ever made. Em puts it this way: “Since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game.”
The rules of the game slowly change (more slowly than in Get Out and Us) as Nope proceeds. One day, the howling wind in the sky above the ranch seems to carry the sound of terrified screams, spooking the horses. Later, during the night, strange lights emit from the Western-themed tourist trap on the other side of the valley, run by the former child star of the aforementioned sitcom (Steven Yeun)—a sitcom, we learn in flashbacks, that co-starred a chimpanzee. What is going on? Peele knows, down to every corner of every frame.
I’ll save spoilers for later, but can safely praise some of the movie’s attributes without them. Shot by Hoyte Van Hoytema (Interstellar, Dunkirk, Ad Astra), Nope’s night skies throb with menace, with Kaluuya’s bright eyes popping amidst the darkness. Peele’s knack for blocking and framing straddles the line between suspense and amusement, especially during a red-herring scene in which OJ investigates the wonky lights in the ranch’s training facility. As the set pieces grow in scale and import, Nope—like Peele’s other films—has you giggling even as you suck in your breath. There’s sly humor in every sequence, including the climactic use of those willowy inflatable figures outside used-car lots.
While no one delivers anything like the virtuosic double performance Lupita Nyong’o gave in Us, Nope also benefits from a strong cast. At first Kaluuya seems too taciturn—making OJ so clearly more comfortable with animals than people that he fades from the screen—while Palmer seems to be pressing her natural charisma in order to balance him out. But eventually they settle into a teasing sibling dynamic that delivers many of the movie’s laughs. Yeun is clearly having fun as a showbiz opportunist (I wish there was more of him), while Brandon Perea gooses the movie with some timely comic energy as a big-box tech-support employee who helps OJ and Em rig up a surveillance system.
Then there is doom-voiced Michael Wincott as Antlers Holst, a renowned cinematographer whom OJ and Em rope into their investigation. Gloomy and ruminating, he lends the film an existential air. “This dream you’re chasing . . . where you end up at the top of the mountain . . . it’s the one you never wake up from,” he tells them when they first seek his help.
As Peele’s films have become more baroque—meaning, complex in their construction—they’ve lent themselves to increasingly intense investigation. He’s been compared to M. Night Shyamalan, which makes sense (they both make genre movies based on bonkers original ideas and Nope is an obvious companion piece to Shyamalan’s Signs). What distinguishes the two filmmakers, however, is the vastness and sociological import of Peele’s reach. He’s Shyamalan with a sharper sense of humor and a stronger sense of having something to say. And so it’s worth asking: once you get what’s going on in Nope, is there much more to get? (Spoilers ahead.)
I’ll confess the threads are harder to follow here than in Us and Get Out, at least after just a single viewing. The opening text quoting Nahum 3:6 suggests a unifying idea, especially considering Jeremiah 11:11 was woven so intricately into Us. Like Jeremiah, Nahum is a prophet of doom, here relaying God’s vow to destroy the ravenous Assyrian empire: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” This could describe the mystery at the heart of Nope—a predatory alien creature that hides in the clouds and vacuums up horses and eventually people, violently vomiting out any nonorganic material. But does the alien represent the Assyrians or the method of God’s judgment against them? While you ponder that, consider also the words of Yeun’s Ricky Park, who disastrously tries to incorporate the creature into the “Star Lasso Experience” at his theme park: “You’re about to witness a spectacle.” So who is casting filth and who is having filth cast upon them? Who is being made a spectacle—the humans or the alien?
Certainly Nope is interested in the treatment of animals, given the flashbacks we get to that 1990s sitcom, when popping balloons agitated the chimp into pummeling its castmates (the scene of a young Ricky, played by Jacob Kim, witnessing this while hiding under a table is the scariest in the movie). OJ—who tells the crew on that commercial set not to look his horse in the eye—is the first to understand that a living creature is hiding in the skies and that not looking directly at it is the key to surviving.
Looking and not looking is yet another thematic thread, given that OJ and Em’s goal is to document the monster, make money off of the footage, and save their struggling ranch. There’s also the mysterious TMZ videographer who shows up and meets his demise precisely because he can’t resist pointing his camera at the beast. Does any of this relate to a comment OJ makes as they prepare to capture the alien on film, that this will be footage that won’t be erased (perhaps referencing the fact that no one remembers that the first movie ever made starred a Black man)?
Nope seems to want to distinguish between gawking and seeing, between exploiting and understanding, between devouring and co-existing. If the movie, like a biblical prophet, denounces a central sin, it’s that of voraciousness—exemplified by both an alien creature with a gaping maw and a culture that will bend everything, be it animals, history, or that very alien creature, toward a self-serving form of entertainment. The ultimate irony of the movie? Peele makes such a prophetic vision wildly entertaining.
(7/27/2022)
