Written and Directed by Jordan Peele
Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun
Rated R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images
Runtime: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Currently in theaters

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

As a fan of movies, there are few feelings as beguiling as something new from a writer-director you enjoy. From the initial announcements of a new project, to posters, trailers, and other marketing materials, all the way through sitting in the theater as the lights go down; shared anticipation palpable while sitting among an excited audience. That’s how I felt sitting down to see Jordan Peele’s new film Nope, the only “spoiler” I had was to add Sour Patch Kids to my usual popcorn and soda combo (they are a very minor plot point). I was not disappointed. 

For some viewers, Get Out will likely always be Jordan Peele’s best film, and I would agree that it is the most successful in achieving clarity with its intentions. Get Out feels like a Christopher Nolan horror movie, everything perfectly structured to keep the audience just ahead of its main character. It’s a tightrope act, but Peele makes it look easy. Get Out is a satisfying movie because it knocks down every pin that it sets up. And even within that, Get Out rewards multiple viewings with the subtle and sometimes oblique references that are worked into the plot. 

Us, Peele’s second movie, doubles down on the oblique nature of those details from Get Out and centers them. Where Get Out focused on race, Us looked at the last 35 years of American history from a class perspective. Both the Black and white families in Us have plenty of material wealth. Boats, a Range Rover, cell phones, golf clubs, fireplace tools, and other signifiers of class turn out to be extremely useful in terms of survival when put to use against the Tethered. Peele doesn’t seem to be demonizing the accumulation of stuff, even for its own sake, but the very existence of the Tethered is a reminder that America is a nation that tries to hide its poorer inhabitants. On my latest viewing, the parts of Us that most resonated with me were the moments where characters attempt to empathize with their Tethered counterparts–especially the young boy, Pluto–and the treatment of Adelaide/Red throughout. 

Adelaide’s psychologists tell her parents that she needs to dance, draw, to do anything creative in order to process the trauma she experienced in the fun house. We don’t know the full extent of that trauma until nearly the end of the film, but regardless, the act of creation is how we deal with our own shadows. When we tell stories from a place of emotional honesty, it helps us tell our story, to externalize. This is especially true when we are wrestling with our own shadows, the darkest parts of ourselves. We can’t truly leave them behind, there is only synthesis.

Sidebar: I just watched All That Jazz for the first time, so there’s a whole other essay in there that isn’t right for this review, but you can see where I’m going with that.

This brings us to Jordan Peele’s newest film, Nope. Not as pointed as Get Out, and not as wide-ranging as Us, Nope lands squarely between the two. While some aspects of the story seem to jut out of the central narrative, it is a cohesive movie overall. I’ll need another viewing or two to determine if Us or Nope is my favorite of his movies so far, but on first viewing I was completely enthralled. I love a good X-File, and Nope slots in right alongside Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Signs for aliens arriving on earth movies, bringing that combination of wonder and terror–The Spielberg Face–back to movie sceens.

An early scene has OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) standing alongside Clover, one of the horses from his ranch, Haywood Hollywood Horses. OJ’s sister Em (Keke Palmer) explains that the Haywoods are descended from the jockey in the "the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture" The Horse in Motion from 1887. The horse gets spooked by a chrome ball (also called a light probe) and reacts violently. This scene perfectly sets up a few different things. First, it tells you everything you need to know about the two main characters. OJ is shy and reserved, a classic ‘man of few words’ archetype that would be right at home in any western picture. In 2022, we can probably just call him introverted. He wants to keep their recently deceased father’s business and the ranch together. At the same time, Em is gregarious and seeking fame and fortune, happy to be the center of attention. Together, they make a great team, but apart they are out of balance. 

This scene is the viewfinder for the entire film in other ways. For one, it needs to be pointed out how the title The Horse In Motion (the entirety of it is the above gif) erases the fact that there is a human being in the film. A Black man whose name has been lost to time because it wasn’t worth preserving. The Haywood’s connection to this man echoes the Watchmen TV series, which invented a fictional 1921 Bass Reeves biopic directed by Oscar Micheaux called Trust in the Law! that served as the inspiration for that universe’s first masked vigilante, a Black man named Hooded Justice. Similarly, Jordan Peele portrays the Haywoods as having “skin in the game” in Hollywood moviemaking for generations. OJ’s first movie was The Scorpion King, and there are several posters in the ranch house of Buck and the Preacher, a Sidney Poitier-directed western. Black history is all around us, but is still not integrated into “the canon” of what is taught or passed down culturally. Peele’s movies and Watchmen feel like the beginnings of a corrective, and hopefully there is a reassessment and realignment down the road. Time to catch up on 1883 to be ready when the Bass Reeves spinoff comes to fruition. 

Nope is very much a western, in the same vein as so many John Carpenter, Steven Speilberg, and James Cameron movies are built on the foundations of the genre, but relocating their stories to other environments and other time periods. Of course, the western, and specifically the cowboy, is pure mythology; the popular image of the cowboy is that of a white man, but they were just as often Black or Latino. The Haywoods have a real ranch for wrangling horses. But their neighbor, Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun), owns a fake western town called Jupiter’s Claim. This fake town is as artificial as our cowboy mythology, but where tourists (hopefully!) know the town is fake, they also likely accept traditional westerns as based on fact. And this all comes back to spectacle. Audiences think we want our fantasies delivered as realistically as possible, but in reality we just want them to have a veneer of realism plastered over our preexisting notions. One of the things that makes Peele such a gifted filmmaker is that his films are pointed without being overtly accusatory. They challenge the audience by whispering in their ear while distracting them with heart-pounding suspense. 

Another aspect of this is how much “of the times” Nope feels without having to draw any specific parallels. An empty Fry’s Electronics (a west coast-based Best Buy rival) allows Angel (Brandon Perea) to have free reign on his retail job. The aforementioned Sour Patch Kids, a director played by Oz Perkins, and material other details make Nope feel like it takes place in our reality. Or maybe I am now just impressed by films that are filmed on location and with practical sets. 

Man vs. nature is the major throughline of Nope. While the comparisons (and homages) to Close Encounters of the Third Kind are immediately obvious, there’s a lot of-bingo!-Jurassic Park DNA in Nope. While the Frankenstein elements are absent, from the horse at the beginning of the film through the exhilarating and beautifully rendered climax, Nope wants you to leave thinking that animals are scary. The threats in Get Out and Us were decidedly human, but Nope repeatedly reminds us that control over an animal is just short of an illusion. The most horrifying sequence in the film is teased at the outset, where a chimpanzee is on the set of a television show, covered in blood. When the full sequence is revealed, watching it unfold is absolutely terrifying to the point of being traumatic (I have a preexisting fear of large primates, except orangutans, which I do not believe could hurt me). This is also echoed in the footage of animals we see cinematographer Holst (Michael Wincott) scrubbing through on his edit deck. That trauma, and the generational trauma of being marginalized in Hollywood, and America more broadly, is baked into the film’s canvas, and just following along with the plot the first time through I am sure I missed some things. 

For all that it has on its mind, Nope doesn’t slack on being a suspenseful and genuinely scary movie. Jordan Peele is drawing on our cultural language for UFOs and then twists them in ways that are impossible to expect. There are multiple sequences that perfectly played the audience I saw it with, eliciting silence, gasps, and laughs at the exact right moment. That takes patience and confidence on the part of a filmmaker, and Peele deserves to have his name alongside those previously mentioned directors that can merge the horror genre with blockbuster spectacle and make it look easy. 

One last thing that must be mentioned is Michael Abels’ spectacular score. He previously worked on both Get Out and Us, but Nope gives him a much broader sandbox to play in. In addition to the chilly slow creep in his previous scores for Peele films, he is able to mix in alien sounds and music that evokes westerns. By the end of the runtime, Abels offers homage to both Ennio Morricone and John Williams, deployed at the perfect moments. The music in particular helps smooth out the film’s tonal transitions and allows the audience to relax or celebrate moments of triumph in ways that don’t often come in pure horror films.

Nope is one of the best studio movies of the year so far, and I can’t wait to see it again. There’s so much to unpack once things get into spoiler territory, and I look forward to looking up towards the clouds in a different way for years to come.