“I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile and make you a spectacle.” Jordan Peele’s Nope begins with this fairly obscure Bible verse, Nahum 3:6, which quite tidily sums up the film and telegraphs what’s to come. His eagerly anticipated third film serves as a fitting thematic companion to his previous works. Get Out focused on racism and the quite literal exploitation of black bodies. Us explored classism and America’s fundamental social inequality. And Nope is about spectacle, and the lengths to which we’ll go to manufacture and enjoy it. Though this theme isn’t exclusively linked to any particular race or class, the longstanding history of exploitation and subjugation of the black community is arguably the most significant component of the film. Peele serves up this incisive social commentary in the guise of a genre-defying alien abduction sci-fi horror tale, resulting in a film which doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of Get Out (but to be honest, what film would?), but will handily entertain viewers who were turned off by the narrative shortcomings of Us.
The film opens with a flashback to the set of the fictional 1990s sitcom, “Gordy’s Home.” While filming a birthday party scene, one of the chimpanzees playing the titular character is startled by a popping balloon and proceeds to brutally murder almost everyone on set. Cut to present day, where Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David, brief but effective) runs Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, a company which provides trained horses for film and TV productions. After a freak accident involving shrapnel literally raining from the sky, the company is entrusted to his children, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer). Nearby, the sole survivor of the “Gordy’s Home” massacre, Jupe Park (Steven Yeun) now runs a Western-themed amusement park named Jupiter’s Claim. Amidst this backdrop, the Haywood ranch begins to experience strange power surges and mysterious incidents which are spooking the horses. This leads OJ and Em to discover a UFO (or UAP, depending on who you ask). They enlist the help of an electronics store salesman, Angel (Brandon Perea) and a world-famous cinematographer, Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) in order to get photographic evidence of the otherworldly visitor—and to secure a huge pay day.
It goes without saying that their plan runs into a few hiccups. As the team works to understand and outmaneuver the UFO, the film descends audaciously into outright horror. Without spoiling anything, the UFO is not entirely what it appears, and the revelations that come to light cleverly turn all the usual alien abduction tropes on their head. Suffice it to say, you’ve probably never seen anything like this, with the possible exception of 1993’s Fire in the Sky, a UFO flick which starts out as painfully dull sci-fi before veering breathtakingly into grotesque body horror in the final act. One particular sequence in Nope, with its similarly visceral, stomach-churning imagery, calls to mind the memorable final sequence of that otherwise wildly dissimilar film.
Peele’s commitment to flat-out horror throughout Nope is commendable, and viewers will likely come away impressed by just how little actual science fiction there is. The UFO encounters are easily the highlight of the film, each sequence a masterclass in balancing action, suspense, and horror. Many of these set pieces occur in the day time, allowing Peele to cleanly choreograph the action, with each character’s position and sightlines cleanly laid out—much like pieces on a chess board. Like Midsommar before it, Peele proves that you don’t need to withhold visual information in order to scare the viewer. (He instead devises other, more clever ways, to obscure the UFO in plain sight.) The creature design on display is also memorable, as the UFO morphs over the course of the film from an almost squished cowboy-hat shape into a Lovecraftian amorphous balloon that evokes the horrifying “angels” described in the Bible.
The craftsmanship on display in these sequences more than compensates for the film’s shortcomings. As always, Peele is not what one would call an ‘actor’s director.’ While the script succeeds at fleshing out the themes and subtext, the characters are disappointingly two-dimensional. Any depth in the characterizations is largely due to the actors. Steven Yeun is by far the most successful at this, but he also benefits from having a character with genuine pathos. One monologue, in which he recounts an (fictional) SNL sketch that portrayed the “Gordy’s Home” massacre is a delight. Putting on his best storyteller face, he lists the various performers’ names (in a stroke of genius, Chris Kattan plays the monkey), with subtle cracks in his showboat-y demeanor hinting at the scarred little boy within. He goes on to make some very bad, yet entirely understandable, decisions. Kaluuya’s performance, on the other hand, is too internalized to be dramatically interesting, resulting in a character who’s resourceful but otherwise is largely a cipher. Palmer, while ordinarily a dynamic actor, comes off as one-note here, with Em’s bluster and bravado quickly wearing thin. Wincott seems to be having fun doing his best Werner Herzog impression, with his gravelly intonations and bleak nihilism. Perea’s self-effacing neurosis is good for some mild comic relief, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that he’s doing a Dave Franco impersonation.
The narrative itself is also a bit disjointed. It’s broken into chapters, punctuated by on-screen text signifying one of the movie’s animals—Gordy, Ghost, and so on. This structure doesn’t add anything to the movie, and makes it feel more episodic rather than a longform narrative. It’s unfortunate, as this contributes partly to the underdeveloped characters and actively works against the movie’s momentum. Overall though, while it doesn’t match the narrative economy of Get Out, this is still a much more coherent and satisfying story arc than Us, which felt like a Big Idea in search of a meaningful plot. Despite the fragmented storyline, Nope does reach a satisfying thematic conclusion.
Also effective is the soundtrack. While there’s not a needle drop here that rivals, say “Run Rabbit Run” in Get Out or “Good Vibrations” in Us, the mix of contemporary classics and golden oldies keeps the action humming along nicely. The music is also complemented by provocative, indelible visuals that will likely linger in your head long after the credits roll—a boy reaching out to touch a chimp’s bloodied hand, a house being drenched in a literal blood rain, and so on.
The whole is ultimately more than the sum of its parts, and results in a thought-provoking exploration of spectacle and exploitation. OJ (whose very moniker recalls one of America’s favorite popcorn tragedies and is intended to destigmatize that particular name) and Em know this topic better than anyone. They even claim to be descended from the first actor ever seen on screen—a black man on a horse, whose identity has been relegated to the dustbin of history. It’s thus no surprise that they find themselves particularly well-suited to confronting an extraterrestrial threat which quite literally consumes its victims. They treat their foe as a scared, territorial animal, knowing all too well that survival means respecting, not taming, their aggressor. And if they can profit off the spectacle, landing a spot on “Oprah” (OJ’s particular benchmark for success), well, there’s no harm in that, is there?
