Say “yes” to Jordan Peele’s Nope

A sprawling, sci-fi procedural anchored by weighty performances, white-knuckle set pieces, and thunderous soundscapes, Nope is director Jordan Peele’s most mature and layered work, exploring our primordial obsession with spectacle and our desperate need to capture it. A slowly unfolding puzzle box that is as alluring as it is exhilarating, Peele assembles his formidable image-making around what he knows best: terror and wit. Minor spoilers ahead…

“I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” Nope, director Jordan Peele’s third feature film, opens with an ominous bible verse from Nahum 3:6, spilling its primary thesis for all to see. Less bitingly allegorical than its predecessors of Get Out and Us, Nope neatly folds metaphors within easily-accessible pockets, which are slowly unearthed by its endlessly exhilarating sci-fi storytelling and Peele’s dazzling craft. It is, at once, exactly what it seems to be on its surface - a film about hidden and uncanny terrors in the sky - but also a movie about making movies, the pieces of ourselves we feed into the Hollywood meat grinder, and our indomitable obsession with spectacle and its capture. In an era where metaphors are wielded as cudgels and sledgehammers, Nope - with its effortlessly integrated symbolism - is a complete breath of fresh air.

In Nope’s sobering prologue, OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) buries his father (Keith David) after a coin from the sky falls with such velocity that it bores a hole straight through his skull. Inheriting full ownership of the Agua Dulce ranch where the Haywood family has been raising horses for Hollywood since the birth of cinema, OJ struggles to keep things afloat without dad. Grief-stricken and despondent, he relies on his extrovert hustler sister Emerald (an electric Keke Palmer) to tide things over with their movie producer clients. Early in the film, Em - with crackling enthusiasm - conveys to producers the Haywood station as showbiz royalty and their own ties to historical Black erasure: Her great, great, great grandfather was supposedly the unnamed Black jockey atop Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 two-second stunner The Horse in Motion. Her well-rehearsed speech - lifted straight from dad’s old videos - is met with indifference and microaggressions from her white onlookers, and it isn’t before long that the Haywood horse is carted away in favor of a computer-generated stand-in. With another business opportunity in tatters, OJ contemplates selling the entire endeavor, horses and all, to his neighbor Ricky Park (a complicated, arresting Steven Yeun), who operates a chintzy amusement park with a mysterious attraction.

“…[*Nope* is] a movie about making movies, the pieces of ourselves we feed into the Hollywood meat grinder, and our indomitable obsession with spectacle and its capture.”

OJ’s business strategy, however, is quickly forgotten when he spots the glint of a silent silver disc streaking through cloud cover over his ranch. This unidentified flying object flits in and out like a barely-seen horror movie monster, but its size and otherworldly nature is undeniable. It’s here that OJ and Em hatch their last-ditch plan for glory: With the help of local store tech guy Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) and perfectionist filmmaker Antlers Holst (an incredible, intense Michael Wincott), they prepare to capture incontrovertible proof of alien life through one perfect shot - their “Oprah” shot. This is Nope’s big rug-pull. Where your typical sci-fi trappings would find our heroes fighting for survival against little green men, Peele deploys a vastly different directive for OJ and Em: “Get. That. Shot.” No matter what. Of course, when the true danger of their airborne adversary reveals itself, their documentation finds new life as a word of warning to others, but Nope never lets us forget that our plucky crew are no altruists: they’re charming hucksters, but hucksters nonetheless.

The Hollywood machine is insatiable, and our need to commodify the strange, terrifying, and traumatic into digestible entertainment - memes, parodies, adaptations - is a byproduct of our doomscrolling, media-hungry zeitgeist. Nope builds itself around this thread through its rousing A-plot, but also through its narrative’s most fascinating character: Steven Yeun’s Ricky “Jupe” Park. Ricky operates his enigmatic amusement park through the veneer of a slick showboater, but he’s also harboring deep, furrowing scars: A former child star of a hit sitcom called Gordy’s Home, his career is derailed and his show is shuttered when the series’ beloved animal star loses it and mangles several of its human costars. In what is likely Nope’s most harrowing scene, a young Ricky - barely able to shake his fear - finds himself huddled under a table as the gruesome maulings unfolds around him. In the present, however, Ricky shoves his trauma into a deep hole, recounting the countless windfalls - merchandising, talk show appearances, and cultural cachet - that have stemmed from a tragedy he no doubt would like to forget. There was even an SNL sketch of the incident, Ricky recounts. “They pretty much nailed it.”

“Where your typical sci-fi trappings would find our heroes fighting for survival against little green men, Peele deploys a vastly different directive…”

Nope, in the end, is a meta sci-fi ouroboros. Deconstructing our obsession with spectacle through the spectacular, no one is better equipped to navigate such contradictions better than Jordan Peele. Nothing short of a maestro conductor, Peele orchestrates every piece of his work in parallel to dizzying effect: Director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar, Dunkirk) is the perfect choice to weaponize IMAX cameras for Nope’s alien grandeur amidst the American West, and Johnnie Burn’s roiling soundscapes can be felt through your bones. Daniel Kaluuya - who has long since been Peele’s muse - is more subdued than usual, but he pings around Nope’s increasingly nerve-jangling set pieces with wit and confidence, enduring almost all of the film’s jolts with uproarious delivery; against all odds, every utterance of the titular “nope” is funnier than the last. But it’s Keke Palmer’s Emerald that steals most of the show: From hits of her vape pen to Akira bike-slides to her stinging one-liners, Palmer imbues her character with an energetic giddiness that’s impossible not to love.

Nope isn’t as socially incisive as Get Out or Us, but there might be even more value in its own awareness of where it lies in today’s increasingly turbulent media landscape. A film about film lovers, the chase of spectacle, and our self-rending offerings to the warped altar of Hollywood, Nope ingeniously disguises its shrewdness in the very yarn it’s skewering. Leave it to Jordan Peele to craft the rare blockbuster that’s also smart: He’s three for three.