‘Nope’ Review: Close Encounters of the Jordan Peele Kind

Jordan Peele always swings big, painting his films with broad strokes and big themes that go well beyond the visceral fright of the horror genre. The manners in which Get Out addressed racism and Us tackled privilege are why they continue to be a part of the discourse to this day. For his third directorial feature, Peele sets his sights to the skies with Nope. As expected, it’s not just your run of the mill alien horror film. Anchored by superb sound design and cinematography, Nope delivers frightful awe with an intensity and terror that cannot be contained.

Siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) help run the family-owned horse ranch with their father Otis (Keith David) where they train horses for film and television. One day random objects start falling from the sky and Otis is struck and killed by a coin without explanation. Left on their own to now run the ranch, OJ and Emerald try and make due, but nothing seems the same since the incident. Strange weather patterns, power outages, and disappearing horses lead them to discovering something hiding in the clouds. Hoping to capture whatever it is on video and get a big payday, they enlist the help of a tech store employee and documentarian to learn more about this unidentified flying object. That is, if they don’t get taken into the void first.

Nope is broken into chapters named after the various horses on the ranch. As OJ struggles to keep the ranch in business, he sells many of the horses to the nearby amusement park run by child star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun). The Haywoods are just trying to stay afloat and survive. Getting video evidence of aliens is their ticket to Oprah, as they put it. As the story unfolds, we learn more and more about the thing that is in the sky. Peele does an excellent job at building tension, only offering glimpses of whatever it is initially and relying on a haunting array of sounds to invoke terror. The film takes you on a rollercoaster, continually increasing the tension of a scene and bringing it to the apex before sending you back downward with a sigh of relief, usually through a quick joke or abrupt ending of the chapter, before starting all over on the ascent again.

Peele throws a few curveballs here and there, but Nope is arguably the most conventional horror film of his three directorial efforts. Of course he puts his own unique spin on the UFO genre, but he doesn’t take it to the same degree as either Get Out or Us. Without going into too much spoiler details, one of the main themes of the whole film revolves around taming beasts and how ultimately nature can’t fully be controlled. The Haywoods have spent their entire lives and careers taming horses to appear in movies and commercials. Still, no matter how much training a horse might have, incidents can happen. There is also a side plot that revolves around Yeun’s Ricky where as a child he was on a famous TV show with a chimpanzee as part of the cast. During the filming of an episode, the chimp named Gordy suddenly attacked the cast, no doubt traumatizing a young Ricky. Everything in Nope revolves around man trying to control nature for their own benefit, and while it may work for a while, ultimately it comes around that these beasts don’t always follow our standards and directions, no matter how much we may want/force them to.

It’s the same for whatever it is in the sky. OJ and Emerald devise their own ideas about what it is and formulate their own plans on how they can capture it on video based on what they see and infer. But as history has shown, that doesn’t always work. Nope does a great job at making you think they are fully in charge and in control. They’re not though. They may make smart decisions, but they still have to bend to the will of nature. That is what makes the film so terrifying because things can shift and change at the drop of a hat.

Nope might not be on the same level as Get Out or Us, but it another strong addition to Jordan Peele’s growing filmography. It’s a much more straight forward horror film, but is still equally terrifying in its presentation. The film will have you on the edge of your seats, wanting to look away but transfixed by what’s in front of you. Jordan Peele has expertly crafted his visions as a director, and Nope doesn’t disappoint.