Nope
Compared to his Oscar-winning Get Out and its excellent follow up Us, writer/director Jordan Peele’s third film feels more accessible and less allegorical, but like his earlier films, it’s still original, daring, inventive and quite unlike anything else you’re likely to have seen.
Premise: Siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer) are struggling to keep their dad’s horse ranch afloat, when they think they see an unidentified object in the skies above their ranch. Hoping for fame and fortune, they set out to capture the UFO on camera.
Review:
For me, Nope felt very different from Jordan Peele’s first two films. For one thing, I would not categorise Nope as a “horror” film at all – yes, there are some tense scenes (and one particular flashback to 1998 is especially traumatic), but tonally, Nope is more of a sci-fi thriller than a horror film. There’s much more of a sense of suspense and adventure than either of Jordan Peele’s earlier two films, and Nope’s tone even reminded me of films like Jaws in places.
Secondly, for better or worse, Nope feels far less concerned with allegory, metaphor and subtext than either Get Out or Us were. That’s not to say that Nope doesn’t also explore a number of interesting themes, such as society’s preoccupation with exploiting tragedy and turning it into entertainment and spectacle, or its obsession with chasing fame no matter the cost – but these ideas are very much there in the background if you want to look for them, rather than being central to the concept of the film in the same way that the high-concept elements Get Out and Us were so key to those films’ central premises.
“…Jordan Peele continues to show a natural flair for building the tension in key scenes…”
This shift away from overtly allegorical storytelling could be seen as either a positive or a negative – on the one hand, Nope did not stay with me and play on my mind after the credits rolled in the same way that Get Out and Us did, but on the other hand, Nope is unquestionably a more accessible film, and a more immediately enjoyable one. There are a number of moments in Nope that are played purely for comedy, and they work really effectively, both in terms of relieving the audience’s tension and as genuinely funny moments. This is also not a film where you’ll be scratching your head during the end credits, asking yourself what actually happened, and did it all make sense … instead, as inventive and creative as the film is, it’s still straightforward enough that no one should struggle to follow its plot.
Speaking of the plot, this is still a film written by Jordan Peele, so you can expect a certain amount of unexpected developments along the way. For that reason, I don’t want to say too much about the specifics of the plot, but suffice to say, I’d be surprised if anyone predicted where the film goes to by the end. As a director, Jordan Peele continues to show a natural flair for building the tension in key scenes, and (despite filming parts of the film in the huge IMAX aspect ratio) he builds that tension as much by what he doesn’t show in the frame as by what he does show the audience. Even the (arguably gratuitously violent) flashback scene is largely depicted off-screen and left to the audience’s imagination – which is perhaps why it felt so much more traumatic than it actually was.
“…the biggest surprise in the cast was arguably relative newcomer Brandon Perea…”
The cast of Nope are all great, although there’s arguably not one, clear, standout, central performance in the same way that Daniel Kaluuya carried Get Out or Lupita Nyong'o carried Us. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer are great together as the chalk-and-cheese siblings, with Kaluuya’s socially withdrawn stoicism aggressively contrasted by Palmer’s flamboyantly extroverted performance. But for me the biggest surprise was arguably relative newcomer Brandon Perea’s performance as Angel, the clerk from a local tech store who comes close to stealing the movie on several occasions.
Steven Yeun featured prominently in the marketing for this film, but his is very much a supporting, ancillary role. In fact, his storyline in many ways feels the most detached from the rest of the movie – the relevance of his backstory is debatable (without getting into spoilers, his backstory seems to only be connected to the rest of the film in terms of the themes that can be read into it, rather than his backstory having any narrative relevance to events), and his role in the present day seems to really only be to fulfil one key plot point. That said, he’s still very good in the scenes that he is in.
“…set against the backdrop of the ‘unsung heroes’ of Hollywood…”
Rounding out the main cast is veteran cult actor Michael Wincott, and I have to say, it was an absolute delight to see him back on the big screen again. Wincott plays an acclaimed cinematographer, and one of the interesting elements of Nope is that it’s set against the backdrop of the “unsung heroes” of Hollywood – OJ and Emerald have followed in their father’s footsteps as Hollywood horse wranglers, and even Steven Yeun’s character is himself a former child actor who has since fallen on hard times.
Visually, the film never disappoints, both in terms of the real life location shooting, but also in relation to the VFX for the object that the siblings think they see in the night skies. Conceived and written during the Covid pandemic, on one level Nope can certainly be seen as a love letter to movie magic and the spectacle of cinema, but it also feels like a film that was intentionally set almost entirely outside, as a form of therapy for society’s new collective trauma associated with the risk of leaving your house to venture outside.
“…an original & entertaining sci-fi thriller…”
Overall, Nope is an original and entertaining sci-fi thriller, that should engage and surprise even the most jaded of viewers. While it may lack the same impact as the social commentary of his earlier films, it is not really much of an insult to say that Nope is Jordan Peele’s weakest film, when his first two movies were Get Out and Us.
