Universal Pictures
It’s not easy melding scares and smarts, thrills and thematic import—just ask Jordan Peele, whose acclaimed debut Get Out ably pulled off that balancing act, but whose subsequent efforts, be it the metaphorically clunky Us or the leaden The Twilight Zone reboot, prioritized the latter at the expense of the former. After those recent missteps, however, Peele finds himself back on solid footing with Nope, a science-fiction horror show that flourishes on its own monster-movie terms, and then laces its mayhem with pointed and invigorating undercurrents. It’s large-scale filmmaking done right, and proof that when he’s on his game, Peele remains one of contemporary cinema’s most skillful genre artists.
The perils of staging and capturing spectacles—especially those involving untamable animals—as well as the culpability of those exhibitions’ audiences is at the heart of Nope, which opens with a nightmarish vision of a bloodied monkey on a sitcom soundstage, the set in ruins and a human costar’s body lying motionless nearby. The simian’s stare at the camera before the action cuts to black is the first of many instances in which Peele highlights the process of watching (often suggested by cornea and lens motifs), ostensibly as a means of implicating viewers in the craziness to come. Consequently, it’s no wonder that the success of the story’s hero hinges on his understanding that, when confronted by wild and deadly creatures, the key to survival is avoiding direct eye contact—something that here feels like a challenge, given that Peele spends the majority of the film teasing us with otherworldly images hidden just out of sight.
That may make Nope sound like tough sledding, but the trick Peele plays is evoking such ideas while avoiding the heavy-handed symbolism and narrative twists that defined his prior efforts. The writer/director’s latest concentrates on Otis Haywood Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), aka OJ, who works with his father Otis Sr. (Keith David) on their Haywood’s Hollywood Horses ranch, whose steeds are trained for show business duty. When inexplicable tragedy strikes, OJ is forced to take over the family operation, yet he’s not very good at it. Between a green screen-enabled shoot that goes awry, and the lack of help afforded by his self-interested sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), OJ winds up in dire straits, and thus compelled to sell his stallions to Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child actor who endured the aforementioned sitcom calamity and now owns the adjacent “Jupiter’s Claim” Western theme park.