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It’s surprising how little information about writer/director Jordan Peele ’s “Nope” has leaked since it was first announced. There have been a few trailers that show what may or may not be the film’s primary threat, and the marketing team has done a very good job with posters of its main cast members looking up at the sky and uttering the film’s title. All that thirst for capitalistic box office gain comes with a price, namely that it builds hype and an audience expectation that may not be met once the finished product is unveiled. This invariably leads to whiny complaints on Twitter and a plethora of think pieces I have no desire to read, even if I didn’t like the movie.  

I’ve always had begrudging respect for a filmmaker who refuses to cater to a viewer’s pre-ordained expectations, even if said viewer is yours truly. It’s why I attend David Lynch movies despite never being a fan of the director’s work. So, I’ve been replaying a throwaway line of dialogue in my head as a potential explanation for how “Nope” is constructed and executed. In response to a pitch for his services, cinematographer Antlers Holst ( Michael Wincott ) tells Emerald Haywood ( Keke Palmer ) that he “makes one movie for them, and one for me.” This is a callback to John Cassavetes ’ philosophy/excuse for appearing in trash—the pay allowed him to finance the movies he wanted to create. 

After the massively entertaining, Oscar-winning calling card of “ Get Out ,” Jordan Peele moved toward a hybrid of audience pleaser and filmmaker’s jones with “ Us .” That film was less blatant and required more work on the audience’s part, which made it fascinating for some and frustrating for others. It was also powered by a career-best performance by Lupita Nyong’o, whose dual role was unshakably strange and multilayered. There is no equivalent performance in “Nope” to anchor viewers, and it’s about three times as messy, but I got the feeling that Holst is Peele’s stand-in, that is, the director is revealing to us through a character that he made this film to amuse and please himself. If that is true, then Holst’s final scene says a lot about his creator; it’s a moment of self-sacrifice in lieu of the perfect camera shot. 

Prior to the pitch for work scene, Holst and Emerald met on the set of a commercial he was shooting. She arrived late to assist her horse-wrangler brother Otis Jr. ( Daniel Kaluuya ) with the animal hired for the ad. That shoot goes awry, but not before Peele drops some breadcrumbs that will lead viewers through the forest he’s built for us to get lost inside. He also includes a nice cameo from nighttime soap opera legend Donna Mills . Speaking of cameos, the opening scene of “Nope” features Keith David as Otis Sr., head of Haywood Hollywood Horses, the family business. The Haywood’s ancestors were the first Black stuntpeople and animal wranglers in Hollywood, going back to the earliest days of movie making. That seems like an extraneous detail, but nothing is truly extra in a Jordan Peele movie.

The rest of the cast features Steven Yuen as Jupe, a barker who runs an alien-based carnival of sorts out in the same middle of nowhere the Haywoods have their ranch, and Angel ( Brandon Perea ), a techie specializing in surveillance equipment he sells out of a Best Buy clone called Fry’s. Jupe is the survivor of a horrific freak accident on a television show that had the first use of a certain type of animal. Angel is hired to install fancy cameras on the Haywood ranch so that Otis and Emerald can be the first to capture “the Oprah shot” of a specific event I won’t reveal. All this focus on being the first to do something! Again, no detail is completely extra in a Jordan Peele movie.

With “Nope,” Peele continues to explore and repeat certain elements of his prior works. Like “Us,” there’s a Bible quote that may be another breadcrumb to follow. This time it’s Nahum 3:6, which says “I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.” There’s also a focus on animals, with horses playing a major role here. Unlike the deer in “Get Out” and the rabbits in “Us,” symbols of creatures being preyed upon, Peele reverses the power dynamic by turning into prey the most dangerous predator of all. There’s also the unusual use of an inanimate object; in “Us” it was scissors, in “Nope” it’s a fake horse and those weird, swaying air-filled things every used car dealer seems to have.

“Nope” is not as good as “Get Out” or “Us,” but it’s definitely Peele’s creepiest movie. He’s always been more Rod Serling than Rob Zombie , and that’s most evident here. There’s humor to be had in the minority characters’ reactions to horror (yes, they say “nope” the way most people would say “oh HELL NAW!”), but the director really leans into Hitchcock’s tenet about suspense vs. surprise. The wait for something awful to happen is always worse than when it does. Additionally, Peele remains a master of misdirection, offering fleeting glimpses of something that’s amiss or keeping the most brutal violence just beyond our view. The sound mix on this is aces, and I’ll never tire of horror movies that center on Black protagonists who are more than just fodder for whatever’s killing everybody.

Peele also gets good performances out of Kaluuya and Palmer, who believably work the sibling angle with all its longstanding grudges, in-jokes and patterns based on who’s older. Wincott wields his wonderful voice as a force of nature. Yuen seems to be off-kilter and the movie’s weak link, but the more I thought about his plotline, the more his performance made sense. I think he’s the film’s biggest breadcrumb in terms of figuring it all out. As for the special effects, they’re interesting, to say the least.

Truth be told, “Nope” reaches a conventional end point that would probably be more satisfying to most audiences had the journey been more tuned to the usual ways these stories are told. After my IMAX screening, there was a smattering of audience applause but I heard lots of grumbling. Call me a sadist if you must, but this is my favorite type of audience reaction. One particularly angry guy behind me on the escalator said “I can’t wait for the critics reviews calling this ‘splendid’!” “Nope” isn’t splendid, but it is pretty damn good. I had a lot of fun trying to figure it out. It’s a puzzle with a few pieces missing; standing back from it, you can still see the picture. But does it give the viewer exactly what they want? See the title.

Available in theaters on July 22nd.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Film credits.

Nope (2022)

Rated R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images.

135 minutes

Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood

Keke Palmer as Emerald 'Em' Haywood

Steven Yeun as Ricky 'Jupe' Park

Brandon Perea as Angel Torres

Michael Wincott as Craig

Barbie Ferreira as Nessie

Donna Mills as Bonnie Clayton

Terry Notary as Gordy

Jennifer Lafleur as Phyllis

Keith David as Otis Haywood Sr.

• Jordan Peele

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Nicholas Monsour
• Michael Abels

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‘Nope’ Review: Hell Yes

Jordan Peele’s genre-melting third feature stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as brother-and-sister horse wranglers defending the family ranch from an extraterrestrial threat.

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By A.O. Scott

The trailers for Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” one of the most feverishly anticipated movies of the summer, have raised some intriguing questions. Is it a western? A horror film? Science fiction? Satire? Will it fulfill the expectations raised by Peele’s first two mind-bending, zeitgeist-surfing features, “Get Out” and “Us,” or confound them?

I can now report that the answer to all of those questions is: Yup. Which is to say that there are some fascinating internal tensions within the movie, along with impeccably managed suspense, sharp jokes and a beguiling, unnerving atmosphere of all-around weirdness.

“Nope” feels less polemically pointed than “Us” or “Get Out,” more at home in its idiosyncrasies and flights of imagination even as it follows, in the end, a more conventional narrative path. This might be cause for some disappointment, since Peele’s keen dialectical perspective on our collective American pathologies has been a bright spot in an era of franchised corporate wish fulfillment. At the same time, he’s an artist with the freedom and confidence to do whatever he wants to, and one who knows how to challenge audiences without alienating them.

In any case, it would be inaccurate to claim that the social allegory has been scrubbed away: Every genre Peele invokes is a flytrap for social meanings, and you can’t watch this cowboys-and-aliens monster movie without entertaining some deep thoughts about race, ecology, labor and the toxic, enchanting power of modern popular culture.

“Nope” addresses such matters in a mood that feels more ruminant than argumentative. The main target of its critique is also the principal object of its affection, which we might call — using a name that has lately become something of a fighting word — cinema.

Peele’s movie love runs wide and deep. There are sequences here that nod to past masters, from Hitchcock to Spielberg to Shyamalan, and shots that revel in the sheer ecstasy of moviemaking. A sketch-comedy genius before he turned to directing, Peele never takes his performers for granted, giving everyone space to explore quirks and nuances of character. He also shows an appetite, and an impressive knack, for big effects. The climactic scenes aim for — and very nearly achieve — the kind of old-fashioned sublimity that packs wonder, terror and slack-jawed admiration into a single sensation.

Movies can be scary, enchanting, funny and strange. Sometimes they can be all those things at once. What they never are is innocent. While this movie can fairly be described as Spielbergian, it turns on an emphatic and explicit debunking of Spielberg’s most characteristic visual trope: the awe-struck upward gaze .

“Nope” starts with a cautionary text, drawn from the Old Testament Book of Nahum, which describes God’s threatened punishment on the wicked city of Nineveh: “I will make a spectacle of you.” Our beloved spectacles — like most of the other artifacts of our fallen world — are built on cruelty, exploitation and erasure, and “Nope” is partly about how we incorporate knowledge of that fact into our enjoyment of them. In the first scene, a chimpanzee goes berserk on the set of a sitcom, a moment of absurd, bloody terror that becomes a motif and a thematic key. The ape is a wild animal behaving according to its nature even though it has been tamed and trained for human uses.

The same can be said for the horses who serve as Peele’s totems of movie tradition. He invokes what is thought to be the very first moving image, captured by the 19th-century inventor and adventurer Eadweard Muybridge , of a man on horseback. Emerald ( Keke Palmer ) and O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) claim the rider as their ancestor. They honor his legacy by holding onto the business started by their father, Otis Haywood (Keith David), a ranch that supplies horses for television and movies.

O.J. — it’s short for Otis Jr. — is the main wrangler, a laconic, sad-eyed cowboy more comfortable around horses than people. His sister is more outgoing, and one of the offhand delights of “Nope” is how credibly Kaluuya and Palmer convey the prickly understanding that holds siblings together and sometimes threatens to drive them apart.

Strange things are happening on the ranch. The power cuts out, a mysterious cloud lurks on the horizon, and freakish storms drop detritus from the sky. A horse’s flank is pierced by a falling house key, and Otis Sr. takes an improbable projectile in the eye. Is there a flying saucer haunting the valley? Emerald and O.J. suspect as much, and so does their neighbor, an entrepreneur known as Jupe (Steven Yeun) who has turned his corner of the valley into a Wild West-themed tourist trap.

The possible U.F.O. hovers around the edges of the action for a good while, kind of like the shark in “Jaws” — or the spaceship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” — adding an element of danger that throws human interactions into comical and dramatic relief. As in “Jaws,” a fractious posse forms to deal with the threat, including Angel (Brandon Perea), an anxious techie, and Antlers (Michael Wincott), a visionary cinematographer who shows up at the ranch with a hand-cranked IMAX camera. Jupe, whose back story as a child actor connects him to that wayward chimp, is a bit like the mayor of Amity — less a villain than the representative of a clueless, self-serving status quo.

He’s also a showman, and as such an avatar of the film’s ambivalence about the business of spectacle. Emerald, O.J., Antlers and Angel, by contrast, are craftspeople, absorbed in matters of technique and concerned with the workaday ethics of image-making. This is the place to note Guillaume Rocheron’s haunting, eye-popping special effects, Hoyte van Hoytema’s lucid-dream cinematography and Nicholas Monsour’s sharp editing, and to encourage you to think about the hard work and deep skill represented by all the names in the final credits.

Peele, of course, is both craftsman and showman. He’s too rigorous a thinker to fall back on facile antagonisms between art and commerce, and too generous an entertainer to saddle a zigzagging shaggy-dog story with didacticism. Instead, he revels in paradoxes. The moral of “Nope” is “look away,” but you can’t take your eyes off it. The title accentuates the negative, but how can you refuse?

Nope Rated R. Scares and swears. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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‘Nope’ Review: Jordan Peele’s UFO Drama Has a Mood of Exciting Unease but an Arbitrary Story

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play horse-ranch siblings who try to photograph a close encounter in a movie that, for all its skillfully ominous atmosphere, begins to fly in all directions.

By Owen Gleiberman

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Jordan Peele ’s “ Nope ” is a tantalizingly creepy mixed bag of a sci-fi thriller. It’s a movie that taps into our fear and awe of UFOs, and for a while it holds us in a shivery spell. It picks the audience up and carries it along, feeding off spectral hints of the otherworldly. Yet watching the movie, you can just about taste the DNA of Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and “Nope” mirrors the trajectory of other films that have been made in the shadow of “Close Encounters,” like M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival.” Here, as in those films, the anticipation works better than the payoff. 

Daniel Kaluuya , an actor so skillful he seems to overhaul his spirit with every role, plays the central character, Otis Haywood Jr., a sweet-souled but recessive and taciturn country fellow who goes by the nickname of OJ. Early on, he reunites with his feisty chatterbox sister, Emerald ( Keke Palmer ), on the California horse ranch the two have inherited from their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), who in one of the film’s first scenes dies during a mysterious shower of inanimate debris. For several generations, the ranch has rented out horses to the entertainment industry, with the Haywoods serving as on-set wranglers and horse whisperers. But OJ is looking to sell the business and cash in.

Before he gets the chance, he walks out of the Haywoods’ beautiful farmhouse, stepping into the bright starlit night to chase a horse that has leapt the fence of its training arena. What he sees and hears in the distance is freaky in the extreme: a crowd, lit by floodlights, that seems to have assembled like some outer-space cult. Before long, the signs grow weirder: a cloud that doesn’t move (and hasn’t for weeks). Wind that funnels down into a small tornado. And, finally, a dark svelte object that glides through the air like nothing of this earth. The film’s title plays, amusingly, off that most casual of contempo buzz phrases ( nope! ), and how it perfectly expresses our incredulity in the face of the otherworldly. 

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Of all the fanciful phenomena that rational people claim not to believe in (ghosts, demons, monsters, the theory that Joe Biden stole the election), UFOs hold a special place. Simply put, there’s a lot of evidence for them. I don’t mean the kind of evidence cited by the folks who think that Ed and Lorraine Warren, of the “Conjuring” films, are paranormal documentarians. I’m talking about the mountains of filmed footage of UFOs, a lot of which is fake but not all of it. Of course, just because a flying object is unidentified doesn’t mean that it came from outer space. Yet the best UFO footage, which is available by the clipload on YouTube, exerts an uncanniness that can’t be explained away. You look at caught-on-the-fly images of gliding spacecraft, or lights dancing in the sky, and think, “Wow, what is that? What if ?” Those thoughts have only been encouraged by recent reports leaked by the U.S. government that acknowledge just how many flying objects there are that even military experts can’t identify, some zipping through the air with a technology no one recognizes.

“Nope” has a seductive mood of unease that makes the film feel, for a while, like something new: the first UFO thriller of the cellphone-ready, I-saw-it-online, how-can-you-not-believe-your-own-eyes? era. This is Peele’s third feature, after the landmark racial-paranoia nightmare “Get Out” and the ambitious but muddled doppelgänger fantasy “Us,” and for a while he draws on his skill at leading us down detours that become hypnotic lost highways. 

In a way, the whole setup is a bait-and-switch, as Peele lures us into the quirky lives of OJ and Emerald, taking note of the fact that their business, Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, has deep roots in racial pride. It seems that the Black jockey who appeared for a few seconds in one of history’s earliest film clips was the great-great-grandfather of Otis Sr. (That’s part of their spiel to potential clients.) Kaluuya, so sly, communicating mostly through his sharp gaze, and Palmer, whose fast-break aggro style acquires more heart as the movie goes on, make the Haywoods adult siblings we feel invested in, and the film introduces a couple of other key characters: Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star who now runs a Wild West theme park called Jupiter’s Claim (that’s where the space-cult show was), and Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), a techie salesman at Fry’s Electronics who helps the Haywoods set up a surveillance system to record the alien spaceship that appears to have settled in over their property.

It’s a flying saucer that resembles a giant undulating sand dollar, and if you had to use one word to describe it that word would be “hungry.” OJ and Emerald decide to photograph it; if they can land the perfect shot and sell it to the right media source (they have Oprah in mind), it could make them rich. But how do you catch a phantom spaceship on film? You call the jaded analog cinematographer Antlers Holst, played by the veteran croaky-voiced hipster actor Michael Wincott.

As they launch the plan, “Nope” itself starts flying off in different directions. It’s part of the film’s design — and, in a way, its racial consciousness — that OJ and Emerald are too mistrustful of mainstream white society to get any authorities involved. So we’re spared the sort of meddlesome-U.S.-government boilerplate plot that weighed down a movie like “Arrival.” Yet “Nope” doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary fashion. There are memorable touches along the way, like the monster image of a praying mantis on a surveillance camera or, as the electricity goes out, the way Peele slows down Corey Hart’s ’80s kitsch classic “Sunglasses at Night” to evoke the dread of a world stopping in its tracks. Yet for all these suspenseful felicities, logic often takes a back seat, which has the effect of lessening our involvement.

The spaceship, for instance, will suck you into its membrane hole if you look right at it…and sometimes if you don’t. The details of the Haywoods’ strategy to film the thing are never fully sketched in. When Emerald dots the property with inflatable tube men, it makes for a grabby image, but the point of these super-fake decoys is barely established. What’s more, the most disturbing scene in the movie — a flashback to Ricky’s ’90s cable sitcom, which turned into an impromptu horror set when the chimp who played the lovable Gordy went on a bloody rampage — turns out to have nothing to do with…anything. When the spaceship finally unfurls its freak flag, it looks like a pirate galleon made out of a giant ripped bedsheet, which is a little spooky and a little innocuous. “Nope,” like “Signs” and “Arrival,” will probably be a major hit, and it confirms the power of the Jordan Peele brand. But it also confirms that making movies with too much chaos and sprawl is threatening to become part of that brand.

Reviewed at AMC Empire, July 19, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 135 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release of a Monkeypaw Productions production. Producers: Jordan Peele, Ian Cooper. Executive producer: Robert Graf.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Jordan Peele. Camera: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Editor: Nicholas Monsour. Music: Michael Abels.
• With: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Keith David, Wrenn Schmidt. 

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Review: Say yup to Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope,’ the rare thriller Hollywood can look up to

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Given all the surreally unnerving sights there are to see in Jordan Peele’s “Nope” — a debris-choked windstorm, a weirdly undulating tunnel, a circular is-that-what-I-think-it-is gliding in and out of the clouds — it seems fitting that one of the movie’s most arresting images should be of a pair of eyes. Those eyes, wide and terrified, belong to a Southern California horse rancher named O.J. Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), who peers up from the darkness of a stalled truck as something very big and very bad looms overhead. Until now, during much of the story’s slow, suggestive buildup, O.J.’s gaze has been downcast and hard to read, reflecting an indifference that verges on exhaustion. It takes a lot to shock those eyes wide open, but what he sees now gets his attention, to say nothing of ours.

You probably remember Kaluuya’s eyes staring into the sunken-place void of 2017’s “Get Out,” a triumph of socially conscious horror that proved his and Peele’s breakthrough. Their latest collaboration, though also solicitous of your shivers, has something rather different in mind. The labyrinthine fun houses and shadowy, subterranean depths of “Get Out” — and also of Peele’s messier, more ambitiously scaled 2019 freakout, “Us” — have given way to a vast kill zone of wide open spaces and bright desert sunshine, shot in magnificently dusty vistas by Hoyte Van Hoytema (known for his frame-filling Imax work on Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and “Dunkirk”).

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And so while evil still lurks within, as it often does in Peele’s movies, here it also swoops and soars overhead in a cheekily outlandish story that the writer-director seems to have cooked up during an epic binge of “War of the Worlds” (both versions), “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “The Thing From Another World” (and its better-known remake, “The Thing”), “Signs,” “Arrival” and especially “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Peele is nothing if not a pop-culture savant, and here he drops any number of classic Hollywood allusions — the spinning cyclone from “The Wizard of Oz,” the cropduster sequence from “North by Northwest” — as easily as he tosses out a reference to “Saturday Night Live” and, by extension, the larger sketch-comedy world where he began his career.

But Peele’s movie love, sincere and sometimes goofy as it is (watch for multiple nods to the Dwayne Johnson action vehicle “The Scorpion King”), also comes with a serrated edge. Perhaps his most pointed citation here is to “The Horse in Motion” (1878), Eadweard Muybridge’s two-second black-and-white clip of a man riding a horse. In “Nope,” that jockey — a rare Black man in a white-dominated profession — is conceived as a distant relation of O.J. and his upbeat younger sister, Em (a terrific Keke Palmer), who run a Hollywood horse-wrangling business that’s been in their family for generations. (“Since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game,” Em beams before a visibly bored camera crew.) Even as it plays fast and loose with the facts, then, “Nope” establishes itself as something of an ethically minded Hollywood history lesson, with a particular focus on the industry’s long, brutal record of animal accidents and abuses on set.

This connection is driven home by a few horrifying if discreetly framed flashbacks to an old ’90s family sitcom whose chimpanzee star, Gordy, would appear to have been at least partially inspired by a real-life simian celebrity named Travis. If that doesn’t ring a bell, resist the urge to Google; you’re better off hearing Gordy’s story in the words of a former co-star, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun). Decades later, wearing a cowboy hat and a chillingly blank half-smile, Jupe now runs Jupiter’s Claim, a small Old West theme park in Agua Dulce. Not far away is the Haywoods’ lonely ranch, which has fallen on tough times since the mysterious death of O.J. and Em’s father (Keith David), and which Jupe wants to absorb into his cowboy-kitsch empire. All this is taking place barely 50 miles north of Los Angeles, in a stretch of desert that — with its bright-colored inflatable skydancers and pennant streamers — sometimes suggests a used-car lot and sometimes feels like a Hollywood dumping ground.

There’s a lot going on here, in other words, even before “Nope” turns our attention toward that giant disc flying ominously overhead, unleashes a hellish rain over the Haywoods’ ranch and cranks up the volume on its shrieking, juddering soundtrack. (There are moments when Michael Abels’ nerve-shredding score plays like a veritable symphony of human screams.) But if the story is a welter of subplots, tangents and ideas — to the point of being overly taken at times with its own conceptual daring — Peele’s visual craft shows an admirable finesse and discretion. He long ago absorbed the key lesson of “Jaws,” namely that what we don’t see is almost always scarier than what we do see, and that delayed gratification can amplify the power of suggestion. And so for a lengthy stretch he keeps his secret weapon a legitimate secret, with the unspoken assurance that everything (or at least a lot) will be revealed in due course.

In the meantime, you can savor the prickles of comic tension between O.J. and Em, and appreciate how Kaluuya’s and Palmer’s initially clashing rhythms — his slow and dour, hers fast and excitable — gradually come to complement each other as their characters join forces. You might also reflect on all the western iconography in Ruth De Jong’s meticulous production design, from the Haywoods’ dwindling stable of horses and the phony saloon exteriors of Jupiter’s Claim to the way that saucer in the sky, from certain angles, resembles the underside of a giant cowboy hat. “Nope” is a western in more than one sense, an idea borne out by Kaluuya’s taciturn heroism and the ragtag crew — including a friendly electronics-store employee, Angel (the likable Brandon Perea) — that soon comes together, mounting a brave stand against a nameless hunter that soon becomes the hunted.

As in “Us,” Peele shows a fondness for Old Testament scripture, opening here with a grim quote from the prophet Nahum: “I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, make you a spectacle.” That last word, “spectacle,” is crucial; it sets the stage for Peele’s inquiry into the business of exploiting Mother Nature’s creations — be they chimp or horse — for the purposes of mass entertainment. But it also suggests another kind of spectacle, the kind that transforms casual observers into camera-wielding obsessives, driving them to risk their lives and minds to prove that otherworldly phenomena exist. What binds this movie so closely to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” has less to do with alien visitors, in the end, than with the fervent curiosity that they can inspire. Some version of that obsession grabs hold of O.J., Em, Jupe and Angel; it also consumes a local cinematographer, Antlers (Michael Wincott, channeling Robert Shaw), who fuels their determination to capture incontrovertible evidence of what they’re seeing.

In some ways, then, “Nope” is a movie about the challenge of getting the perfect shot, an aim that Peele shares on a practical and artistic level — there’s no shortage of well-framed, jaw-dropping images — even as he cautions against it in the abstract. The four-letter title, which the characters mutter under their breath at moments of heightened anxiety, also functions as a kind of warning. In a sense, Peele wants to use a Hollywood genre template to mount a critique of Hollywood barbarism, to lay bare the callousness of an industry that grinds dreams into dust and exacts a lot of unseen collateral damage. And because the audience plays its part in this vicious cycle, Peele means to complicate the very act of watching, to suggest that it can have its moral costs as well as its undeniable pleasures. That’s one reason he implies rather than embraces the violence of his story’s darkest moments, turning the unspeakable into the unshowable.

All of which may leave “Nope” feeling like something of a B-movie ouroboros, an unusually well-made and imaginative thriller that’s sometimes tripped up by its own high-mindedness — and also, perhaps, by a closing stretch that struggles to bring Peele’s grand intentions together. Still, there’s no denying the richness of his ideas or the skill with which he taps into his inner Steven Spielberg, an inspiration that can seem tiresome in the wrong hands, but which here feels uniquely pointed and purposeful. One of Peele’s more subversive touches is to effectively weaponize the convention known as “the Spielberg face,” a term that, as unpacked at length by the critic and essayist Kevin B. Lee , describes Spielberg’s signature images of characters gazing up, in beatific wonderment, at the spectacle in front of them. In “Nope,” Peele’s characters keep watching the skies even at their peril, unable to tear their eyes away. You’ll know the feeling.

Rating: R, for language throughout and some violence/bloody images Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes Playing: Starts July 22 in general release

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Nope Reviews

The supporting players work together in ways that show Peele’s prowess, not only as a visual filmmaker, but as one who casts well and trusts his actors. Nope is a wild ride, and one I can’t wait to take again.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2024

Jordan Peele’s third film captures the terrible beauty of our endless fascination with events no matter how horrific.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

Nope, Peele’s third directorial outing, may debut in the horror genre, but there’s more to the brilliant film than audiences’ expectations.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 7, 2023

More stylish than substantial.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 7, 2023

I love all of Jordan's movies so far, but this one might be my favorite just because there's so much to unpack. Every time I think about it I find more things that I need to talk about and it's the gift that keeps giving.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 14, 2023

It's a very layered movie, lot of themes on Hollywood and how it uses people and kinda chews them up and spits them out - figuratively. He [Jordan Peele] is probably one of our best directors today.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 10, 2023

The failure of Nope is partly because of Peele's lack of restraint in terms of mangling together mismatched ideas.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Aug 9, 2023

Although the vision is stronger than the pen this time around, the Spielberg-esque scope is all-embracing, and his craftiness in the individual horror/sci-fi set pieces is utterly remarkable.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 29, 2023

As with his previous films, Peele wears his inspirations on his sleeve. This time around he mines heavily from two Spielberg classics, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Jordan Peele takes full advantage of Hoyte van Hoytema's phenomenal cinematography and Michael Abels' memorable score to create a spectacle worthy of the big screen, but it's the sound production that really elevates the movie to that level.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 25, 2023

An almost perfect spectacle that dives into our obsessions with spectacles in our real life. A unique blockbuster that will make you afraid of looking up.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Jordan Peele has made a science fiction thriller that is one of the most visually striking films in recent memory.

Known for his powerful social commentary in US and Get Out, Jordan Peele reinvents the summer blockbuster through a neo-sci-fi western that looks at society’s obsession with spectacle.

Damn the white-washed history, and the capitalist traps of Hollywood’s fortune and fame. The beast has no more power here.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

It's a good movie, but perhaps it's time to take some of our bloated expectations off Peele as a filmmaker.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 16, 2023

The film ultimately spends what feels like an eternity in a climactic and rather confusing confrontation that feels elaborate but fails to ratchet up the tension.

Full Review | May 30, 2023

A sci-fi horror flick that raises some interesting questions about why aliens might come to Earth and what for.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 28, 2023

Director-writer Peele clearly knows the business of suspending disbelief. I say “yup” to ‘Nope.’

Full Review | Original Score: A | Apr 16, 2023

Beneath the interesting and strange tale of aliens and UAPs is Peele shining a bright light from the sky onto Hollywood and American pop culture’s exploitation of Black people and animals.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 7, 2023

There's so much considered detail and nuance that is weaved into these fantastical themes which is bolstered by a lot of the characters taking control of their own narrative.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 23, 2023

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Nope review: Space is the place in Jordan Peele's subversive sci-fi update

Don't look up: The fertile mind behind Get Out and Us explores unfriendly skies — and more earthbound threats — in his far-out latest.

In the arid, IP-fatigued movie landscape of 2022, Jordan Peele feels like some kind of unicorn: an auteur filmmaker whose mere presence above the title elicits a kind of collective thrill in both audiences and critics that no mad multiverse or reanimated dinosaurs can really match. And he's essentially done it with just two films over five years, cementing his signature style — spooky, high-concept, socially astute — with a speed and clarity of purpose that most directors take half a lifetime to nail down.

Nope (in theaters July 22) arrives accordingly with no small set of expectations, and not a little bit of mystery: The 35 million-plus people who have viewed at least one of two versions of the trailer online will come in with the idea that it is perhaps a play on an old-school UFO movie, or at least something vaguely extraterrestrial. And they know that it marks a reunion with his Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya , who is now, like Peele , an Oscar winner . (They've both still been under-served by the Academy, but that's a story for another time.)

It's also the first lead role of this caliber for Keke Palmer , a onetime Nickelodeon kid whose prickly, dynamic presence on the sidelines of films like 2019's Hustlers seemed to beg for a bigger closeup. Here, she gets to hold the restless center of nearly every scene she's in as Emerald Haywood, the showboating sister of Kaluuya's more cautious, introspective Otis Junior. Otis Senior (Keith David) is not long for this world, or at least this screen: He dies in the opening scene, felled by some mysterious space-junk detritus that drops from the sky one day on the family's ranch outside Los Angeles. ("What's a bad miracle, they got a word for that?" OJ asks ruefully at one point, looking like he already knows the answer.) The Haywoods hail from generations who, as Emerald brightly explains to a roomful of blank-eyed industry types, helped bring horse-training to Hollywood, earning an inaugural place for Black wranglers in movie lore.

That and five dollars won't buy them a bag of carrots, though, if they can't get their stallions to behave on a green screen. And even back at the ranch, the livestock still seem spooked. But aren't animals always the first to know when something's off? There's a man named Ricky "Jupe" Park ( Minari' s Steven Yeun) , busy running his own hustle at a retro Western-themed amusement park down the road, who may have ideas about the strange weather hanging over the valley. Jupe was once a child star himself, until something went terribly wrong with a chimpanzee on a sitcom set more than 20 years ago; now he works a sort of rhinestone-cowboy shtick with his wife and kids, though he's always eager to revisit the old glory days if somebody asks, or even if they don't.

Revealing much more about what follows seems like an unnecessary spoiler, though it also feels fair to say that Peele has never leaned this close to early Spielberg (or if you're feeling less charitable, mid-period M. Night Shyamalan). His screenplay — threaded through with flashbacks and unhurried character moments — is for a long time a tease, both elliptical and explicit when it comes to the central mystery, though it's clear he's absorbed a lifetime of Close Encounters lore, and much darker visitations too. The casting, as always, is on point: Palmer's Emerald is loose and funny and kinetically alive, the kind of final-girl hero most scary movies only feint at creating, and Kaluuya remains one of the most fascinatingly interior actors to watch on screen. His OJ doesn't speak much and often moves even less, but there's so much going on within him that the eye never wanders; his stillness is a centrifugal force.

The wide-lens cinematography, by Hoyte Van Hoytema ( Interstellar , Dunkirk ), is gorgeously expansive, and Michael Abel's score clatters and shivers. The prevailing mood is a looming, sun-drenched tension (as in Ari Aster's Midsommar , daylight doesn't signal safety here). For all of the film's escalating supernatural events, though, what's less clearly drawn, and will likely prove less satisfying to a plot-hungry public, are the whys and hows of its conclusion. Peele's scripts have always felt like meta-text; this one toggles between classic genre stuff and a deliberately fragmented play on certain all-American tropes — flying saucers, sitcoms, jump-scare terror — filtered through a fresh, keenly self-aware lens. As a sci-fi fable, Nope feels both more slippery and less viscerally satisfying than the relatively straightforward horror of Get Out or even 2019's Us , but it still sticks. The truth is out there, or up there, in that curiously immovable cloud that looms like a cotton-ball anvil above the Haywood ranch; it's Peele's prerogative to build his world below it, and leave the rest. Grade: B+

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• Nope star Keke Palmer says Jordan Peele offered her the role after a FaceTime call
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‘nope’ review: jordan peele’s rapturous and suspenseful sci-fi ride.

A menacing force threatens a Southern California horse ranch in the director’s third film, starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Steven Yeun.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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Nope , Jordan Peele ’s latest offering, slinks and slithers from the clutches of snap judgment. It avoids the comfort of tidy conclusions too. This elusive third feature from the director of Get Out and Us peacocks its ambitions (and budget) while indulging in narrative tangents and detours. It is sprawling and vigorous. Depending on your appetite for the heady and sonorous, it will either feel frustratingly perplexing or strike you as a work of unquestionable genius.

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Release date: Friday, July 22 (Universal) Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Keith David Director-screenwriter: Jordan Peele

Even when parts of it don’t jell, Nope is a rapturous watch. This film, about a pair of sibling horse wranglers who encounter an uncanny force on their ranch, covers a wide range of themes: Hollywood’s obsession with and addiction to spectacle, the United States’ inurement to violence, the siren call of capitalism, the legacy of the Black cowboy and the myth of the American West. Aided by a strong cast, led impressively by Daniel Kaluuya , Keke Palmer , Steven Yeun and Brandon Perea, Peele plunges us into a cavernous, twisted reality.

Agua Dulce is a serene tract of Southern California, where large, billowy clouds appear to caress the tips of sandy, burnt-orange mountains. It’s also home to Otis Haywood Jr. (Kaluuya), or O.J. for short, and his father ( Keith David ). The two men spend their days caring for their stable of mares and stallions and running Haywood Hollywood Horses, the oldest Black-owned horse training service in the industry. After his father dies in a strange accident, O.J., a quiet wrangler, reunites with his estranged sister Emerald (Palmer), or Em, to inherit the business.

Em arrives to the shoot late, but her energy is infectious. She loves the spotlight and hungers for easy routes to fame. Most of the on-set crew are immediately taken by her boisterous energy, her toothy grin and talk-show-host delivery of fun facts: Did you know that the Haywoods are the direct descendants of the unnamed Black jockey in Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 The Race Horse , the first film ever made? Now you do.

Behind Em stands a tortured O.J., gripping the reins of his horse. In a later scene, he admonishes Em for her style, for promoting her multihyphenate career (actor-singer-stuntperson). Em reminds him that running the ranch is her side gig, not her dream. The Haywood siblings’ relationship bears obvious scars of past wounds, but Peele shortchanges audiences when it comes to why. Their suspicious communication style establishes their inability to work as a team, but the characters themselves would have benefited from greater depth and dimension. Kaluuya and an equally impressive Palmer wring as much as they can from O.J. and Em, but they needed another scene or two to burrow into the precipitating events of their fractured relationship.

When O.J. and Em begin piecing together why strange things have been happening on their ranch, their instinct is to make money off it. In their attempts to “capture the impossible,” they meet Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), a recently heartbroken employee at a big-box electronics chain. (Watching the three work together, brainstorming and testing strategies, may bring to mind the teamwork of the characters played by Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee in the 1972 film Buck and the Preacher , which inverted Hollywood’s tradition of the Western by casting Black actors in the main roles.) A late, and unlikely, addition to this rag-tag crew is Antlers Host (Michael Wincott), a cantankerous and revered cinematographer. Although their individual motivations seem different, each of them is driven by a desire for money, fame or some combination of both.

Full credits

Distributor: Universal Pictures Production company: Monkeypaw Productions Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Keith David Director-screenwriter: Jordan Peele Producers: Jordan Peele, Ian Cooper Executive producers: Robert Graf, Win Rosenfeld Director of photography: Hoyte van Hoytema Production designer: Ruth De Jong Costume designer: Alex Bovaird Editor: Nicholas Monsour Composer: Michael Abels Casting director: Carmen Cuba

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Jordan Peele channels ’50s sci-fi scares into another stylishly crafted and hugely entertaining modern horror

It can’t be easy being Jordan Peele. His first movie came from nowhere to make a motza, land Oscar nominations and create an entirely new genre for your know-it-all mate to drop into pub chat. Now every time he makes another one of his social horrors, we expect the Earth: entertainment, a message and a dozen or so Easter eggs to chew over on Reddit. Happily, the writer-director has the game to back it up. Us , his satisfyingly freaky, if sketchily-plotted follow-up to Get Out , was a slight backwards step, but his dusty new sci-fi horror is a belter. 

If those first two movies riffed on the horror classics of the ’70s – Kubrick, Polanski, The Stepford Wives et al – Nope is amped-up on the science-fiction paranoia of the 1950s and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone , as it unleashes a malevolent force or entity (that I’m absolutely not going to spoil) on a brother and sister in California’s remote Santa Clarita Valley. 

Those siblings – Daniel Kaluuya’s taciturn OJ Haywood and his sparky sis Emerald ( Hustler ’s Keke Palmer, great here) – are Hollywood’s only Black horse trainers, whose business dealings with snooty white film people are complicated when their legendary animal wrangling dad (Keith David) is killed by a coin falling mysteriously from the sky. 

Soon, it becomes apparent that something – or someone – is out there. With help from a lovelorn electrical showroom employee (Brandon Perea, a real find), they wire up a CCTV system in the hope of catching it on camera. It’ll be ‘the Oprah shot’ as they put it, for obvious reasons. Of course, they’ve radically underestimated what they, and their neighbour ( Minari ’s Steven Yeun), a former child star called Ricky Park who runs a Gold Rush-styled theme park across the valley, are up against. For a film about how our hunger for spectacle is both innate and intrinsically self-destructive, it would hardly do to neglect the visuals, and Peele elegantly charts Nope ’s incremental horrors in majestic widescreen. Interstellar cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s IMAX camera regularly has us scanning the sky for signs, like Old Testament prophets. Peele is not above the odd jump scare, either, though mostly Nope is unsettling rather than scary (and one shot, in particular, is seriously unsettling). 

That creeping sense of the uncanny is underpinned by Michael Abels’s terrific orchestral score – all jittery strings and drums like earthquakes – and some magnificently loud and unearthly sound design. Lupita Nyong’o’s hellish croak in Us is officially no longer the most terrifying sound in the Peele canon. 

It’s mostly unsettling rather than scary – and one shot is   seriously   unsettling 

He’s a filmmaker, of course, who loves to pepper his movies with clues, fake outs and red herrings, leaving you to figure out what’s important and what isn’t. But his webs can be almost too opaque at times, and while a digression into a young Ricky’s traumatic, bloody experience on a TV sitcom is suitably disturbing, the thread connecting it with the main story is frustratingly thin.

By its final showdown, Nope is only a twirling six-shooter away from turning into one of cinema’s very few horror-westerns. That climactic sequence left me a bit cold after the eerie, uncomfortable brilliance of what comes before – the movie’s carefully crafted menace evaporates somewhat in the desert glare – and Peele’s endings remain a rare Achilles heel.  But what comes before is so overflowing with ideas – about the erasure of Black culture, our relationship with past traumas, and the underseen side of the moviemaking business – and so brimming with visual flair, it puts most other blockbusters in the shade. Spend two hours watching it and a couple more unpacking it – with or without that know-it-all mate. In US theaters Jul 22 and UK cinemas Aug 12 .

Cast and crew

• Director: Jordan Peele
• Screenwriter: Jordan Peele
• Brandon Perea
• Daniel Kaluuya
• Keke Palmer
• Steven Yeun

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Summary Residents in a lonely gulch of inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.

Directed By : Jordan Peele

Written By : Jordan Peele

Where to Watch

Daniel Kaluuya

Keke palmer, emerald haywood, brandon perea, angel torres, michael wincott, antlers holst, steven yeun, ricky 'jupe' park, wrenn schmidt, keith david, otis haywood sr., devon graye, ryder muybridge, terry notary, barbie ferreira, donna mills, bonnie clayton, fynn bachman, eddie jemison, young ricky 'jupe' park, sophia coto, mary jo elliott, jennifer lafleur, phyllis mayberry, margaret houston, andrew patrick ralston, tom bogan, brett houston, lincoln lambert, kolton park, pierce kang, phoenix park, roman gross, critic reviews.

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Jordan Peele subverts expectations (again) with 'Nope'

Aisha Harris

Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in Nope. Universal Studios hide caption

Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in Nope.

When the first trailer for Nope dropped, viewers almost immediately swarmed social media trying to interpret the opaque montage of shots – shots which revealed virtually nothing about the plot of the movie. This is partially of Jordan Peele's own doing, because his first two feature films as a writer-director, Get Out and Us , set up high expectations for twisty, multilayered social commentary by way of popcorn thrills. Even more so it's a product of the current cultural landscape, where seemingly every big movie or TV series is laden with twists and Easter eggs and spoiler-y cameos, lending itself to fervent Reddit threads breaking down the creator's underlying meaning.

Movie Interviews

Jordan peele looked into the mirror and saw the evil inside 'us'.

Code Switch

The horror, the horror: "get out" and the place of race in scary movies.

Peele surely knows by now what audiences anticipate from him and other filmmakers like him, which is probably why – once again – he's managed to subvert our expectations. Nope isn't so much a plot-twisty experience to be meticulously deconstructed as it is a consistently surprising one. It's a journey that's less social commentary-forward than its predecessors, yet still stacked with plenty of meaning to tease out after you've left the theater.

First and foremost, he wants us to be in awe. And on that front, he doesn't disappoint.

The film opens by quoting a Bible verse from the book of Nahum: "I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle," followed by a quiet, eerie scene involving an animal that's best left unsaid for first-time viewers; the better to creep you out in the moment. Eventually, Nope drops us into the world of OJ and Emerald Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer), a pair of siblings dealing with the loss of their father Otis, Sr. (Keith David) while trying to maintain the family business. Haywood Hollywood Horses is their company, a horse wrangling outfit that's worked with TV and film productions for years and is based in the small California desert valley town of Agua Dulce.

Mysterious events and sightings from above begin to occur on the family's ranch, and the hard-hustling Emerald sees an opportunity to make some extra cash by getting the perfect shot of a UFO to sell online. Soon, she and OJ have tricked their land out with camera gear with the help of Angel (Brandon Perea), a tech salesman and quirky supernatural enthusiast who has a plethora of time on his hands. (His actress girlfriend just broke up with him, much to his dismay.) But the UFO poses more of a threat than they initially realize, and soon the three find themselves on the offensive and enlist the help of an old-school filmmaker – the kind who still shoots on actual film – played by Michael Wincott.

Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!

Not my job: jordan peele gets quizzed on the teletubbies.

True to Peele's sensibilities, Nope seems to be borrowing from a plethora of cinematic references: Spielberg (particularly Jaws and E.T. ), M. Night Shyamalan ( Signs ), and Alien , just to name a few. Kaluuya plays OJ almost like the strong, silent cowboy heroes of Old Hollywood westerns, a man of few words unless the occasion truly calls for it, and the kind of guy who keeps his feelings close to the vest. This contrasts nicely with Palmer's fast-talking, looser Emerald; she's the firecracker in this powder keg, injecting energy, wit, and comedic relief into a character whose ideas on how to keep the family's legacy alive run up against her brother's intentions.

As the movie trots along, the plot is always a couple steps ahead of where the mind may go, and – at least upon first viewing – not all of the threads necessarily hold together if you think about them for too long. (For instance, a storyline involving Steven Yeun as an amusement park owner and former child star is very effective in echoing the movie's themes, but could also have been more developed.) I also suspect that, like Us , this will stir up a lot of debate about what message Peele might be trying to impart to his audiences, though I'd argue there's less there there to debate over in this case. (On the other hand, maybe that in itself is something to ponder.)

This is not to say Nope is slight; with this movie, he's contributing a new entry to the rich history of Black westerns (the Sidney Poitier-directed Buck and the Preacher is visually referenced, for one) and tapping into themes about a cultural obsession with taming nature and profiting off of pageantry. It's also significant to note how Peele playfully speaks to Black audiences and their frequent responses to horror movies through the clever title and OJ and Emerald's actions – like Regina Hall's ever-skeptical Brenda in the Scary Movie franchise, these characters are wary and smart about situations that are obviously ominous. "Nope" isn't just a phrase, it's a way of survival.

But the aims strongly prioritize thrills and mood-setting. Aesthetically, this is his most ambitious feature yet, with intensely crafted action sequences, breathtaking visuals courtesy of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, and a superbly immersive sound design by Johnnie Burn. Peele seems to be having more fun with his audience than ever before as a feature filmmaker, and in turn, it makes for a fun watch.

In an era of sequels, prequels, reboots, and franchises-within-franchises, it's refreshing to see a filmmaker working in this mode, evoking familiarity while keeping viewers on their toes. Nope has only solidified my anticipation for anything and everything Peele does next.

• Jordan Peele
• Daniel Kaluuya
• Keke Palmer

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Nope review: a haunting & humorous twist on hollywood sci-fi.

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Nope , Jordan Peele's new movie about a "bad miracle," offers a thrilling and humorous twist on Hollywood sci-fi - and serves as a meta-love letter to filmmaking. Fans of Peele's prior horror entries, Get Out and Us , are likely to enjoy the filmmaker's latest offering; though, it's worth noting that, while still full of profound and layered ideas,  Nope is closer in execution to the horror-comedy mix of Get Out than Us (which, although profound and more nuanced, was slightly more difficult for moviegoers to digest). Thematically, everything ties together but some plot threads are looser than others - serving the movie as an experience (packed with foreshadowing, homage, and clever ties to film history) more than the plot, on occasion.

Nope posits the unnamed Black jockey featured in Eadweard Muybridge's pre-motion picture photo series, "The Horse in Motion," founded a horse training ranch for the purpose of supplying the burgeoning film industry with horses for production. Generations later and Haywood's Hollywood Horses falls on rough times, following a freak incident that critically injures family patriarch Otis Haywood Sr. (played by Keith David). Without their father to manage the business (and fickle Hollywood producers who would rather use CGI than real horses in their productions), OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his younger sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) struggle to keep the ranch afloat - resorting to selling off their beloved horses one at a time to former child-actor turned rodeo showman Ricky "Jupe" Park ( Steven Yeun ). However, when the Haywood horses begin breaking out of their stables and disappearing into the night, OJ begins to take notice of an increasing number of strange occurrences and mysterious sounds on the property - that might just provide an opportunity to save the ranch (in more ways than one).

Related:  Nope Trailer Finally Reveals Plot Of Jordan Peele's New Movie

Peele's return to the director chair is a highly successful one - shaking off concerns that the filmmaker might stumble in his junior outing (mostly due to surface-level pre-release comparisons between Nope and M. Night Shyamalan's third horror film,  Signs ). Nevertheless, Peele delivers a layered subversion of horror movie (and this time science-fiction) tropes with well-realized characters that, once again, recontextualizes traditionally white story beats through a Black POV - to amusing and penetrating results. Where  Get Out is Peele's most entertaining and accessible film, and  Us remains the filmmaker's most ambitious and complex effort,  Nope  raises the bar in a number of interesting ways, perfectly balancing humor, suspense, and payoff, including several scenes that rely on masterful use of restraint and non-action. Without going into specifics, Peele's conceptualization of the movie's main threat is at the same time haunting, beautiful, and genuinely disturbing, injecting a number of unique ideas and epic visuals that transform the film's genre inspirations.

That said, at times Nope leans too heavily into homage and thematic juxtaposition - which, like any thoughtful piece of cinema, will reward repeat viewers with intriguing motifs to unpack. Still, moviegoers who are hoping to switch off their brains for an entertaining horror thrill-ride will find that select aspects of  Nope  (especially Gordy, an ape character played by Planet of the Apes series actor Terry Notary) don't outright connect. Again, this isn't to say that these elements aren't worthy of inclusion (they absolutely are) but, given a significant amount of emphasis and runtime are dedicated to them, they result in a hefty price for certain moviegoers to pay - a price that, when it comes to these tangents, will leave certain viewers more confused than exhilarated.

Peele's prior films provided a showcase for memorable characters as well as great performances and Nope is no exception. Breakout Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya is back in the leading role of OJ - and it is Kaluuya that sells several of the film's most outrageous and tense scenes. Kaluuya plays OJ as stoic, but tender, making for an especially entertaining mix when the buttoned-up character is thrust into an increasingly bizarre situation (and series of encounters with the villain's malevolent threat). A scene in which the actor actually says "Nope" sums up why Peele's take on horror is so refreshing - and, along with another intense scene in which Kaluuya is stuck inside his truck, are sure to illicit some genuinely cathartic laughs (in the face of impending death).

Similarly, Keke Palmer ( Scream: The TV Series ) delivers a charming turn as Emerald - OJ's aspiring actor-director-stunt-woman younger sister who is as outgoing as OJ is understated. She's a scene-stealer and served well by Peele's writing and direction - who provides Palmer with a rich character arc that, by the end of the film, unleashes a transformed and downright steely Emerald upon the third act.

Supporting actors Brandon Perea, Steven Yeun, and Michael Wilcott are mostly confined to exposition and comic relief - making room for Kaluuya and Palmer to shine. Yet, Perea's tech guy-turned-accomplice to OJ and Emerald, Angel Torres, is a standout - especially in his scenes and banter with Keke Palmer . Meanwhile, Yeun ( The Walking Dead ) does his best to turn exposition machine Ricky "Jupe" Park into a defined character; unfortunately, Jupe's child actor backstory is heavily tied to a set piece that does more to build motif than advance the core storyline. As a result, while Yeun has some great moments, his overall contributions are a bit of a mixed bag.

Nope is another insightful and inventive twist on a genre staple from Peele. It's packed with great performances and entertaining characters - who react in unique ways to the movie's unique threat. All the same, select aspects and characters do not come full circle by the end, resulting in a movie that flirts with interesting tangents but doesn't always deliver a worthwhile return on time spent. Still, there's no one making movies like Peele and Nope is a welcome addition to his catalogue - one that, for all the reasons it might be overindulgent to certain viewers, provides a lot for fans to analyze and unpack.

NEXT:  Nope Cast Reacts To Theories For Jordan Peele Movie In Hilarious Video

Nope opens in theaters July 22. The film is 135 long and is rated R for language throughout and some violence/bloody images.

Key Release Dates

Our rating:.

• Movie Reviews
• 4 star movies

Where to Watch

Daniel Kaluuya (OJ Haywood) Keke Palmer (Emerald Haywood) Brandon Perea (Angel Torres) Michael Wincott (Antlers Holst) Steven Yeun (Ricky 'Jupe' Park) Wrenn Schmidt (Amber Park) Keith David (Otis Haywood Sr.) Devon Graye (Ryder Muybridge) Terry Notary (Gordy) Barbie Ferreira (Nessie)

Jordan Peele

The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.

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Nope Review

22 Jul 2022

It’s often said that showbiz can eat you alive. Jordan Peele ’s third film runs with that metaphor further than anyone might have expected. For his latest sci-fi horror, Peele characterises the film industry as a ruthless beast, and wonders about who gets led into its jaws, and for whose benefit. In Nope , the audience itself becomes a vast monster, demanding to be entertained by personal and historical trauma, commodified for their viewing pleasure. The film makes visceral horror of the nightmare of being consumed by something unfathomably larger than you — whether that’s by a national audience or a flying Lovecraftian terror. But it’s also a celebration of film crew — those in the less glamorous roles fundamental to creating cinematic spectacle. Peele is no stranger to turning American pathologies into demonic monsters: Get Out found uncanny frights in white liberal racism via Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and The Stepford Wives ; while Us reimagined C.H.U.D. as a reflection on class warfare and displacement.

Nope looks at the multiple meanings of “spectacle”. It unpacks cinema’s romanticisation of the American frontier, itself a site of historical trauma. The dominance of white producers, feeding their movie and television machine with the misery of minorities, is played just as terrifyingly as the later, more uncanny horrors; with this, Peele turns whiteness into another monster. But he isn’t too preoccupied with what Nope signifies. It’s satisfyingly resistant to the temptation of recent horror movies that overexplain their meaning, limiting themselves to a single interpretation.

Peele is masterful at manipulating and restricting perspective, delighting in leaving just enough out of view to allow the imagination to worsen the horror.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer show delightful chemistry as OJ and Emerald ‘Em’ Haywood, children of a renowned Hollywood horse trainer, apparently descendants of the jockey in the 1878 photography series The Horse In Motion (a key milestone in motion-picture history). Between clashes of Palmer’s manic energy and Kaluuya’s cool stoicism, their close encounter with the unknown becomes an obsession and a potential solution for their inner turmoil, maybe even a route to fame. Another dynasty marred by tragedy is included: Steven Yeun plays former child star ‘Jupe’ Park, attempting to leave behind a tabloid incident by taking refuge in a nostalgic, whitewashed, Gold Rush-styled theme park. Also fascinating is genre cinema legend Michael Wincott, playing a Quint-from- Jaws -type as a hermit cinematographer, ominously growling a rendition of the 1958 novelty alien song ‘The Purple People Eater’, among other poetic and vaguely creepy turns of phrase.

While there’s commonality with Jaws in its quest to capture something monstrous on film (the sky taking the place of the sea), Nope doesn’t limit itself to straightforward pastiche, embracing its influences but looking to make something new of them. With impressive precision Peele remixes a broad range of influences, including the incomprehensible terror of Lovecraft, more niche genre fare like Ron Underwood’s Tremors , classic Hollywood, and even beyond, such as a direct reference to Akira , through thrilling replication of the famous bike-slide shot (perhaps his tribute to a cancelled remake he was once linked to).

Peele’s regular composer Michael Abels fashions a score that cuts between the plucky tension of past work and something more grandiose, recalling the motifs of classical Westerns. Visually, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema opens up the frame through IMAX photography, and even with that newfound height, Peele is masterful at manipulating and restricting perspective, delighting in leaving just enough out of view to allow the imagination to worsen the horror. One such moment, featuring Steven Yeun, is among the most exciting set-pieces of the year, an astonishing moment of pure, visceral sci-fi terror. Despite some often claustrophobic horror, van Hoytema and Peele even make bright, wide-open spaces feel threatening as characters struggle to catch a glimpse of the terror from above.

Through all of this, Nope sees Peele distinguish between the making of entertainment for an audience — a ravenous, uncaring beast, bloodying its teeth with the spectacle of other people’s lives — and the act of filmmaking for yourself, capturing something impossible on camera, making a dream real. In the exploration of these ideas, the mythmaking of the Haywood ranch dovetails with Peele tearing away classic cinematic imagery from white-supremacist, manifest-destiny roots. The director repurposes it as a spectacle of the more triumphant kind, framing Kaluuya as a cowboy in a bright-orange The Scorpion King crew hoodie. In defining such liberation he wrangles film and television production history as the Haywoods do horses, pulling in all of his favourite cinema and lovingly demolishing and rebuilding it. Nope is as much a celebration of what’s great about film as it is a parody of its monstrous tendencies.

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Movie Review – Nope (2022)

September 21, 2022 by Robert Kojder

Nope , 2022.

Written and Directed by Jordan Peele. Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Wrenn Schmidt, Barbie Ferreira, Donna Mills, Terry Notary, Jennifer Lafleur, Sophia Coto, Ryan W. Garcia, Andrew Patrick Ralston, Gloria Cole, Conor Kawalski, Lincoln Lambert, Keith David, Devon Graye, Oz Perkins, Jacob Kim, and Eddie Jemison.

The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.

Nope has scope, and that’s about it. That’s also one way of saying Jordan Peele, the director, showed up and that Jordan Peele, the writer, made a mess of his script. This is frustrating for several reasons, chief among them being that the one-two punch of Get Out and Us are incredible racially charged horror flicks imbued with the kind of uproarious comedy that helped him make a name for himself on Comedy Central’s Key and Peele . In contrast, Nope probably could have used a lighter, more satirical touch, given what the characters are trying to accomplish and what the narrative is trying to reveal about society and filmmaking. 

The biggest bummer is that Nope doesn’t have much interesting to say in the end. It’s also impossible to say anything profound that emotionally resonates when the narrative swings back and forth like a pendulum to different characters and subplots (with no grace whatsoever and a baffling chapter structure that consistently fades to black during sequences that should be sustaining suspense and excitement), one of which that is trying to criticize Hollywood (to be fair, that’s baked into the core of the story as well) but amounts to nothing more than an unbelievable misfire that uses some of its traumatized and disfigured characters as symbolic props rather than for a definite purpose.

Even worse, the backstory behind it is so ludicrous and without meaningful purpose (which would allow the ludicrous part to be forgiven) that it mostly comes across like Jordan Peele’s brilliant Key and Peele script doctor sketch ripping apart Gremlins 2 (crazed killer monkeys?! Oh my God, I love it! It’s in the movie).

In his defense, Jordan Peele shouldn’t be pigeonholed into biting racial commentary for every project. But his redirection towards tackling the Hollywood system does work in the film’s opening act, which also introduces us to rancher OJ (an effectively minimalistic turn from the great Daniel Kaluuya, although perhaps a bit too restrained) and his sister Emerald (rising star Keke Palmer). The latter is far more in sync with Jordan Peele’s love letter attempt at filmmaking and the appeal of getting “an impossible shot.” Strangely, after the first 20 minutes, Peele mostly abandons insight on how Hollywood treats these Black horse wranglers and how they have historically done so for generations.

Nope switches gears from the struggles of financially saving the ranch via thanklessly lending Hollywood their horses for projects, to seeking money and fame by snapping photographic evidence of a UFO that the quiet OJ spots while chasing after one of their prized horses that mysteriously run off in the night (almost as if it’s terrified of something coming and exclaiming “nope” as many of the human characters repeatedly do during scenes of tension). Again, obtaining this evidence is referred to as “the impossible shot,” which could be an indictment of the sad state of blockbuster filmmaking; get your money shot, sell it in the trailer, rake in the money, and fuck having a coherent narrative or even decipherable action.

Metaphorical waxing aside, obtaining visual UFO proof is also intended to bring OJ and Emerald closer again, as the siblings have been estranged ever since their dad died an inexplicable tragic death on the ranch, seemingly related to whatever is in the sky. They are also joined by a nosy electronic store technician Angel (Brandon Perea), providing some fun and levity while installing high-end digital security cameras.

It’s also shocking that Jordan Peele seems to miss that more laughs should come into play (especially since everyone involved has fine comedic chemistry during the few and far between jokey bits), not treating the story too seriously, especially since both thematic presence and characterization are scarce here. By not doing so, everything but the action falls flat. Turning an alien-invasion flick around into obsession with the unknown from its protagonists requires them to be compelling and richly drawn, which they are in some respects but mostly underdeveloped.

However, there are assuredly some fascinatingly eerie observations, such as a cloud that has stood still for six months, power outages, and intense moments stemming from UFO-responsible tornadoes. And when it comes down to it, the action sequences are involving, with the right amount of clearness, clever obstructions, and blocking until it’s time to reveal what these characters are up against.

Peele should also buy composer Michael Abels and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema something nice for Christmas, as they single-handedly save Nope from no return. The former laces his chilling score with a Western twist, whereas the latter excels at capturing awe-inspiring shots such as a horse outrunning something across a vast dusty landscape. Still, their contributions are not enough to make any of this engage on a narrative or character level.

Oddly, some parts of Nope that feel out of place indeed turn out to be the freakiest (ridiculously talented motion capture artist Terry Notary is also something for that). It’s enough to wish that we got to spend more time with Steven Yeun’s former child actor Jupe, who witnessed something traumatic on-set that doesn’t feel fully explored in the present day. Anyway, he now makes a living running a Western-themed amusement park that seems to be the only sign of human life near the ranch.

Not only is this a scattershot narrative, but Peele falls prey to what he is grinding an ax against; the Hollywood system and its obsession with impossible shots over concise storytelling. As is, Nope is gorgeous and filled with a riveting spectacle that’s human element is lost in epic ambition. It’s indescribably disappointing how one feels nothing even when Jordan Peele’s climactic suspense is in overdrive and superbly crafted. At one point, OJ asks his sister Emerald what a “bad miracle” is; the answer is Nope .

Flickering Myth Rating  – Film: ★ ★  / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Nope (2022) Movie: Review & Ending Explained

Nope (2022) review: jordan peele’s genre throwback is an intense, ambitious love letter to the movies.

Even if Nope (2022) is more highly-budgeted, and incidentally more ambitious and harder to decipher, than writer-director Jordan Peele’s previous two films, it’s still just as much a product of the current cultural climate as anything Peele has done. This is especially true in the sense that Peele doesn’t aim so squarely for any kind of political metaphor so much as he takes to task the history of the moving image in its 150-year entirety, gleefully exercising his influences while unabashedly finding the sinister humor within the exploitative, truth-stretching practices that have kept the entertainment industry, and much of American culture, afloat all the while.

Combining the best elements of sci-fi horror, neo-Westerns, and the satire Peele and his comedy partner, Keegan-Michael Key, made an entire brand out of, Nope is as strange of a beast as the unexplained presence that haunts the Californian desert valley of Agua Dulce from up above, and Peele wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s every reason to believe that he’s offering too much of so many things to the point that the film should’ve collapsed in its conceptual phase, but his earned indulgence is balanced by his restraint and his understanding of how much humanity has come to value the immediate gratification of spectacle, even if it means trying (and failing) to tame the untamable.

The latter element is of particular significance to Nope (2022) as Peele filters it through the story of OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald “Em” Haywood (Keke Palmer), a pair of black siblings who train horses for Hollywood, and whose ranch has fallen into dire straits since the death of their father (Keith David) under mysterious circumstances. In their father’s absence, their primary source of income is their selling of horses to Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child actor turned carnie who runs a local Western-themed amusement park.

Things gradually go from bad to worse for the Haywoods as they soon find their land playing host to an unidentified flying object, but good to great for audiences eagerly anticipating how Peele intends to meet the high expectations set in place by the success of Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) . The key word is “gradually,” as this extraterrestrial phenomenon descends upon its newfound territory and beams up what it can find in a series of tautly paced and utterly suspenseful sequences that bring about obvious, almost on-the-nose parallels to both Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) in the best way possible. With cinematographer Hoyte von Hoytema taking a break from his place as Christopher Nolan’s go-to in order to capture the film’s sprawling landscapes, and with composer Michael Abels’ ominous score picking up the rest of the slack in the way the Haywoods’ otherworldly adversary is presented, Nope (2022) is a film that’s as enthralling to look at as it is enticing to look away from.

However, Peele’s debts to a young Steven Spielberg lay just as much in the spaces in between the moments when he promotes his belief in the “less is more” concept both visually and sonically. Even under the guise of a summer popcorn thriller, he grants depth to OJ, Emerald, and even Jupe with the kind of precision that critical acclaim and a Best Original Screenplay Oscar surely indicate, and his ensemble makes a fitting impression with such rewarding material.

True to the film’s contemporary Western landscape, Kaluuya is a cowboy in street clothes, a response to the Black Cowboy subgenre that Peele plants blink-and-you’ll-miss nods to within the confines of the narrative. Playing the quiet, more reserved sibling who witnessed his father’s death firsthand, Kaluuya keeps his feelings buried deep until perilous circumstances call for an emotional response. He creates a nice contrast to his more eccentric and scene-stealing sister played by Palmer, who embodies Em’s increasingly ridiculous ideas for capturing the apparent flying saucer on film, which includes hiring a down-on-his-luck techie (Brandon Perea) and an enigmatic cinematographer (Michael Wincott), for this is the only way to have definitive proof of what they are seeing — and a hefty financial payout to accommodate their efforts. Em is by far and away the optimist of the duo, but her desire for an “Oprah shot” more often than not masks the burden that she, too, feels for inheriting the historically poor hand dealt to her family due to their chosen line of work. It’s by no means a coincidence that Peele frames a first contact story with monetary stakes around a black family.

As Em explains to an indifferent film crew with salesman-like passion, Haywood Hollywood Horses is a family-run business with the secondary purpose of preserving the forgotten legacy of their great-great-great grandfather, a Bahamian jockey whose appearance in Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion , considered one of the first moving images ever produced, did little to solidify his identity after Muybridge went on to become a filmmaking pioneer all the way back in the 1880s. This is just one of the ingenious bits of historical fiction that Peele conjures up in his exploration of who and what comes at the expense of giving an audience what they want. The other bit of significance is Jupe’s detailing of his childhood experiences as a sitcom star, which came to an abrupt end following a horrific, if preventable, tragedy. Even if these experiences bear little effect on the main plot, they are critical to the commentary Peele swings for, and it’s here that Yeun makes a valuable supporting contribution, delivering some of the film’s darkest and simultaneously funniest dialogue as he contends with his past in an apathetic business by allowing it to be repackaged into something it so clearly isn’t.

That act of repackaging is something that Peele himself seemingly thrives on throughout Nope (2022) , but in a way that’s not quite as morbid as it is introspective. This certainly isn’t the first time Peele has explored childhood trauma or historical precedents through the lens of a genre film, just as he’s not the first filmmaker of his caliber to use an alien invasion as an allegory for something more profound. But when we live in an age when tastes have become so simple that mainstream audiences will find endless, if questionable, pleasure in sequel after sequel and remake after remake, that Peele can make something that realigns familiar genre beats from multiple sources into something that is as fresh in its heterogeneity as it is biting in its condemnation of the business he’s fortunate enough to be a part of is an accomplishment in and of itself. It’s only further evidence that his filmography would not work quite as well in a time and place other than right now.

Nope (2022) Plot Summary & Synopsis: 

What is haywood hollywood horses.

Nope (2022) begins on the Haywood Hollywood Horses ranch, owned and operated by Otis Hayood, Sr. (David) and his son, Otis “OJ” Haywood, Jr. (Kaluuya) Otis, Sr. claims that he is the great-great grandson of the black horse jockey from Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion photographs, which his children eventually use to market themselves as entertainment royalty in order to ensure the success of their fading business. What starts as a normal day for the Haywoods takes a sudden turn when Otis, Sr. dies after being struck by debris that has fallen from the sky without explanation. 

In the wake of their father’s death, OJ and his sister, Emerald “Em” Haywood (Palmer), inherit the family business and find themselves on-set for a television commercial with renowned cinematographer Antlers Holst (Wincott). After OJ provides the crew and actors with a safety demonstration for their horse, Lucky, a crew member, having not listened to OJ’s rules, fails to earn Lucky’s respect and causes the horse to act erratically. This effectively delays the shoot and causes the Haywoods to be fired. It’s then that Em, who feels little emotional attachment to the horses or the family business, suggests selling the ranch to Jupiter’s Claim, a nearby Western theme park that has already bought a few of the Haywoods’ horses. Though hesitant, OJ eventually agrees to a meeting with the park’s owner, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Yeun), who discusses with OJ and Em the possibility of an acquisition before showing them memorabilia from his time as a child actor.

What is the “ Gordy’s Home Incident”?

Part of Jupe’s memorabilia includes select remnants from his experience on Gordy’s Home , a sitcom in the 1990s starring a trained chimpanzee named Gordy who is adopted by a suburban family. Flashbacks, including one that comprises the opening scene of the film, reveal the horrific turn of events that led to the sitcom’s cancellation despite its success. During a taping of a birthday episode in the show’s second season, a bunch of balloons floated up into the studio’s rafters and popped, causing Gordy to snap and attack his human castmates and crew members. Jupe, having hid under a table while these events unfolded, was one of the few to be spared by the chimp’s uncontrollable rampage. When Gordy, seemingly back to normal and with little recollection of his actions, approached the frightened Jupe and made a friendly gesture toward him, he was shot by Animal Control officers.

Jupe would continue to find modest success as a child star before evolving into a carnival barker as the proprietor of Jupiter’s Claim. In the present, he reveals to OJ and Em that his Gordy’s Home memorabilia is kept in a hidden room in the back of his office, which he charges patrons to view. He explains to them how his success was largely built upon the media coverage surrounding the sitcom, even going so far as to detail a Saturday Night Live sketch that parodied the incident, which featured Scott Wolff as a young Jupe and Chris Kattan as Gordy. Jupe speaks of this sketch with fondness and reverence, clueing the Haywoods, and the audience, into how desensitized Jupe has become to the travesty that would come to define him. Jupiter’s Claim is nothing if not the result of a career born on the back of a nightmare.

How Do the Haywoods Notice the UFO?

Later that night, OJ goes out to his barn after hearing strange noises. While there, he observes three Roswell-esque alien creatures, but quickly discovers that they are just Jupe’s three sons in costume, having been sent to deliver a warning to the Haywoods not to mess with the theme park. Later that night, all the power at the ranch suddenly goes out as OJ sees a strange object similar in shape to a flying saucer barreling through the sky at the same time that one of his horses goes missing. 

To prove it is extraterrestrial intelligence, he and Em go to a Fry’s Electronics, where they meet employee Angel (Perea) and discuss taking a video of the alien to sell. They hire Angel to set up a series of cameras on top of the house and elsewhere on the ranch. After setting up the cameras, OJ sets up a decoy horse with a pennant banner tied around it. The UFO approaches and shuts down the ranch surveillance camera. Unfortunately, a praying mantis lands on the lens of the house camera, blocking the view of the ship, and sucking up the decoy. It flies away with the decoy’s pennants dragging out of its maw and hides behind the clouds. Angel notices that one giant cloud in the sky never moves and deduces that this must be where the UFO takes shelter.

What is Jupe’s Plan for the Horses?

Jupe prepares for a show at Jupiter’s Claim featuring one of the Haywoods’ horses, Clover, in a glass box. Jupe explains that they have been regularly putting on this show, in which he uses the horses as bait to lure “something” out of hiding, for the last six months (since Otis, Sr.’s death). Though he doesn’t specify this “something” as an alien, he alludes to it with the Roswell costumes his kids wear and the alien-themed merchandise sold at the park. After introducing his kids and wife, Jupe introduces his Gordy’s Home co-star and first love, Mary Jo Elliot, whom the audience sees in flashback as one of the actresses who was attacked by Gordy the chimp. She is sitting in the audience, her face covered with a veil and noticeably mangled due to the attack.

Jupe is aware that the presence of the UFO shuts down any electrical interference, and thus markets alien-themed merchandise since no one is able to record anything for themselves. Jupe notices the inflatable tube men that line Jupiter’s Claim deflating early, signaling the approach. He awkwardly tells the audience that the “something” is early as it approaches the show arena. With the pennants in tow, the alien begins to suck up everybody from the audience, as well as Ricky and his family.

What Exactly is the UFO?

OJ, who had been watching the show unfold, hesitantly approaches Clover to get her out of there. After loading her into his truck, OJ attempts to drive away, but the alien gives chase, eventually spitting out the decoy horse into the truck’s windshield. OJ realizes the UFO is not the ship, but is actually the alien itself. It’s a predatory creature asserting dominance, but does not eat those who don’t look at it. Utilizing similar methods to those used to train horses, OJ believes they can influence the alien’s behavior to get the footage without being eaten. After a second failed attempt at recording footage of the alien, now dubbed “Jean Jacket” by the Haywoods, they decide to hire Holst for assistance. 

Nope (2022) Ending Explained: Do the Haywoods Get Their Proof?

How do the haywoods defeat the ufo.

Holst arrives with an IMAX film camera with a crank reel, all the better to capture the alien without losing footage. OJ and Em raid Jupiter’s Claim, removing batteries from the cars to power the inflatable tube men to lay a path for the alien and the horse. OJ will lure the alien Jean Jacket into their trap while Angel helps Holst to capture the video. During the attack, Holst gets cocky and runs closer to Jean Jacket to capture a better shot. Jean Jacket sucks him up and then heads for Angel. Angel wraps himself up in barbed wire and a tarp, causing Jean Jacket to spit him out. Enraged, Jean Jacket opens up into its fully realized form (a jellyfish-like shape). OJ, on a horse, decides to distract Jean Jacket in the hopes that it will not get Em.

Em flees to Jupiter’s Claim, where she releases a giant helium-filled balloon in Jupe’s likeness to the sky, whose eyes stare straight at Jean Jacket. Em heads over to the Winking Well (a dual wishing well and photo station) and gathers up coins that Jean Jacket spat up to take multiple pictures of the alien eating the Jupe balloon. Em inserts coins and cranks the Winking Well to take photos of the balloon as Jean Jacket approaches it. Jean Jacket sees the human-shaped balloon and devours it. As Jean Jacket returns to its flying saucer form, the high altitude and compression causes the balloon to burst, killing the alien. Em screams out in victory as the last photograph develops, perfectly capturing the fully formed Jean Jacket ensnaring the balloon. In the distance, Em sees OJ on the horse in full cowboy mode.

What’s Next for OJ, Emerald, and Angel?

Nope (2022) ends shortly after, and though the three protagonists manage to survive their encounter with the alien, their ultimate fates, along with that of the footage they capture, is left open-ended. There’s no telling if the Haywood siblings will receive the financial reward they were hoping for, or if their findings will be dismissed by skeptics and ignored by the public. Peele does not offer any explanation, so there’s reason to believe that either outcome is possible, but it’s also worth noting that the government’s response would inevitably come into play, as well. This is especially true given the endless conspiracies surrounding the cover-up of an alien encounter in Roswell, New Mexico in the 1940s. Since the incident at Jupiter’s Claim would invite questions and speculation from those who did not witness it, there’s certainly reason to believe that, even now, the government may not immediately be in favor of the public knowing about extraterrestrial life on Earth. Of course, because of that speculation, a future in which the Haywoods are caught up in a media storm because of their evidence is more than possible, as well, and would be one in which they are able to bring their business back with the proper monetary backing.

Read More: 10 Films To Watch If You Like Nope (2022)

Nope (2022) official trailer.

Nope (2022) Links: IMDb Director: Jordan Peele Cast: Daniel Kaluuya , Keke Palmer , Steven Yeun , Wrenn Schmidt , Brandon Perea

Where to watch nope, trending right now.

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Say yes to ‘Nope,’ Jordan Peele’s alien-invasion western

The horror auteur’s third film is a sci-fi epic that feels both comfortably familiar and fresh

There’s a reason virtually nothing is opening in movie theaters this week — virtually nothing, that is, except “Nope,” the new sci-fi epic from writer, director and producer Jordan Peele. Based on the success of Peele’s Oscar-winning horror debut “ Get Out ” and its follow-up “ Us ,” the filmmaker’s name alone has the power to strike fear into the hearts of studio heads and film distributors with a competing product to sell. And so a wide berth has been given to Peele’s latest, a stylishly creepy alien-invasion tale starring Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer.

Fittingly for a movie so big-footed it has scared away almost all comers, you’re going to want to see “Nope” on the largest screen possible, and with the best and biggest sound system. Set on a remote ranch in the picturesque California desert town of Agua Dulce, the film centers on siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood (Kaluuya and Palmer), Hollywood horse trainers who experience an unearthly visitation. “Nope” has been hand-tooled for the kind of presentation you can only get in a real theater — preferably Imax, to take full advantage of the film’s striking production design and eerie sound mix, which ranges from a thunderous, cinderblock-shaking roar to the kind of hush that isn’t so much a stillness as a sonic vacuum: the kind of silence in which you hear nothing but your own heartbeat. Kudos to sound designer Johnnie Burn (a BAFTA nominee for “ The Favourite ”), who deserves to be first in line for next year’s Oscars.

Before settling into its unsettling groove, “Nope” must dispense with some perfunctory backstory involving the insolvency of the Haywoods’ horse-wrangling business — who makes westerns anymore? — and the mysterious death of their father (Keith David) six months before the main action gets underway. We learn that OJ is a laconic cowboy type; Emerald is a talker, and often rather funny. There’s also a subplot involving a former child actor (Steven Yeun) from a 1990s sitcom starring a chimpanzee that infamously went berserk (in suitably horrific, bloody fashion), but that narrative pretty much goes nowhere. Now the proprietor of a Wild West-themed tourist attraction in the desert, Yeun’s character feels shoehorned into a tight story that’s probably better off without him. (Or, alternatively, he deserves his own separate movie.)

Things pick up as OJ and Emerald decide they need to document some of the unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs) they have lately begun encountering around their ranch: a cloud that never moves and a dark, saucerlike object that can be glimpsed slicing through it just behind the photogenic hills. Not just document, but potentially monetize, by capturing footage they have dubbed the “Oprah shot”: an unimpeachable, high-quality image that someone will pay for. When it becomes clear that they’re dealing with something much stranger and deadlier than they originally thought, their plan evolves from making a quick buck to saving the Earth.

In that sense, at least, “Nope” feels like a throwback, and in a good way. It’s an old-school creature feature, replete with a creature that causes electrical blackouts, but defies the stereotype of the little green man. And it gets a big jolt of contemporary juice from the fact it’s set in moviemaking country. When OJ and Emerald realize they can’t handle the mystery on their own, they team up with a 20-something specialist in surveillance systems from a chain electronics store (Brandon Perea) and a grizzled guerrilla cameraman with a hand-wound film camera (Michael Wincott).

It’s a nod to the past, the present and the future of moviemaking, all at once.

The acting here is quite good, particularly by Kaluuya, who exudes the strong, silent air of a modern Gary Cooper, all shrugs and monosyllables, and Palmer, who is his much more expressive foil. But “Nope” ultimately belongs to its director, not its actors. Whether we’re watching some heavy CGI in the sky or flashback scenes featuring a rampaging primate (played by Terry Notary in an impressive motion-capture performance) or simply Kaluuya on horseback — a new kind of western hero in an orange hoodie — Peele tells his story visually, not verbally. One particularly idiosyncratic sequence features OJ and Emerald setting up a warning system of colorful inflatable dancing men — the kind you sometimes see outside car dealerships — around the perimeter of their property. It’s quintessential Peele: memorably surreal, spooky and a little bit silly.

The dialogue is not so important but features the title word prominently, spoken by OJ and Emerald in response to what they see. You might find yourself saying “nope,” too, once or twice, in a way that’s really tantamount to saying “yes” to “Nope’s” shivery pleasures, which feel both oldfangled and new.

R. At area theaters. Contains coarse language throughout, some violence and bloody images. 131 minutes.

2 New Horror Movies Prove An Exciting Box Office Trend Is Critic-Proof

• Horror movies don't need critical acclaim to succeed at the box office, as shown by Tarot and The Strangers: Chapter 1.
• The recent success of horror films like Smile and Scream may make it challenging for sequels with poor reviews to perform well.
• Even with bad reviews, horror franchises like The Nun can improve critical reception with sequels, offering hope for Tarot and The Strangers.

Both Tarot and The Strangers: Chapter 1 box office performances prove something very important regarding the horror genre's resurgence. Like any genre, horror goes through cycles at the box office. In the ‘70s, huge hits like Jaws , Alien , and The Exorcist proved the genre was profitable, while the slasher boom of the ‘80s saw franchises like Friday the 13th , Halloween , and A Nightmare On Elm Street dominate the video store shelves. Later, the meta-slashers of the ‘90s, Japanese horror remakes of the ‘00s, and the found footage craze of the 2010s kept the genre alive.

More recently, Five Nights At Freddy’s , IT , and A Quiet Place all proved horror was still huge. However, the genre isn’t always a reliable moneymaker. Until 2024’s teen horror Tarot's box office performance broke a multiple-month drought, 2024 seemed to have brought an end to the genre’s recent string of box office successes. Fortunately, the impressive debut of The Strangers reboot proved that this was no fluke. Meanwhile, the critical reception of both movies highlights a surprising truth about the horror movies that proved to be financial successes in 2024.

Tarot And The Strangers: Chapter 1 Succeeded At The Box Office Despite Bad Reviews

Neither horror movies box office was hurt by low critical ratings.

While The Strangers: Chapter 1 benefited from its association with a successful series, Tarot 's box office success proved that horror movies dont even need a recognizable franchise to win over viewers.

Although both movies received bad reviews, Tarot and The Strangers: Chapter 1 succeeded at the box office without any support from critics . This echoes a trend from 2023 when the video game adaptation Five Nights At Freddy’s won big with audiences despite lackluster reviews. While The Strangers: Chapter 1 benefited from its association with a successful series, Tarot ’s box office success proved that horror movies don’t even need a recognizable franchise to win over viewers. The supernatural horror movie made over $30 million upon release (via Box Office Mojo ), earning back more than three times its $8 million budget.

The notion is exciting as it proves that horror movies don’t rely on critical acclaim to succeed, but this has the potential to become a concerning trend. After all, critically reviled horror movies succeeding at the box office leaves studios with no concerns about quality control. Despite the so-called “ elevated horror ” trend granting the genre more critical legitimacy in recent years, horror movies that follow Tarot and The Strangers: Chapter 1 into theaters will likely be more concerned with getting viewers in seats than impressing reviewers. This is evidenced in The Strangers: Chapter 1 ’s shameless cliffhanger ending .

10 Most Influential Horror Movies Of All Time

Many of the best horror movies of all time have also gone down in history for sparking the genius of future filmmakers who draw inspiration from them.

Tarot & The Strangers: Chapter 1 Succeeded At The Box Office Despite Bad Reviews

The horror genres box office performance has been incredible since 2020.

The fact that director Renny Harlin’s new The Strangers movie ended without a resolution proves that creators can get away with a lot in service of maximizing output. That said, it is not surprising that studios are unconcerned by critical misgivings after the horror genre’s recent performance at the box office. In 2021, horror proved to be a big winner when theaters reopened, with A Quiet Place: Part II , Halloween Kills , and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It all earning over $100 million. High-profile flops like Malignant and Last Night In Soho tempered enthusiasm around this trend.

Smile , Nope , Scream , The Black Phone, and Halloween Ends were all major hits, while M3GAN , The Nun II , Scream VI , and Five Nights At Freddys did equally well in 2023.

However, 2022 proved that horror was an incredibly profitable investment for studios and filmmakers with numerous massive hits. Smile , Nope , Scream , The Black Phone, and Halloween Ends were all major hits, while M3GAN , The Nun II , Scream VI , and Five Nights At Freddy’s did equally well in 2023. 2024 started wobbly with The First Omen and Lisa Frankenstein underperforming, but Tarot and The Strangers: Chapter 1 redeemed this. As such, it is no surprise that the creators of The Strangers: Chapter 1 ’s new trilogy weren’t worried about ending the movie with a cheeky “ To be continued... ”

Tarot & The Strangers Both Face Future Problems After Poor Reviews

Sequels to these horror hits may struggle.

Although Tarot and The Strangers: Chapter 1 did both succeed upon release, they still face a challenge that wasn’t an issue for 2022’s big horror hits. Smile , The Black Phone , and Scream were all well-liked by critics, so the announcement of their potential sequels was met with enthusiasm. In contrast, the bad reviews that Tarot and The Strangers received may impact the reception of any follow-ups, specifically with The Strangers: Chapter 2' s upcoming release . The same could be said for 2023’s horror hits, too, since Five Nights At Freddy’s earned a paltry 32% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

To be fair, another 2023 horror hit proves that this isn’t always an issue. Horror franchises can turn their critical reception around , as evidenced by the Rotten Tomatoes scores of The Nun and its sequel The Nun II . Both movies were massive box office hits, but this was due in part to The Nun II improving The Nun ’s 25% critical rating with a far stronger 52%. These improved reviews proved that Tarot and The Strangers: Chapter 1 aren’t doomed to disappoint with their follow-ups despite their imperfect beginnings.

Sources: Box Office Mojo , The Numbers

The Strangers: Chapter 1

Director Renny Harlin

Release Date May 17, 2024

Distributor(s) Lionsgate

Writers Alan Freedland, Alan R. Cohen

Cast Rachel Shenton, Froy Gutierrez, Ema Horvath, Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso

Runtime 91 minutes

Genres Thriller, Horror

Franchise(s) The Strangers

• Cast & crew

Borderlands

Based on the best-selling videogame, this all-star action-adventure follows a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power. Based on the best-selling videogame, this all-star action-adventure follows a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power. Based on the best-selling videogame, this all-star action-adventure follows a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.

• Joe Crombie
• Cate Blanchett
• Olivier Richters
• 1 nomination

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Tim Miller directed the re-shoots in Eli Roth's place as Roth was busy with Thanksgiving (2023) , which also stars Gina Gershon .
• Connections Referenced in The Salty Nerd Podcast: WTF Happened To Borderlands? ft. Krimsonrogue (2024)

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 42 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos

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