Nope (2022)
dir. Jordan Peele
Rated: R
image: ©2022 Universal Pictures
Director Jordan Peele’s much anticipated third outing of big-budget, spectacle horror filmmaking, Nope, has a lot of big ideas swirling around inside it. The comedian-turned-horror-maestro explored the horrors of racism in his debut, Get Out, and the horrors suffered by an American underclass who exist in order to make life easier for everyone above it in Us. With Nope, Peele’s ideas never quite gel into a cohesive whole. The story is ambitious, the storytelling is thrilling, but Nope ultimately feels like a blockbuster-budgeted episode of The Twilight Zone.
We begin with a tragedy on the set of a fictional television sitcom called Gordy's Home. The sequence is a flashback to 1998, to a fateful taping of the show, which is about a family raising a chimpanzee named Gordy like he’s their own. It’s a horror-tinged sendup of cheesy family-oriented American sitcoms from the past that featured a novelty character in a fish-out-of-water scenario, like Mr. Ed or Alf.
During the taping of the episode, which is about the family throwing Gordy a birthday party, the monkey snaps, presumably because it can no longer tolerate the unnatural living conditions its human handlers have forced upon it. The chimp goes on a rampage, killing or maiming all but one of the regular cast members.
In the present, we meet Otis Haywood Jr., who goes by OJ, and his sister, Emerald, or Em for short. They have inherited Haywood Hollywood Horses from their father, Otis Sr., who died in a freak accident when a plane exploded in mid-air and a deadly hailstorm of objects rained down on the Haywood ranch. In one of the movie’s most effective graphic horror moments, we discover it was a nickel striking Otis Sr. in the head that killed him.
At least, OJ and Em are told by officials that the deadly debris came from an airplane. OJ has his doubts.
Six months after the accident, Haywood Hollywood Horses is struggling under OJ’s watch. The company supplies trained horses for movie and TV shoots, in an echo of Gordy’s nonconsensual participation in the sitcom. OJ isn’t the businessman his father was. He’s an introvert who speaks little and is quiet and halting when he does. He depends on Em for her help, but she’s more focused on jumpstarting her own career in entertainment and considers Haywood Hollywood Horses as a side gig.
To make ends meet, OJ sells a few of his horses to the nearby Western-themed amusement park called Jupiter’s Claim. The park is run by Ricky "Jupe" Park, who starred as one of the kids in Gordy’s Home. Jupe has made a career off of his status as a survivor of the chimpanzee attack.
As with Get Out and Us, Peele is interested in excavating the toxic conditions created when the powerful in American society use those with little or no power for their own ends.
Then the UFO enters the picture.
Without spoiling too much, I’ll reveal only that OJ and Em become determined to capture this strange phenomenon on video, because providing indisputable evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life would make Haywood Hollywood Horses a sensation.
After enlisting the help of a Fry’s Electronics employee named Angel – or rather, after Angel insinuates himself into the situation – in setting up a network of security cameras, they discover a problem. Whenever this mysterious flying object appears, it kills all electrical devices near it for as long as it’s in close proximity to them. Em decides to contact the famous cinematographer who was working on the shoot that Haywood Horses was fired from after one of OJ’s horses panicked when a crew member spooked it.
The idiosyncratic cinematographer is named, improbably, Antlers Holst, and his genius seems to be the reason he’s allowed to continue working with analog equipment, when the entire rest of the industry has switched to digital. This is the first suspension-of-disbelief moment in Nope that I resisted. The movie needs this character to be obsessed with mechanical, analog filmmaking as a convenience for the story, not because the writing makes us believe it’s so.
Antlers is quirky and weird, but ultimately one dimensional. Actor Michael Wincott – who I will forever associate with his role as the villain Guy of Gisborne in the 1991 Kevin Costner vehicle Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – does a lot to make the character memorable. Wincott’s cantankerous mumbling as his character fires up his hand-crank IMAX camera during the group’s first attempt to catch the UFO on film has a droll sense of humor to it.
Daniel Kaluuya is stoic and intense as OJ, but the breakout performance in Nope for me was Keke Palmer as Em. Palmer goes for broke in the role. In her hands, Em is an obnoxious younger sibling to the long-suffering OJ. She also refuses to take shit from anybody and lives out loud as her most authentic self. Palmer provides a lot of the laughs that come in between Peele’s broader horror aesthetic.
As with Get Out and Us, Peele served as both writer and director on Nope. (The director said in a recent interview that he will never direct a movie that he didn’t also write.) Peele once again proves himself a visual stylist; he’s a master at composing iconic, haunting visuals that stick with you. In the case of Nope, though, all those individual moments of arresting visuals never equal more than the sum of their parts.
The most striking of Peele’s visions is of dozens of air puppets – the wacky, flailing nylon creatures you see outside of car dealerships – all dropping dead as the UFO disrupts the power of the wind machines keeping them inflated.
Aside from inspired creepy moments like this one, Nope relies heavily on jump scares to goose its audience into the desired reaction. These jump scares never feel cheap – well, one does, when Jupe’s kids terrify OJ by wearing creepy alien costumes – but Peele’s movie is over reliant on them, which ultimately reduces their effectiveness.
There are also a dozen nit-picky type logic issues that kept me from ever fully falling under Nope’s spell. Every time the UFO disrupts electronic devices, Peele makes sure that one of those devices is playing music, so that the power outage creates a sinister slowing down of said music.
That makes sense with a record player – Palmer has a great dance sequence set to music from a turntable early in the movie that is interrupted by the UFO – but the same effect is used for a car stereo playing Corey Hart’s 1984 hit Sunglasses at Night. It’s a cool, creepy moment, but one that feels contrived and included only for its cool factor and not because it makes any actual logical sense. If a car’s power goes out, the stereo will simply cut off, not ominously slow down to a Quaalude-like crawl.
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema – who shot three of Christopher Nolan’s films and has recently completed working on Nolan’s upcoming Oppenheimer – makes Peele’s Nope look gorgeous. Together, Peele and van Hoytema use every bit of the oversized IMAX frame; almost every shot is visually interesting.
As a cinephile, I should love that Peele is paying homage to the old-school, analog technique of filmmaking as the only way to catch photographic evidence of the flying terror in the sky. It feels too clever by half, though. It’s a cool idea shoehorned to fit into the story.
With Nope, Peele is examining the myriad ways in which people are forced into situations they don’t want to be in. Gordy is forced to act in a sitcom. Jupe is forced to make a living off of the most traumatizing event in his life. OJ is forced to keep the family business running after his father dies. But Peele never weaves all of these disparate threads together into a cohesive and satisfying narrative. Nope is fun for a few laughs and jarring scares, but the feel of cultural phenomenon that was present in Get Out and – to a slightly lesser degree – Us is missing this time out.
Why it got 3 stars:
- I liked Nope generally, but I found that when I started to think too hard about character motivations or plot contrivances, too many things stuck out as not quite working.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Jupe – played by Steven Yeun – relates a story to OJ about how Saturday Night Live aired a sketch about the Gordy's Home tragedy with Chris Kattan as the homicidal ape. It’s a really odd moment. I thought Peele wanted me to laugh, and I did, but it also relates a really sick and twisted way that our culture memeifies – for lack of a better word – horrific events and turns them into jokes. Maybe Peele simply wanted to make me uncomfortable with those clashing ideas.
- It is criminal how underused the great Keith David is in Nope. Do not put this titan of cool in your movie if you only plan on him appearing for what is, at most, five minutes of screen-time.
- “I guess some animals ain’t fit to be trained.” That’s a line from Otis, Sr. (the aforementioned titan of cool). It feels like a line that should be a key to unlock the overall message of Nope, but I could never quite make it fit all that’s going on here.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
I saw this at a press/promotional screening and It. Was. Packed. I’m glad I wore my mask for the entire screening. The energy in the room immediately after was one of slight confusion, like people were as perplexed by what they had seen as I was. The IMAX experience was quite impressive. Nope is currently playing in theaters, most likely at one near you.