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In Jordan Peele's Nope, the Darkness Stares Back

A modern cowboy, a Black man in an orange hoodie, sits astride a horse, facing forward in a medium shot. He points two fingers at his eyes, then points at the camera, signaling his sister—and us too.

" Nope ," Jordan Peele 's latest film, is about looking—and being seen. The writer/director (" Get Out ," " Us ")  reminds us of this through the motif of mirrors, cameras, and eyes, evoking ideas about representation, erasure, and power.

Peele has said " Nope " is about spectacle, what he's called "the human need to see something crazy," and how we monetize that. But what else is a spectacle except what you can't help watch? The motorists clogging traffic to check out a car wreck. The selfies and online videos delivering stunts and more we hope people want to see.

There's an uneasy, alien relationship between our desire for such novelty and the urge to package it, market it, and cash in on it. We like to watch—and make sure others are watching too.

"So much of this is about the violence of attention," Peele has said . "In a lot of ways, this is a reflection of all these different sides of this industry of the spectacle that I've been on ... and me trying to be upfront with my part in it and at the same time live my life and tell my story and do my thing."

(Spoilers follow.)

"Nope" opens with violence: the carnage from "Gordy's Home," a 1990s-era sitcom (apparently modeled on the 1980s interracial adoption sitcoms like "Diff'rent Strokes" and "Webster") where the chimpanzee star mauled and killed actors—a seemingly out-of-context start whose connection to the main story will become clearer later. We meet the cowboy, OJ ( Daniel Kaluuya ), a Hollywood horse trainer like his father, Otis Haywood Sr. ( Keith David ). The Haywoods, including OJ's sister, Emerald ( Keke Palmer ), are descendants of a man seen but largely ignored: the Black jockey riding a racehorse in Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 short , the first film ever made.

One sunny day, debris rains from the sky. Keys and other things ping off the ranch fencing. Otis Sr. collapses, dead; a nickel sliced through his eye. The poor man never saw it coming. OJ hangs it in a baggie on the wall, where he can't help but see it. His father spent his life helping Hollywood create spectacles, and he's cut down by a nickel, his life worth less than pocket change.

After his death, OJ and Emerald try to rustle up business. OJ, uncomfortable meeting people's eyes, pats and murmurs to a horse on a commercial set, soothing himself as much as the animal. Emerald exuberantly introduces their heritage and safety rules, then adds how she sings, dances, and sews. OJ chides her for promoting her side hustles, but she fires back that to her, the ranch is a side hustle. She wants to be seen. 

When a crew member sets a mirror in front of their horse, the reflection spooks the animal, costing them the job. Soon, that thing in the sky snatches a horse or two. OJ thinks whatever it is could be their ticket to saving what their father built. So he and Emerald decide to shoot it—but not with a weapon. They hit the local electronics store to rustle up a high-tech camera system to get what they call "the Oprah shot"—the money shot. Nothing is real if you don't have proof of it, if someone doesn't see it.

Angel ( Brandon Perea ), a curious techie, joins them, along with the commercial director, Antlers Holst ( Michael Wincott ), whom Emerald entices with the chance of "the impossible shot." He warns her: "This dream you're chasing, where you end up at the top of the mountain? It's the one you never wake up from."

Former child star Ricky "Jupe" Park ( Steven Yeun ) knows that dream. He played a kid sheriff in one show and in "Gordy's Home," he was the adopted Asian child in a white family on a sitcom in which Gordy, the chimp, was the real star. He survived the "Gordy's Home" rampage, physically at least, and now runs Jupiter's Claim, a kitschy Western attraction down the road from the Haywoods' ranch. Its mascot is a winking inflatable cowboy, and its souvenir photos are taken by a camera in a wishing well. Emerald photobombs one by accident.

Capitalizing on people's curiosity, Jupe keeps a secret room of "Gordy's Home" memorabilia, including a sneaker with a drop of blood, for fans to pay to admire—a way to monetize his pain, like the Haywoods are trying to do—but he's literally put himself in a box, unable to break away from how others see him. 

He also hosts a spectacle, the "Star Lasso Experience," where he welcomes that thing in the sky by feeding it horses OJ sold him. First, he introduces a former "Gordy's Home" co-star, her maimed face hidden behind a veil. She wears a sweatshirt with the smiling photo of the teenage girl she used to be: how she wants to be seen.

Jupe tells his audience about the alien presence he calls "The Viewers," who in his mind look like the cameras he's seen for most of his life. A flashback shows him hiding on the "Gordy's Home" set under a table. The shape of the film magazines atop the abandoned cameras resemble the alien plush figures and masks that present-day Jupe sells. 

Back then, Gordy looked right at Jupe—and us, the camera acting as Jupe's point of view. Its gaze inscrutable, its mouth bloody, the chimp drew closer, reaching its knuckles toward Gordy. Did it sense a kindred spirit? Or would it have harmed him? Rescuers shoot it before Jupe can find out.

Jupe as a boy had no control. Through the theme park and the alien show, he seems to have control now—but it's false, just like the trainers on "Gordy's Home" thought before Gordy snapped. Before OJ's horse saw its reflection and startled.

Attention can be a beast. It might feel warm, flattering, euphoric. But it can change, like the creature does: from the silvery flying saucer of so many films to something pliable, expansive, with a gaping maw that looks like a black hole. 

All this attention literally engulfs Jupe. As he and the apprehensive crowd stare up at it, unable to look away, the alien entity opens its mouth like an aperture, devouring Jupe and his audience whole. Peele shows them struggling inside this creature, fighting against folds of tissue, and we realize we've seen this before, over the opening credits: a billowing "tunnel" that rippled like curtains.

We were in the belly of the beast then. We just didn't know it. 

This creature likes to watch, too—to a point. It's drawn to whatever looks at it, making us the focus that mesmerizes. It feeds on our attention, though never on itself, inhaling anything and everything it can before chucking what it can't use. I will cast abominable filth at you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle , says the biblical quote (Nahum 3:6) that Peele uses to open the film, and after visiting Jupiter's Claim, the creature delivers a deluge of filth, parking in the sky right above the Haywoods' ranch house and spewing out blood, metal, and other debris. It literally chews people up, absorbing only what it needs for sustenance and ejecting the rest, indiscriminate in its damage.

Don't look at it, OJ warns, thinking of animal behavior, but it's something actors learn, too: where and when to look. He covers his horse's head with a blinker hood and pulls up a hoodie to guard his own eyes—orange crew gear from " The Scorpion King ,"  the film shoot where young OJ was inducted into the Hollywood economy by his father, and another chance for the family business that didn't work out (the filmmakers sidelined their horses for camels instead). OJ gallops out as bait so Holst can get the shot, but their plan goes sideways. A tabloid photographer, all silvery helmet and shiny motorcycle, like the creature in miniature or the mirror that startled the horse, drives into harm's way. The creature sucks him up along with Holst, who got the shot after chasing higher ground, hoping to top the impossible. His dream ends on top of a mountain.

Eventually, the creature changes shape, all diaphanous loops with a square green eye that peels back curtain after curtain, like an early viewfinder—or as if unveiling another show. OJ signals to Emerald— I see you —and makes one last ride so she can escape, but she signals back at him. 

I see you. I got you .

Don't all of us want to be seen? Cinephiles notice when a film has a female gaze or a different gaze from what we've long consumed. Through three horror films, Peele has made sure we see Black characters in a way we haven't before: casting them in the spotlight instead of the margins, eschewing the trope where they're among the first to die. A filmmaker's gaze gives a camera power, showing us who's the predator and the prey, but there's also power in where we decide not to look.

Emerald figures out a way to get the money shot, feeding coin after coin into the Jupiter's Claim wishing well, luring the creature with that winking inflatable balloon—something it swallows but then can't stomach. A photobomb of another sort.

But ultimately, she doesn't care. She's too relieved to see OJ, alive. They both survive because they looked out for each other, realizing that you can't chase the spectacle or stare into the abyss forever.

Sometimes the darkness stares back.

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“Nope” Is One of the Great Movies About Moviemaking

The essence of the cinema is the symbol—the filming of action that stands for something else, that gets its identity from what’s offscreen. There’s plenty of action in Jordan Peele’s new film, “ Nope ,” and it’s imaginative and exciting if viewed purely as the genre mashup that it is—a science-fiction movie that’s also a modern-day Western. But even that premise bears an enormous, intrinsic symbolic power, one that was already apparent in a much slighter precursor, Jon Favreau’s 2011 film, “ Cowboys & Aliens .” Like “Nope,” Favreau’s film involves the arrival of creatures from outer space in the American West; there, it was already apparent that what the genres share is the unwelcome arrival of outsiders from afar (aliens are to Earth as white people are to this continent). Peele takes the concept many ingenious steps further.

“Nope” is a phantasmagorical story of Black people in the American West, the unwelcome among the unwelcome, and it’s set in the present-day West, namely, Hollywood and the Hollywood-proximate, the very heart of Wild West mythology. “Nope” is one of the great movies about moviemaking, about the moral and spiritual implications of cinematic representation itself—especially the representation of people at the center of American society who are treated as its outsiders. It is an exploitation film—which is to say, a film about exploitation and the cinematic history of exploitation as the medium’s very essence.

Peele’s film is set mainly on a horse farm in California, Haywood Hollywood Horses, that provides the animals as needed for movies and TV shows and commercials. Its owner, Otis Haywood, Sr. (Keith David), dies mysteriously after being hit by a bullet-like piece of space debris that showers the property. The farm is taken over by his two children, Otis, Jr., called O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya), and Emerald (Keke Palmer). Neither of the heirs, though, is entirely cut out to fill Otis’s shoes. O.J., who loves the horses and works devotedly with them, is something of an introvert; he isn’t the communicator—the on-set presence—that his father was. Emerald, who is very much a communicator, is an aspiring filmmaker and actor for whom the horses are just a job, and not a very pleasant one. To address the farm’s financial troubles, they sell horses to a nearby Western theme park. But, when the source of the space debris—a monstrous U.F.O. that sucks humans and horses into its maw and eats them—makes its appearance, O.J. and Emerald are forced to fight it. They’re also inspired, for the purpose of saving the farm financially, to film it, in the hope of selling the first authentic footage of a U.F.O.

I’m being especially chary of spoilers in discussing “Nope”; I greatly enjoyed the discovery of the plot’s daring and inventive twists and turns, along with the discerning and speculative ideas that they bring to light. By remarkable design, the movie is as full of action as it is light on character psychology. There’s no special reason why O.J. is taciturn or Emerald is ebullient, or why they’re able to marshal the inner resources for mortal combat with invaders from outer space. “Nope” offers the characters little backstory—at least, not of the usual sort. Rather, Peele pushes even further with a theme that he launched in “ Get Out ” and “ Us ”: the recognition of history—especially its hidden or suppressed aspects—as backstory. With “Nope,” Peele looks specifically to the history of the cinema and its intersection with the experience of Black Americans to create a backstory that virtually imbues every frame of the movie.

For the Haywoods, the crucial backstory goes to the birth of the cinema: the real-life “moving images,” created by Eadweard Muybridge in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, that are often considered the primordial movies. Muybridge was commissioned to study the movement of a galloping horse; the name of the Black jockey he photographed riding one of those horses went unrecorded. In “Nope,” Peele creates a fictitious identity for the rider—Alistair Haywood, the family’s forebear. Emerald tells the crew on a TV commercial, who are relying on one of their horses, that, when it comes to movies, the Haywoods have “skin in the game.” Acknowledging and extending cinema’s legacy while also redressing its omissions and misrepresentations of history is the premise of “Nope”: the responsibility, the guilt, the danger, the ethical compromise of the cinematic gaze.

The film-centric symbolism of “Nope” gives rise to the film’s distinctive, surprising sense of texture. “Get Out” and “Us” are films of a thick cinematic impasto, crowded with characters and tangled with action. “Nope,” made on a much higher budget, is a sort-of blockbuster—but an inside-out blockbuster. If the first two films are oil paintings, “Nope” is a watercolor of the kind that leaves patches of the underlying paper untinted. It’s set in wide-open Western spaces, and what fills their emptiness is power: political, historical, physical, psychological.

The movie is also filled with images—imagined ones, and also real ones, a visual overlay of myth and lore that fills the Western landscape with the history of the cinema. What embodies the invisible lines of power is the gaze, of the eye and of the camera alike. Peele has been, from the start of his career, one of the great directors of point-of-view shots, of the drama and the psychology of vision, and he pursues the same idea to radical extremes in “Nope.” Point-of-view shots are at the center of the drama; again, avoiding spoilers, the spark of the drama turns out to be, in effect, eye contact—the connection of the seer and the seen (including when they’re one and the same, in reflections). Alongside the intrusive intimacy of the naked eye, Peele makes explicit the inherently predatory aspect of the photographic image—the taking of life, so to speak—and the responsibility that image-making imposes on the maker.

There’s another bit of backstory that puts the filmmaker’s responsibility front and center. The movie begins with a scene in a TV studio, where an ostensibly trained chimpanzee performing with human actors on a sitcom runs amok. (This subplot reminds me of the horrific accident on the set of “ Twilight Zone: The Movie ,” in 1982.) A survivor of the chimp’s attack, which took place in 1996, is an Asian American child actor (Jacob Kim) who now, as an adult (played by Steven Yeun), is the owner of Jupiter’s Claim, the Western theme park to which O.J. has been selling horses. The jovial owner, called Jupe, has also had some contact with the U.F.O. and is also trying to profit from it, indifferent to the risks involved. Jupe’s space-horse show (something of a mysterious, invitation-only event) makes uncannily clear the predatory connection between viewers and, um, consumers.

Peele is seriously playful with the technology of movies in ways that recall Martin Scorsese’s “ Hugo .” The action of “Nope” pivots on the power and the nature of movie technology—the contrast of digital and optical images—and the creative rediscovery of bygone methods, as reflected in its very cast of characters, which includes a young electronic-surveillance nerd and U.F.O. buff (Brandon Perea) and a grizzled cinematographer (Michael Wincott). The TV commercial for which the Haywoods rent a horse is being shot in a studio, in front of a green screen (another empty visual space shot through with power), where a melancholy horse is standing still, stripped of its majestic energy, reduced to a mere digital emblem of itself, ridden by no one but manipulated by a desk jockey with no onscreen identity at all. Peele presents the C.G.I. on which “Nope” itself depends as a dubious temptation and a form of dangerous power.

Yet the crucial bit of backstory remains unexpressed: the question of why, of all the horse farms in California, the space creatures chose to target the one that’s Black-owned. The answer to the question is one that both demands expression and faces a silencing on a daily, institutional basis. The movie opens with a Biblical quote: a scourging prophecy, from the book of Nahum. In transferring the politics of “Nope” to the intergalactic level—a sardonic vision of the universality of racism—Peele also transfers them to an overarching, spiritual, metaphysical one. He offers a scathing, exuberant vision of redemption. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Western theme park Jupiter’s Claim. It also incorrectly described the space debris that killed Otis Haywood, Sr.

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Critic’s Pick

‘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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Jordan Peele Invades the Western With ‘Nope,’ a Thrilling Salute to Spectacle

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Early in Nope , Jordan Peele ’s thrilling new horror movie, a woman named Emerald Haywood ( Keke Palmer ) tells a story. She and her brother OJ ( Daniel Kaluuya ) are horse handlers and ranch owners by trade, who parlay their animal wrangling skills on TV and film shoots, which is where we meet them today. But the ranch is a family business, passed down to them by their father, the late Otis Haywood (Keith David), and by his father before him. Go back far enough in their family line and you’ll meet the man Emerald tells us about in her story: the Black jockey captured in Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 photographs of a galloping horse, which, strung to together, became one of the earliest known examples of stop-motion photography — essentially, of movies. We know the name of the horse: Sallie Gardner. We know the name of the owner of the horse: Leland Stanford. What we don’t know is the name of the man astride the horse. This is the story Emerald tells us — before telling us about her side hustles and where we can find her on social media. A girl’s gotta eat. What’s any of this got to do with aliens? In Peele’s movie, everything. Nope is in large part a movie about what cannot be tamed, and spectacle — our dire, damning hunger for it — is at the top of that list. (Aliens — animals, broadly — make for a very close second.) The point of opening a movie like this with a reminder about the birth of movies isn’t just to school us on where Black people fit into that history, though that’s obviously very much to the point; even the set decor of Nope underscores the notion, down to a poster in the Haywoods’ ranch for the classic, too-little-known Black western Buck and the Preacher — a reminder that the history of movies is still in need of all kinds of intervention. 

But Peele, a director who’s made a name for himself by infusing horror with healthy spoonfuls of Black common sense and a love of movies, has even more ideas up his sleeve. A lesson of Muybridge’s work was that the camera, stopping time, could see things that the human eye could not. Images are evidence. You want proof of how a horse gallops, of the instant when none of its hooves are touching the ground? Only a photo can convince you. You want proof of UFOs? You want the first stakes in that evidence before it’s ripped out of your hands, destined to become the property of a curious, shameless, hungry public? Well, you better hope those aliens are in your backyard — which, as it turns out for Emerald and OJ, they are.

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Maybe the siblings should consider themselves lucky. The day that we see them on a movie set with one of their horses, named Lucky, is the same day that the former child star Ricky Park (Steven Yeun) offers to buy Lucky — in fact, to buy their entire, family-owned ranch — off of their hands. When that day becomes night, the Haywoods learn why. There’s something in the sky: something making their horses go wild and disappear into the night. If you’ve seen horror movies, you know the signs. A cloud that doesn’t move by day. Brown-outs and strange noises at night. They install video cameras around their remote, lonely property, tucked away in the northern California hills, and on the roof of their house. But the suspense is not in the question of why. Emerald asks her brother early on if he thinks there’s a spaceship hovering over their front yard. All he has to do is nod yep .

Nope is not the kind of movie to obscure what it’s “about” — that’s one of the most satisfying things about it. It’s a little like the M. Night Shyamalan classic Signs in that way. That movie knew that we know the signs. It doesn’t build toward a climactic reveal of the UFOs at its center: It reveals them halfway through, in — what else? — video footage taken from on the ground, not unlike the kind that the Haywoods soon want to create. The pleasure of Shyamalan’s movie isn’t in seeing where the signs lead, which is toward the inevitable, but rather in watching its characters try to make sense of those signs, try to integrate what they’re seeing into their understanding of the world, to the point of these mysteries inspiring a crisis of faith. 

Nope is similar, only it’s about the crisis of looking. What do you do when you hear tell of some awful, incredible, little-known event — a long-ago murder or freak accident, the kind of deep cut that’s only barely persisted in the cultural memory? Many of us cannot help but look it up. What’s the first thing you do when some foreign object in the sky flits over your head, just out of sight? You look up. 

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Peele’s ingenious idea is to use that instinct against us. It’s more than a matter of unidentified flying objects. It’s a matter of lore, of violence — of horror, of course. Peele has rightly been noticed for his profusion of movie references, his almost scholarly, but in no way didactic or merely referential, skill at reminding us of the bedrocks of the genre. Nope is another masterclass in this trend in his work — just look at his approach to the mere idea of the UFO. The flying saucer myth is alive and well in this movie. But it wouldn’t be Peele if that trope went unrevised. 

Peele’s career as a director has been overly defined by the term “social thriller.” Less remarked-upon, but equally important, is his unabashed investment in symbolism, the kind of high-concept thinking that can push a movie along the axis of its ideas, distinct from its emotional logic or its genre satisfaction. At its best, as in Get Out, Peele merges that impulse with his well-honed knowledge of tropes and his incredible sense of humor to create something as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, a movie that can end with a classic, villainous infodump without feeling overwhelmed and deflated by explanation. Us , his solid second thriller, falls prey to the latter: the concept and action were almost at odds with each other, resulting in a movie with too many symbols and too strong of a need to talk us through them, whereas its action was already doing enough. 

Nope is like the cosmically perfect stepchild of the two. Peele brings the concept and the beautifully achieved terror together — including a sequence halfway through the movie, beginning when a live show goes wrong and ending with a sickening twist on a house of horrors. It’s segment of the movie that uses every resource available to threaten the senses, from the clashing thuds of heavy rain to one of the most eerie examples of a movie scream that I think I’ve heard. This is a movie that knows the power of images. It has learned, from the greats of the genre, that what we fear most is what can’t be seen, what’s merely implied. All the camera has to do is trace an arc across the sky and you’ll believe something is there. (Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who shot Dunkirk — an IMAX movie, like this one — was a perfect choice for this project, able to carve daring, evocative shapes onto the screen through what feel like the simplest means.)

None of it would work without people. Palmer and Kaluuya could not be better. Palmer is down in every way, as stylish and unflappable as Samuel L. Jackson or Jada Pinkett Smith, with a taste for stoner mayhem and, when the movie calls for it, action-movie know-how. She’s who you’d want to be in a movie like this. But you’re not Keke Palmer — sorry. She makes for a fun pair with Brandon Perea, who plays a tech-store clerk in name but is really this movie’s version of a video-store clerk: in on it, knowledgeable, reluctantly down, and ultimately in over his head. 

Kaluuya, meanwhile, offers us something else. His OJ is a man of few words who seems sterner than he is, though not out of shyness. It takes a while to realize the archetype he’s drawing from here, one that belongs to another genre — the genre that the character Antlers Holst, played by Michael Wincott, with his Eastwood growl, ought to remind you of. 

Nope may be a horror movie in which the most damning thing you can do is to look — but the key to the movie’s conceit is in the irony in wanting to be seen: in which the Black descendants of a man whose name has been lost to movie history find themselves eager to be handed the reins of their own story and given a chance to tell it themselves, for once. One of the terms that Emerald uses in describing her great ancestor, that Black jockey atop Leland Stanford’s horse, is “action hero.” She claims him as one of the first. And because of the horse, she goes further: He’s a Western star. Midway through, Nope dials back on the heightened frights of its horror to become something else. It becomes a story of invasion — not just of the extraterrestrial kind, but of the land-born, territorially offensive kind. It becomes a movie about protecting the homestead from the most invasive species of all: other people. It becomes a Western. 

What that means for Nope should be left to the movie to reveal. But it’s not the kind of thing that can be reduced to a plot point. It’s why, as you watch, that alien life form in the sky may start to resemble something a little familiar, a movie symbol born of these same landscapes, a totem of movie heroism. Then, like the movie itself, it becomes something else: an undulating, mocking paean to spectacle. You can’t help but look. But here, looks kill. 

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Nope Reviews

I can’t confidently say that everything works, but most of Peele’s latest feels as experimental and creative as it is simple and fun.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2024

With unflinching dexterity, Peele and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema juxtapose the terror of encountering a being from beyond with one of the most claustrophobic scenes ever caught on film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 20, 2024

Nope‘s combination of stellar acting, incredible cinematography and awesome sound design makes this a cinematic experience that’s out of this world.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 15, 2024

Jordan Peele crafted an impressively well-crafted sci-fi flick that while it displays clear homage to classics, feels unlike anything we’ve seen before it.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 12, 2024

Nope is simply put one of the year's best films

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 4, 2024

Jordan Peele’s mind is astonishing. He takes such large concepts and layers them upon each other, building out a metaphorical journey that only deepens with each viewing.

Full Review | Jul 3, 2024

“Nope” is really a story about the underdogs in showbiz trying to survive instead of getting out, but Peele pulls punches when it comes to showing how demented they are in that pursuit.

Full Review | Jun 9, 2024

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: B+ | 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.

• Entertainment
• Jordan Peele’s Nope is a breathtaking celebration of filmmaking as an art form

Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Steven Yeun

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Share this story

With both Get Out and Us , Jordan Peele introduced the world to some of the monsters living inside his imagination that were born out of his deep-seated love for the horror genre. While Nope — Peele’s third feature with Universal — definitely runs on the distressing, disorienting energy his projects have become known for, it also feels like the director’s first movie that’s actually about filmmaking as a thrilling and terrifying art form.

Nope tells the story of the Haywoods, a family of Black ranchers who made a name for themselves raising stunt horses for film and television productions. While patriarch Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) always expected that his son Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) and daughter Emerald (Keke Palmer) would eventually take over the family business, none of them ever imagined that Otis Sr. would suddenly and quite mysteriously die after a strange encounter with an innocuous cloud. 

The Haywood siblings are still grieving in their respective ways as Nope opens on Otis Jr. (who goes by OJ) doing what he can to maintain Haywood’s Hollywood Horses and Emerald making it very clear that she’s ready to become a part of the showbiz in a non-equine capacity. Like with most siblings, there’s tension between OJ and Em that Nope brushes up against without veering too far off course. But their father’s death brings Em and OJ closer in a way that properly sets Nope ’s story in motion and illustrates one of the film’s most salient ideas about what it means to work in the entertainment industry — particularly as a person of color.

Unlike OJ, the family’s soft-spoken stoic who prefers the company of horses, Emerald inherited their father’s showmanship and deep pride in their great-great-grandfather, the unnamed Black jockey depicted in Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion cabinet 1878 card series. Blessedly, racism (or some anthropomorphization of it) is not the frightening menace that eventually gets Nope ’s characters uttering the movie’s title aloud. But the specter of it is present in the way Nope connects The Horse in Motion ’s jockey to his fictional descendants: skilled professionals whose talents go largely underappreciated and overlooked by others in the industry, like famed director Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott).

Even those willing to do business with the Haywoods, like former child actor turned local show cowboy Ricky Park (Steven Yeun), are hesitant to see them as more than the people who tend to animals — people so low on the call sheet that they’re almost invisible. That sense of being boxed in by others’ preconceptions is one of the ways Nope starts to build up an atmosphere of dread long before any of its human characters realize that they aren’t alone out there in the desert.

OJ doesn’t really want to believe his eyes when he witnesses something strange one evening while chasing down an escaped horse, and he’s loath to tell his sister. But he can’t deny hearing the sound of screams echoing through the canyons whenever one of the strange power outages that’s been plaguing their ranch sets in, and before long, Em, too, catches a glimpse of the alarming sight that put her brother on edge. If you’ve seen any of Nope ’s trailers or its very effective posters, then you likely know what kind of creatures its story revolves around. But instead of trying to present itself as a wholly new spin on the kind of film it appears to be, Nope exceeds by going a bit meta as its heroes realize that they’re going to have to fight for their lives using, among other things, cameras.

Peele has always had an eye for bold, visual storytelling, but there’s a majesty to Nope ’s sweeping shots of the California desert that feels reflective of his evolution as a filmmaker and of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s artistic sensibilities. Nope ’s striking, almost portrait-like shots of its heroes immediately call to mind Western classics like Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher as OJ and Em’s ranch becomes their new base of operations where they plan to photograph and document whatever it is that’s hunting them and their neighbors. But the slick and imaginative ways that  Nope  repeatedly reminds you of the danger that OJ and Em must face has much more in common with the likes of M. Night Shyamalan’s  Signs  and Joe Cornish’s  Attack the Block.

As characters, both OJ and Em are so firmly within Kaluuya and Palmer’s wheelhouses that they have a way of feeling like archetypical performances you’ve seen from them before, but it works within the context of Nope ’s slightly amped-up reality. Palmer in particular shines with an easy exuberance that feels entirely her own, and Kaluuya embodies the precise kind of laconic cowboy masculinity that defined the leading men of movies like George Stevens’ Shane .

Neither of the Haywoods feel quite like “real” people but rather like heightened personifications of artists hungry to become part of the movie-making business — no matter the cost. Foolhardy as their plan to stand their ground while documenting their confrontation with the creatures is, it makes a certain kind of emotional sense when you step back and look at Nope as a text about people pouring everything they have into getting the perfect shot.

Nope leaves itself far less open to interpretation than Peele’s previous films, and it’s better for it as the movie shifts gears in order to give itself ample time to show off its VFX budget. Nope lays all its cards on the table with a series of truly breathtaking and astounding set pieces that speak to Peele’s ability to conjure large-scale horrors that are just as nightmarish as the smaller, more intimate ones we’re accustomed to seeing from him.

Though its straightforwardness and focus on spectacle over subtlety might not quite be what audiences expect from a Monkeypaw feature, Nope ’s a strong entry from Peele and a sign that the director’s still got plenty of heat left to spare.

Nope also stars Brandon Perea, Terry Notary, Andrew Patrick Ralston, and Jennifer Lafleur. The movie hits theaters on July 22nd.

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