There is a spectacular scene toward the end of Jordan Peele's new sci-fi-horror-meta-extravaganza – an apocalyptic rainstorm traps Daniel Kaluuya in his truck, where he delivers a well-placed, comic "nope". The episode is just right, funny, frightening and mysterious. That's the good news, and pretty much all the good news. If only the rest of Nope worked nearly as well. For months the trailer has been teasing us with the sight of a frightened Kaluuya and Keke Palmer looking up at the sky, Steven Yeun in a cowboy hat and hilarious bright red suit, and a glimpse of what seems to be a flying saucer. It promised a frothy, entertaining popcorn movie, infused with Peele's usual layers of social commentary. But Nope turns out to be a would-be romp that often limps along instead.
Expectations were high even before the trailer, of course. Peele's Get Out (2017) was a true instant classic, effective as horror and trenchant as a critique of racial stereotyping. Us (2019) leaned even more into horror as it dealt with class and race.
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Nope has a bigger scale and huge ambitions, reaching for ideas about fame and the entertainment industry. With Kaluuya and Palmer as siblings who have inherited their father's ranch and business, wrangling horses for film and TV, the film borrows tropes from sitcoms, 1950's space-invader movies, and the myth of the old West. It has a house straight out of Psycho, and a plot that might as well have Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a template. The problem isn't that it's messy. Plenty of great films are sprawling messes. It's that not one of those individual strands is quite horrifying or entertaining or suspenseful enough.
Peele teases these threads in the first minutes, with the chatter of sitcom dialogue and a shot of a bloody chimp on the show's trashed set. Then we are at the California horse ranch, where OJ Haywood (Kaluuya) and his father (Keith David) hear a strange screeching in the sky. The father soon dies.
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun
Kaluuya's calm but intense manner serves him well through the film. "Your name is OJ?" an understandably confused actress asks him on a movie set. He blankly says, "Otis Jr"; no mention of the infamous OJ. This OJ is serious about honouring his father's legacy. His sister, Emerald (Palmer), is brash and attention-seeking, bursting onto the same movie set with such manic energy you wonder where the performance can possibly go after starting at such a high pitch. But the plot rises to match her level of mania, and Palmer shows Emerald to be tougher than she first seemed.
When OJ sees odd moving objects and signs in the skies – there's a cloud that never seems to move – Emerald decides to get rich and famous by photographing the first genuine evidence of a UFO, whether it actually is a UFO or not. The desperate hunger for fame is a major theme handled in a facile way. The biggest lost opportunity is Yeun's character, Jupe, a former child star who now runs an Old West theme park near the Haywood ranch. He was the young actor in the sitcom with the chimp, a story he tells us early in the film, part of a very long stretch while we're waiting for the plot to kick in. When the events surrounding the bloodied chimp are revealed much later, it is both horrifying and anticlimactic.
As written, Jupe isn't a man addicted to fame, which we're meant to see him as and which Yeun could certainly have achieved, but a stick figure indicating addiction to fame. In a similar way, Emerald tells a film crew a story about the famous Eadweard Muybridge photographs of a man on a horse, which when run together created what is credited as the first moving image. The identity of the black man on that horse has been lost to history, and his image appears twice in Nope. It's an eloquent, worthwhile gesture, but Emerald's mini lecture intrudes on the plot. Peele has rarely been so blunt in his social commentary.
The film does look spectacular at times, with ominous skies and candy-coloured inflatable tube men waving their arms on the ranch. There are sandstorms and eerie special effects, some from the sky and others closer to home. And as always in Peele films, clues and echoes are so detailed and carefully planted that it's hard to spot everything the first time through. He is still a master filmmaker, and even a mediocre Jordan Peele film is better than the strongest film of an ordinary director. Nope is that mediocre film.
Nope is released on 22 July in the US, and on 12 August in the UK.
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