NOPE

A HUMBLE HORSE TRAINER TAKES ON AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL

★★★★★ (A Must-See)

Director: Jordan Peele

2022

Having just lost his elderly father in a freak accident, shy and reclusive O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) looks up at the sky over the desert and sees something not quite right, but dismisses it. There’s no reason for him to see the unexpected in anything. O.J. is a man I’m very familiar with out here in the country. He doesn’t say much and doesn’t feel he has anything meaningful to say. To him, life is an honest day’s work without lofty ambitions. The only scary thing in the world for him is losing his family’s horse ranch, a reality he’s facing now that the deals his father had with Hollywood producers are going dry. When you work the land, aliens or monsters are the farthest thing from your mind. It’s an eat or be eaten world.

Nope is by far the best horror film I’ve seen so far in 2022. Besides being a terrifying movie—with a scene so disturbing I couldn’t stop thinking about it days later—Nope is sweeping, majestic, smart, and moving. And highly original, a talent that has made Jordan Peele’s name a hot ticket. As my friend JJ and I left the theater in awe, I gnashed my teeth that I didn’t come up with this idea first.

THIS REVIEW WILL BE SHORT TO KEEP IT SPOILER FREE

After losing his father and selling some of his horses to make ends meet, O.J. enlists the help of his charismatic but flighty sister Em (Keke Palmer) to help him salvage production contracts involving leased horses. Both of the siblings fail at the task. O.J. is too awkward (he can’t make eye contact with people, an important plot point) and Em can’t focus on anything that isn’t her budding music career. This puts O.J. in a dire situation. The cast and crew trying to work with him don’t care that his jockey ancestor was in one of the first moving pictures of all time: Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 “Horse Galloping”. They also don’t care that his father is dead. All these white people stare at the two Black people in the room and don’t know what to say or how to be around them; it’s awkward and vile and something Em and O.J. have had to deal with all their lives.

These early scenes are peak Jordan Peele, a mirror in which everyone can look into. But that’s about it when it comes to racial commentary. The rest of the movie is about O.J.’s search for money to save the ranch and how far he’ll go (and how much he will risk) to get it.

My father was a jockey most of his life, so Nope hit home in a way few movies can. I understood the plight of the rancher, I understood O.J.’s connections with his animals. He cares so much about them that he intends to buy the horses back from Ricky (Steven Yeun), a former child star who now runs a western theme park called Jupiter’s Claim, not far from O.J.’s house. Ricky is an interesting character on his own. During the filming of his TV show in the 90s, an ape named Gordie, who was part of the cast, went rogue and maimed multiple people. Eye contact, or lack of it, was how Ricky survived, but he doesn’t know that. He believes Gordie saw something special in him, that they had a connection. This arrogance leads him to feel this connection elsewhere, which ends in disaster.

Nope isn’t just a horror film about a down-on-his-luck rancher who sees something strange in the sky. It’s as funny as it is scary. A Geek Squad-type bro named Angel (Brandon Perea) and a praying mantis steal scenes, and a faceless TMZ reporter gets the biggest laugh during one of the most frightening moments. Peele is a master of the Great Balance, and Kaluuya is clay in any role, an actor who can tug at the audience’s heartstrings so hard that we feel we are the ones in danger.

It’s no secret that the sphere in the sky is from another world; the mystery is why it’s hiding around Jupiter’s Claim and the nearby ranch. In the end, O.J. becomes such a worthy adversary, a man with nothing to lose, that a creature at the center of the film has to make itself bigger to be intimidating to its formidable opponent. This is when Nope becomes epic and illustrious and made for the big screen. O.J. is a hero willing to sacrifice himself so others may live. Fleeing on his horse across the desert like his great, great grandfather did on film, he is also heralding a new world.

GENRES: Apocalyptic, Diverse Characters, Feminist-Friendly, Funny, Monster/Creature

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