An enormous alien spacecraft relentlessly bears down on Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ
Nope (2022)
Writer-director Jordan Peele’s latest is in many ways a straight-ahead sci-fi thriller, scary enough to startle you at times, rarely dark enough to make you shudder deep in your bones. Peele, who showed he knows how to slowly escalate terror in Get Out (2017), is working here on a grander scale, but he can still make a viewer’s skin crawl. This time, though, it’s not entirely clear why he’s bothering.
In Nope, Peele undergirds fright with a unique Black family story, founded in Hollywood. The Haywoods have been horse wranglers since the movie industry’s beginnings. For generations they’ve provided properly trained and disciplined horse flesh on sets from the silents to today’s TV commercials. The modern patriarch, Otis Haywood, Sr. (Keith David), is the proud father of two adult children he hopes will continue to run the business.
But will they? Do they care? Otis Sr. is mysteriously killed when his face and body are pierced by a flurry of sharp objects that seem to come out of nowhere. Was he struck by a sudden rush of wind or a nascent dust storm? No one has a clear explanation for his fatal injuries.
His son, Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), called OJ, has never accepted the eruptive violence that took his father’s life, and he carries on the horse wrangling business partly in tribute to his late father. OJ retains an enduring skepticism and melancholy over the death of his father. He’s haunted by the loss. With good reason, as he’ll soon discover.
OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), haunted by the past, must face down his fears in Nope
His sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), who’s called Em, treats the family business as a sideline, and wouldn’t fuss if OJ sold the place. A nearby carnival operator, Jupe Park (Steven Yeun), offers to buy out the brother and sister.
Yet the stately old house and ranch remain the Haywood family’s signature landholding, and both OJ and Em demand that the handful of horses they still rent out be treated on set with dignity and respect. Their father’s love of both the trade and its role in entertainment history still burns, even if dimly, in both his offspring. So, no sale.
That’s when the movie begins to unfold ominously, like a flower of evil. OJ notices a cloud above the ranch that sits motionless for days on end. What looks like a flying saucer with a great maw of a mouth descends from the cloud and pelts OJ and the family manse with wind and piercing dust. It also, frighteningly, shuts off the electric current in the house, the barns and the surrounding landscape.
At this point, brother and sister begin to turn from running scared to fighting back. OJ reasons that this is the force that killed their father. Em and, reluctantly, OJ see a chance to capitalize on the danger if they can survive the object’s attacks. Em delightedly suggests that they install cameras to film the invader and sell the footage to the highest bidder (hopefully, Oprah Winfrey).
Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), a local tech wizard, installs specialized cameras for them and joins in their scheme. To make sure the captured footage will be properly edited, they call on Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), a celebrated documentary filmmaker. He brings along a hand-cranked camera that won’t need electricity should the malevolent force again cut off electrical power.
What has this quartet taken on? When the saucer attacks Jupe’s carnival site, swallowing up guests and staff, the four guarding the Haywood ranch calculate, correctly, that they’re next. And they could be doomed.
Thankfully, they’ve got pluck, and for a viewer it’s bracing to watch them go on offense. Em is both gutsy and comically energized for the fight.
OJ, Angel and Em band together to take on a fearsome alien invader in Nope
But there’s sobriety and sorrow, too. OJ sees in the implacable force – is it from nature, or does it also have some sort of purpose, actual intentions? – a power beyond the reach of reason. He’s the first to peg it as “an animal”, to understand that it eats the people it draws into itself. Indeed, we hear their screams as they’re being devoured.
Peele would seem to be setting out his own course in sci fi. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) had its obelisk determining all our fates. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982) pictured, perhaps naively, benevolent other worlds. More recently, The Vast of Night (2019) showed humanity being spied on, yes, but in the end a select few were removed whole and entire, not devoured but sought out and, therefore, presumably, preserved.
All these movies said that some force out there was either controlling us, perhaps better than we can ourselves, or else wanting to get hold of us, in order to study us, torment us, or reveal itself to us. The universe wasn’t necessarily benign, but humankind was conceived as worth something, even if we couldn’t be sure of precisely what.
By contrast, Peele’s visiting force – from we know not where – has only malign designs. It shows no signs of superiority, has no lessons to teach, demands no conciliation. Peele is proposing not a vision for mankind, but a cruel, arbitrary fate we must beat back, if we can, or otherwise surrender to. Are there other ships like this one? Could whole armadas of them appear in the sky at any moment?
This fraught proposition is scary only up to a point. To be sure, the movie is photographed, with impressive technical mastery, to rattle us. Peele understands how to create a threatening atmosphere by going in tight or by looking on from an enormous height. His cutting maximizes both the comic and dramatic timing from his actors.
We fear for the characters while they make us snicker and giggle at their antics, trying to outwit a force from hell. The anxiety Peele can elicit from weather, light and sound feels eerily unsettling.
Still, does this sleek showing off add up to a coherent vision? Of our lives today? Our past? Our possible future? Do we deserve the fate that’s meted out to us here?
From these questions flow my reservations about this movie. It’s charmingly acted, by Kaluuya with his cool rage, by Palmer with her flinty brashness, and by the rest of the cast with carefully measured fear and bravado. They all entertain agreeably.
But Peele’s talent exceeds his subject. This is finally a puny monster he’s evoked. Not a challenge to mankind’s meaning and ingenuity so much as a giant nuisance, a test of our cussedness.
Peele’s gifts as a director continue to sharpen, and with Nope he puts on quite a show. And yet, this time around, he doesn’t leave us much to think about.