After the blistering social commentary of Jordan Peele’s first two movies, Get Out and Us, there’s an expectation that his latest, Nope, would have the same level of thematic richness.
nope toys with those expectations. The visceral and entertaining movie definitely has a lot to say about a lot of things, but there’s also a suspicion that Peele is having his own cheeky meta moment, a playful ribbing to audiences.
Because nope is nothing if not a spectacle. Peele wants you to look and he wants you to think about the exercise of him looking and consuming – and he has all the tricks to hypnotise and bewitch his audiences so they never look away.
OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) is outside on his family’s horse ranch when small objects mysteriously start falling at great velocity from the sky. His father of him is struck and killed by a coin and the ranch passes to OJ and his sister of him Em (an electric Keke Palmer).
Six months on, the ranch is struggling and OJ has had to sell horses to the neighboring theme park run by a former child actor, Jupe (Steven Yeun).
There’s a mysterious force in the skies above them, a UFO that hides inside a stationary cloud and OJ and Em and Jupe all want to exploit its presence for their own profit agendas.
But they’re going to find out they can’t bend a primal force to the will of men and a lot of blood will be spilled before the credits roll.
Utterly captivating, you can approach nope in multiple ways. If you want to have a leanback popcorn experience, Peele delivers. The film is a sensory smorgasbord – the set-pieces are variously tense, booming, draw-your-breath and exhilarating. And it’s also just really funny with Peele deploying his extensive experience in comedy.
You can go along for the ride on a pure spectacle level and inhale what it offers in visual and auditory thrills. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (dunkirk, Ad Astra, Her) does a tremendous job in shooting these expansive frames that make the story feel big.
There are visual questions to the likes of poltergeist and even The Godfatherwhile the tone, especially in that final act, evokes the Amblin movies of the 1980s.
Or you could engage with nope on a more cerebral level because Peele is working with several intersecting ideas.
There’s the man versus beast motif, which, without spoiling things, shows up in more ways than one, connecting a traumatic event in Jupe’s past to his present ambitions involving the visitor in the sky.
The main thrust of it though is these ideas around spectacle, this voracious appetite we have to be entertained, to be enticed into an experience away from the everyday, and the need to record it because if it doesn’t exist for posterity, did it even really happen?
nope can be heavy handed in how it deals with spectacle – the repetition of mirrors and reflections, including that which is captured by cameras, different aspects of performativity and a reference to chimp attack victim Charla Nash.
Of course, spectacle is almost always heavy handed, it’s about the fireworks and not grace. nope explores the cost of our obsession with spectacle and it reflects back to the audience our own complicity.
The ideas are sometimes a little undercooked and lose cohesion but Peele carefully works the balance between commentary and entertainment, which mostly succeeds.
above all, nope commands attention because it’s so conscious about itself being a spectacle and it’s asking us to decide whether it works as more than just a fun time.
Rating: 3.5/5
Nope is in cinemas now
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