NOPE (Universal, R)
It’s genuinely interesting to me that Jordan Peele is a household name at this point. Borderline funny even. It’s more the path of that familiarity than anything else. When I was in college Key & Peele was a constant conversation topic. In the void left behind by Dave Chappelle, Keagan Michael Key and Jordan Peele came with all of their tools handy. Their skit show commanded attention and Comedy Central, and as such, cemented them as names you could drop just about anywhere, often with distinct memories and quotes from their skits. When Key & Peele ended it wasn't without dismay. So when Jordan Peele announced that he was going to start directing feature films it was an exciting prospect. When he announced the first film would be a psychological horror flick everyone balked. It wasn't that we weren’t aware of his talents, but you could be forgiven if you assumed his first project would be a comedy. That was how he got on the map after all. What would later be released as Get Out would immediately put everyone’s trepidation to bed. Get Out was a monumental success, earning Peele an Oscar on his first foray into directing feature films. Following the release of his second film Us, a similarly lauded film, Jordan Peele had made himself a household name again. From comedy to psychological horror. Having seen NOPE, at this point, I’m not sure what Jordan Peele can’t do.
The initial trailer for NOPE, airing at the Super Bowl, was a quiet, enigmatic two minutes that answered far fewer questions than it posed. Daniel Kaluuya, a returning actor from Get Out, works on a farm in the California desert. After the mysterious death of his father, he and his sister, played by Keke Palmer, experience supernatural and/or extraterrestrial phenomena. It was deliciously vague, and as a person who generally steers clear of horror, I found myself wildly curious. Since the debut of the trailer I made myself watch Get Out and Us, and what I found was deeply non-traditional horror. Each film had its elements of horror and spookiness, but neither movie was out to get you with cheap jump scares and gore, instead what I was met with was disturbingly cerebral terrors. Terrors that leaned on the black experience, that harkened to deep seated fears in my brain. Fears I hadn’t had a film address directly, but here Jordan Peele was, turning a mirror to me and asking me to see the face beneath my own. I immediately committed to making sure I saw NOPE in theaters.
There is a small conversation to be had about the frustrating habit trailers have, wherei they give just a little too much away. I’m not sure NOPE is an egregious offender of this pattern, but I will say the last few trailers that came out gave a little more than I would have hoped. If you haven’t seen all the trailers, don’t. Save some mystery for yourself. That’s not to say the the trailers for NOPE spoiled the whole film, they just let me know to look for some things I wish I hadn’t had any idea were coming.
Hollywood. Be better about this. You can intrigue without spoiling. Thanks.
NOPE is about the Haywood family, and their Hollywood horse ranch. They train horses for TV and film, and have for decades. When Otis Haywood, Sr. (Keith David) is mysteriously killed by falling debris one day, Otis Jr. takes over the business. From the jump, partially because you know the film you are in, mostly because the atmosphere is established phenomenally, you know that something isn’t adding up. OJ (Otis Jr.) is clearly unconvinced that what struck his father came from an airplane. Kaluuya should be commended for his performance in this film. He is immediately readable as deeply thoughtful, observant, and skeptical. When his sister Emerald shows up to help around with the duties of the ranch, they start to observe something unnatural in the night sky.
When it comes to the portrayal of aliens in film and television, even in videogames and literature, there is a shorthand that exists. Obviously. We all know the “little green/gray men” trope. Perhaps at this point a stereotype, though I’m not sure we are going to see many of them come out of the woodwork to decry their poor representation. Often times extraterrestrials are portrayed as far too similar to people. Why are so many bipedal, binocular, and why do they so often behave like humans? They are aggressive, colonistic, and violent. All in ways humans can understand. Even in seminal works, like those of Asimov and George Lucas. Stanislaw Lem is truly one of the only authors I have encountered who presupposes, instead, that aliens would be what their name implies, truly foreign to human understanding, sometimes even comprehension. In his novel Solaris, for example, a team of scientists happen upon an intelligent ocean, and in trying to understand it and communicate with it, discover that this form of sentience not only is wholly unbothered by their presence, but it arguably makes no effort to communicate with them nor help them understand its nature. It’s refreshing. NOPE takes this same spirit and applies it to UAP, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the new stand in term for UFOs.
Peele’ s take on the common UFO story is a wildly entertaining and deeply ponderous narrative about animalistic behaviour in people and creatures. It’s a movie that confronts people’s addiction to spectacle. Our sometimes craven hunger for watching. The whole film plays out like a creepy Goonies, as OJ and Em try to find a way to capture footage of this phenomena they have been witness to, complete with little montages of trap setups, and planning sessions. And Jordan Peele flexes his Spielberg influence throughout. The UFO scenes are tense, obscured, and carry with them a gravitas that glues you into your chair. It also cannot go without mentioning that the Director of Photography Hoyte Van Hoytema’s talent in capturing the surreal and the celestial is unmatched. The veteran of Interstellar, Ad Astra, and Tenet is particularly gifted at capturing the unnatural and making it feel unnatural. Much of this film factors the sky into each shot, in many cases the sky takes up more than sixty percent of the shot, training viewers to look for something that doesn’t belong. When it is revealed later what you should have been looking for it is startling. Peele and Hoytema find a way to consistently hide threats right in front of your face, their later discovery prompting the perfect and colloquially understood, “Nope,” as soon as the unnatural is spotted.
NOPE is a brilliant film, content with hinting the reality of a situation until the last moment, and then being proud enough of its decisions to then let you sit and stare at the alien (both in nature and origin) events as they play out in long form in the last act of the film. It isn’t particularly “scary” in the way that you might have assumed it is. Instead, as Peele is wont to do, the terror is psychological. A kind of festering fear that you are being hunted, observed, studied, by something far more qualified to do those things than is comfortable. Also, as an aside that calls back to my discussion of Stanislaw Lem and the nature of alien representation in fiction, when you get a glimpse of what this thing is that has been stalking the clouds throughout this film, the creativity on display is intoxicating. It is just such a phenomenally unique explanation of what you are looking at. I caught myself, more than once, mouth agape, nodding furiously, feasting on what was laid before me.
Like I said before, I’m not sure Jordan Peele knows how to miss. At the very least, he hasn’t missed yet. NOPE is a fantastic flick, with an absolutely stellar atmosphere and execution. Go see it in the largest and loudest format you can because the sound engineering elevates it to still another level of greatness. And don’t blame yourself if, for the next several days, you catch yourself watching the sky thinking, “…nope.”
~Caleb