Director: Jordan Peele
Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Steve Yuen, Keith David, Donna Mills
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 131 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc

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Rating notes: Sustained stress and coarse language

Comedy and tension in a story blend of Westerns, horse training, and sci-fi of the Close Encounters kind when a mysterious craft menaces the horses.

Actor-writer-director Jordan Peele made an impact with his comedy, especially with his friend Keegan Michael Keys. Then he wrote and directed the thriller, Get Out – and found a new set of fans. He followed up with Us. In looking at Nope, we might see that he is keen to direct a Western and keen to direct his own Close Encounters kind of science-fiction. Which, he seems to combine in Nope.

Nope is an anagram for Open. The meaning of this film takes a while to open up and open out. For this reviewer, it took too long, making it difficult to engage with characters and themes. British actor Daniel Kaluuya had a significant role in Get Out. Here, he is the laconic cowboy, as he and his father (David) raise horses to be used in the movies. It is hard to get a fix on him as a character. He is monosyllabic a lot of the time and is obviously meant to be something of a hero.

Then there is his sister, Emerald, played by comedian and music video artist, Palmer. She gets on her brother’s nerves a lot of the time and, with her raucous outbursts, insensitive rushing into situations, she is rather hard to take, which means that some of us are not quite on side as the problems arise, when the transition from the western background to the appearance of the alien craft occurs. Perea is an electrician and Wincott plays what is a really odd photographer, invited to come and photograph the alien craft, filming without electricity his own self-made cameras (in the tradition of Eadweard Muybridge whose rider and horse pioneering film is referenced many times).

The film opens with a disaster on a television sitcom set in 1998 and later returns to that situation after we, perhaps, have forgotten all about it. Probably some footnotes in the programming would help us to understand how this all fits into the overall Nope story. There is also the producer of the television show, Yuen, who now runs an entertainment complex adjacent to the horse farm.

Perhaps there is too much explanation of characters and situations – or, perhaps, not enough. But, with some explanations of what might be going on, especially the alien craft (looking flimsy at first with fabric rather than metal, then blossoming into all kinds of fabric) and its mission, horses maybe for some intergalactic reason, there is, finally, some tension building up with the four central characters confronting, evading, challenging, photographing, the unseen aliens driving the spaceship.

This review would have liked to have said Yep instead of Nope – but, in terms of stating the obvious, the number of reviewers and bloggers who have posted Nope for their review, might have shown some more creativity in expressing their negatives! But, nope, they didn’t.