Nope movie review: A remarkable addition to Jordan Peele’s genre

The first thing that strikes you are the men in the cowboy hats — against horses, a vast expanse of land and sky, a stately house, a porch looking long into the distance. Familiar? Look again. For, Jordan Peele won’t have it any other way. And once you have done that — looked again — you can’t unsee what is the most remarkable thing about that scene: that those men on horses are Black. In the ranches where countless served as slaves, Blacks as owners are still aliens.

The insider who is an outsider is a recurring theme of Peele’s films. And Nope is the third in that, after Get Out and Us. More ambitious and at the same time less successful in straddling the fault lines compared to his other films, Nope is nevertheless a remarkable addition to his genre, particularly in the relentless beauty and breathtaking horror of its spectacle.

That there is a word that is crucial to Nope. The film opens with text from Nahum (part of the Hebrew Bible) 3:6: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.”

Who is the caster of the filth, who is the spectacle, and how the tables are reversed in a world where we are all increasingly spectators in each other’s lives, lies at the heart of Nope.

Terrible things happen to people, and terrible things are done by them. There is humour and pathos, drama and silliness, action and sometimes painful stillness packed into Nope’s taut but still longish length. There is too much of that UFO and too little of the fight against it. The use of titles to segment the storyline seems forced and lazy. But then there are its characters — each so unique, so unlike your imagination that you are forced to ask yourself why.

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And that is Peele’s strength. There is a guy pointedly called “OJ” (Otis Junior, played by Daniel Kaluuya) Haywood, who runs the ranch after his father’s inexplicable death, with a resignation and stoicism that hints less at the heroism associated with this American frontier and more at the futility of it all.

There is his sister Emerald (Kate Palmer) Haywood, who realising her own marginal space in the running of the ranch, hangs about trying her hand at other things. She is OJ’s complete opposite, a woman who can talk a room full of Hollywood execs under the table, and Palmer adds just the right amount of sauce to Emerald.

There is the Asian theme park owner who is the rival to OJ’s cowboy. Having survived an on-air massacre by a chimpanzee on a TV show set, Jupe (Steven Yeun) has come to believe in his own invincibility. Imagine the odds of finding a man like Jupe hanging around in the middle of this nowhere.

There is a tech store employee called Angel, a wonderfully nuanced Brandon Perea who nudges himself into the story of the Haywoods because who, after all, can resist a spectacle.

Then there is Michael Wincott playing a celebrated cinematographer, wedded almost obsessively to his art and to little else, speaking in a gruff, low voice as if pained by the sheer need to do so.

And then there is Hollywood itself, towering over this beautiful Wild West. The Haywoods are deeply connected to it as they have been supplying horses to the industry for shoots forever, and believe their history is tied to the very first motion picture (a scene lasting seconds) ever created. But what is history to them is mere detail to showbiz – easily forgotten for the next big thing. Especially those like them existing on its fringes.

OJ is struggling to keep his ranch going by finding work in Hollywood, Emerald is struggling to make her way into it, and Jupe is struggling to put it behind him.

The cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema, especially of a strange creature or thing swimming across a night sky against clouds and faint lights, causing them to go out and to spring back up, is breathtaking. The night sequences are so beautiful that you almost wish Peele wouldn’t move on to day, where the use of inflatable men across a desolate landscape is a nice device of its own.

The conceit of Nope is that, even if your life depended on it, can you look away from a spectacle? What makes a spectacle a spectacle? And what happens to those who are turned into spectacles? Plus, the layers of alienation that define where we end up.

Is Peele entirely successful? Nope. Especially as the writer-director-producer drags the ending to an unnecessary length. But would you look away from the thing that is haunting the Haywoods, now changing shape, now beautiful, now horrific, now cruel, now curious? Nope.