The marketing for Nope, like all of Jordan Peele’s movies, leave with us with so many questions because the first image we get for his movies are the most vague teaser posters in the history of poster making for movies. The poster for his first film, Get Out, centered on a man strapped in a chair. Zero color, all black and white and there was only so much you could interpret from that one image. His follow up film, Us, had a poster of two similar shaped human heads with the tagline “a new nightmare from the mind of academy award winner Jordan Peele.” These posters come out and we don’t know what to expect except that we’re in for a unique horror movie experience. The very first poster for Nope, which dropped an entire year before the movie was released, featured a small suburban looking town with a giant cloud above it in the shape of a UFO with some colored looking rope/hook attached to it as a tail. Zero context and zero narrative information, but we automatically knew that Jordan Peele’s next horror picture would deal with alien life form. Knowing the style and sensibilities Peele has in the directors chair, in the insatiable appetite for his next horror movie was growing prior to its release.
What’s been really exciting about Jordan Peele’s horror movies is that the level of commentary has been a fascinating topic of discussion. Get Out was diving in themes of slavery and Us dealt with more themes with the ideas of social class and the trapped of the mentally unstable. Both movies, in essence, brought up situations of paranoia and the constant fear of the unknown. It’s been an aspect in both movies and for him to bring that idea into an alien movie seems pretty genius. With the two trailers for Nope painting the movie as both a horror movie and as a spectacle, the enticement and intrigue of this movie increasingly became more compulsive that the potential Nope for huge. Nope is Jordan Peele’s most ambitious take as a director, serving in the minds of a Spielberg, Hitchcock and Carpenter and movie. Peele really went for a larger and much epic scope in spectacle and it delivered, overall. He also, once again, delivers in effective tension, terrific sound and moments of horror that felt old school fashion. The performances from Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya are top notch, it also excels on special commentary and it surprisingly delivers on the best music composed by Michael Abels.
Set in the state of California, Nope focuses on a brother and sister who run a horse ranch in the hopes for making so more profits. They end up turning some potential for the success of their ranch to the owner of a nearby theme park, while this owner of the amusement park is trying to profit off of a mysterious, otherworldly phenomenon in the sky.
From a filmmaking perspective, Nope might be Jordan Peele’s best directed movie to date. Having Hoyte van Hoytema (Dunkirk, Tenet, Spectre, Interstellar and Ad Astra) as the films cinematographer makes this definitive spectacle for the summer of 2022. The shot of the ranch during the day, during the night and all the glorious framework of the UFO was damn impressive. Considering all of his movies had smaller budgets than most big movies, Nope utilizes its money towards the entire landscape of this movie to stimulate a gorgeous looking movie. Where Jordan Peele nails on the filmmaking, he proves that he is a mastermind at creating great tension and horrific sequences of ambience. This is by far his best sounding movie, not even with the scenes of UFOs, but the silence of it all, the silence of paranoia and the constant fear of unknown entities. Like Hitchcock, Jordan Peele beautifully understands that this level of tension is what makes the horror genre thrive to higher heights.
As stated earlier, the commentary angle in Nope is maybe his effort yet. He uses spectacle as an extra ingredient of subtext to allure the ideas that humanity can’t control something that’s outside of their own level of comprehension. Whether aliens exist or not is irrelevant, but we as humans almost become like a deer in a head light, frozen and completely speechless at what our eyes behold. Like Get Out and Us, Nope excels on that consistent theme of the anxiety of not knowing what we’re witnessing. It makes characters reaction inherently more believable when they see a giant UFO in the sky and say to themselves ‘nope’ over and over again. Nope also features concepts and other messages that are the stuff of nightmares. Without giving any spoilers away, there is a side story in Nope that is genuinely one of the most frightening, tragic and devastating sequences of any horror ever made proving that Peele is so great at what he does.
With Peele teaming up with Daniel Kaluuya again, this is the best collaboration between the two, even more so than what they did together in Get Out. He gives a radiating performance in this and it looks like Daniel Kaluuya and Peele could be another special actor and director pair. However, the real deal in this movie is Keke Palmer. Palmer, as mana actress, is a familiar face but hasn’t made a huge breakthrough in film just yet, but Nope proves that she’s got the moves for bigger roles, all thanks to Peele’s direction. Her performance is lovable, funny and exempts the kind of characters that Peele is great at making.
In some way, Nope might be the best directing effort by Jordan Peele. The beauty of Jordan Peele is that his movies can be the for the mainstream audiences, yet he’s able to dissect so much information and dive in to a wide variety of topics, social issues and other cultural points of issue. Nope is incredibly power hungry with its demonstration on spectacle, but what’s more important is that Peele is now three for three on his horror movie run.
Final grade for Nope: A
Zane's take at the Cinema's 