Goodbye horses
I would claim, and I would certainly appear to be in a very small minority in doing so, that with Nope, Jordan Peele has officially entered the realm of wildly talented directors whose work is all but guaranteed to be interesting and visually striking on a rare and potent level, but who are also fucking lousy screenwriters who need desperately to find other people to provide them scripts to fuel their majestic stylistic visions. It is, I think, a commonality of all three of his films that the worst thing about them is the screenplay, which in the case of his 2017 feature debut Get Out suffered from screaming its themes through a bullhorn and completely losing track of everything it was up to in the third act, and in the case of the 2019 Us suffered from making absolutely no goddamn sense. In both of those cases, Peele's command of genre mechanics, tone, visual style, and his exceptional skill with actors all helped the films overcome that; Us, I think, even turns its baffling script into something of a strength, give or take the very last scene, by using it to shove the movie into a kind of Argento-esque "the delirium is the point" mood, and it is for that reason that I think that film is all the argument we need that Peele has real, undeniable chops as a filmmaker.
Nope splits the difference between those two films, basically: like Get Out, it is way too hung-up on theme and allegory at the expense of solid storytelling mechanics, and like Us, the allegory is confusing as hell, and the film improves immensely when it drops it in favor of just walloping us with immaculate suspense scenes. I cannot recall the last time that my response to a film shifted so extremely hard, and at a very identifiable point; there is a single, specific scene where in the course of about three seconds I went from "this is a godawful 1-star catastrophe that has absolutely no sense of narrative structure whatsoever and is letting its underdeveloped characters die horribly in the stark California sun" to "this is a 4.5-star masterwork that has the best grasp on genre of anything I've seen since at least 2019".
The difficulty this presents to the reviewer is that virtually all the stuff I loved falls under the umbrella of "spoilers", but I don't especially want to only say shitty things about the movie. To get the shitty things out of the way, though, Nope spends its first hour on a muddled mixture of slow-burn horror, metacommentary about the ethical dangers of making and consuming "spectacle" (a term that Nope is deploying in a dreary critical theory sense drawn from Guy Debord, not a "the way actual people use words" sense) in the context of a film expressly designed from its IMAX cameras on down as a spectacle, and a story about thinly-drawn characters in a not-terribly-interesting story about economic precarity. This is structured bizarrely, spending a ton of time on a major supporting character and his subplot whose function in the script proves to be almost strictly allegorical; the character is "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun), and the subplot is his nightmarish experience as a child actor in the 1990s, when he was the star of a cheesy family sitcom about a chimpanzee named Gordy (mo-capped by ape specialist Terry Notary) who snapped one day and went on a hideous, bloody rampage. This rampage is so important to Peele that he opens the whole movie with a cryptic snatch of footage flashing back to that moment; its function will prove to be almost exclusively thematic, as Jupe's backstory ends up having basically nothing whatsoever to do with the film's actual story. And for the people who enjoy ferreting out the themes of a movie, I guess that's a cool thing and all, but it's pretty shapelessly shoved into the film as a story.
As for the actual story, which has only a little to do with Jupe and nothing at all to do with his chimp-related trauma, it's focused on a pair of siblings, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer). As the film opens, they've been orphaned by the weird death of their father (Keith David), who had a coin wedged in his brain after an inexplicable storm of small metallic objects over the family horse ranch. Some time later, they've been trying - not very well (OJ) or not very hard (Emerald) - to keep the family business, Haywood's Hollywood Horses, alive and well and supplying animals to the film industry. But it's been rough, and OJ has been selling his horses, one at a time, to Jupe's Wild West-themed amusement park in the next gulch over from the ranch. It's getting close to the time that they might have to abandon the property altogether, until OJ spots what could very well have been some manner of extraterrestrial craft one night, and Emerald comes up with the idea that if they can capture a good picture of it, and thereby prove the existence of alien life, that should do pretty well for their bleak financial prospects.
There's something to that, though it feels like the draft of the screenplay got filmed, before the "something to that" got figured out. Tonally, the opening hour of Nope is going all over the place, from dry humor to terror to dreamy Spielbergian awe to harsh realism, and the scenes exploring each of those moods generally feel like they've been sketched out as a series of goals to achieve rather than actually written out in full. The pacing just isn't there - some scenes go on for ages (the deadly dull scene establishing the Haywoods on a commercial shoot), some feel perfunctory and pointless (the Haywoods buying equipment at a Fry's Electronics), some are just right (OJ being stalked by pranksters pretending to be aliens in the horse barn). They never fit together, in part because the random Jupe scenes keep shattering the film's momentum every time it seems to have a clear direction, in part because the stakes are so flat ("we'll make money by proving aliens exist with a photo", in 2022? Maybe if it were being presented with an ironic sense of humor, but if it is, I completely missed it), in part because it takes so long for the characters to coalesce - surprisingly so, really. The performances are very good, and usually that's more than half the battle. But while Kaluuya's OJ is a clear person right out of the gate, with his exhausted monotone reaction to the unfairness of the world, Palmer's Emerald doesn't really have a strong center until quite a bit in the film (in part because the film makes a false attempt at giving her motivations with an early scene of backstory about their dad that doesn't inform the writing or performance after the scene is over), and while she's working like hell to give the character a vibe, it's pretty shallow. Of the other main characters, Jupe is basically a narrative dead end, despite Yeun's strong work, the Fry's employee Angel (Brandon Perea) starts as poor comic relief and only gradually evolves up to decent comic relief, and the deranged cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) never makes a damned bit of sense at all, except, again, due to his symbolic value in the thematic argument Nope is making.
So that gets us a long way into the film, and I found it largely miserable - there are individually good scenes, but they feel very lonely. And then, midway through, Jupe starts to put on a show at his theme park, and Nope snaps into place so fast and so hard that it's almost disorienting. Mostly, this is because this is the exact point where Nope starts worrying so much about being anything but a machine for dispensing suspense setpieces, with the story and the theme both taking a distinct backseat to, well, pure spectacle. And this is where Peele the writer recedes and Peele the director rages up to the fore. To be clear, Nope is always well-directed and mostly well-shot, by Hoyte Van Hoytema.* It's got some terrific sound design, aggressively throwing strange alien noises at us and contrasting that with the hostile silence of the desert night. It's just not until the second half that it starts to embrace its aesthetic strengths, and Peele starts hitting us one after another with some of the best thriller sequences in many years.
One of the really exciting things about Nope's turn toward popcorn movie thrills is that these sequences are not merely all fantastic, they're all different. One sequence is dominated by a long take that's partially obscured by a gauzy tablecloth, giving us a tense POV shot that nervously looks around, seeing only an incomplete fragment of some bloody slaughter, warily catching glimpses of the perpetrator of that slaughter. Another is all about pure excess, dumping Christ knows how much stage blood out in a garish, horribly overwrought waterfall of gore that feels like something out of Fulci - and this is itself cross-cut with an unbearably tense scene whose entire content consists basically of nothing other than Kaluuya's eyes, stark white in the pitch-black night.
It's a pretty remarkable collection of suspense-generating moments, once it gets going, enough to make me feel genuinely bad at how desperate I was to not be watching the first half. Even so, it's always a film of terrific individual scenes rather than a film that feels, as a whole, like it's building to some great crescendo; and indeed the last few minutes are a bit flimsy compared to the preceding hour, not really a crescendo at all, and certainly not a great one. Still, while I am insistently confident that Nope is a misstep, it's a misstep that comes from a place of extreme ambition and exceptional talent. And when it hits, it's demonstrating the same instinctive sense of cinema and obvious love for The Movies of the most wonderfully excessive moments in Us. Jordan Peele simply has it, even if in this particular case, I don't think his movie does.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*Some of the night exteriors felt pretty smeary to me, but I think it's not merely possible, but indeed likely that this was the fault of the projection.
Nope splits the difference between those two films, basically: like Get Out, it is way too hung-up on theme and allegory at the expense of solid storytelling mechanics, and like Us, the allegory is confusing as hell, and the film improves immensely when it drops it in favor of just walloping us with immaculate suspense scenes. I cannot recall the last time that my response to a film shifted so extremely hard, and at a very identifiable point; there is a single, specific scene where in the course of about three seconds I went from "this is a godawful 1-star catastrophe that has absolutely no sense of narrative structure whatsoever and is letting its underdeveloped characters die horribly in the stark California sun" to "this is a 4.5-star masterwork that has the best grasp on genre of anything I've seen since at least 2019".
The difficulty this presents to the reviewer is that virtually all the stuff I loved falls under the umbrella of "spoilers", but I don't especially want to only say shitty things about the movie. To get the shitty things out of the way, though, Nope spends its first hour on a muddled mixture of slow-burn horror, metacommentary about the ethical dangers of making and consuming "spectacle" (a term that Nope is deploying in a dreary critical theory sense drawn from Guy Debord, not a "the way actual people use words" sense) in the context of a film expressly designed from its IMAX cameras on down as a spectacle, and a story about thinly-drawn characters in a not-terribly-interesting story about economic precarity. This is structured bizarrely, spending a ton of time on a major supporting character and his subplot whose function in the script proves to be almost strictly allegorical; the character is "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun), and the subplot is his nightmarish experience as a child actor in the 1990s, when he was the star of a cheesy family sitcom about a chimpanzee named Gordy (mo-capped by ape specialist Terry Notary) who snapped one day and went on a hideous, bloody rampage. This rampage is so important to Peele that he opens the whole movie with a cryptic snatch of footage flashing back to that moment; its function will prove to be almost exclusively thematic, as Jupe's backstory ends up having basically nothing whatsoever to do with the film's actual story. And for the people who enjoy ferreting out the themes of a movie, I guess that's a cool thing and all, but it's pretty shapelessly shoved into the film as a story.
As for the actual story, which has only a little to do with Jupe and nothing at all to do with his chimp-related trauma, it's focused on a pair of siblings, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer). As the film opens, they've been orphaned by the weird death of their father (Keith David), who had a coin wedged in his brain after an inexplicable storm of small metallic objects over the family horse ranch. Some time later, they've been trying - not very well (OJ) or not very hard (Emerald) - to keep the family business, Haywood's Hollywood Horses, alive and well and supplying animals to the film industry. But it's been rough, and OJ has been selling his horses, one at a time, to Jupe's Wild West-themed amusement park in the next gulch over from the ranch. It's getting close to the time that they might have to abandon the property altogether, until OJ spots what could very well have been some manner of extraterrestrial craft one night, and Emerald comes up with the idea that if they can capture a good picture of it, and thereby prove the existence of alien life, that should do pretty well for their bleak financial prospects.
There's something to that, though it feels like the draft of the screenplay got filmed, before the "something to that" got figured out. Tonally, the opening hour of Nope is going all over the place, from dry humor to terror to dreamy Spielbergian awe to harsh realism, and the scenes exploring each of those moods generally feel like they've been sketched out as a series of goals to achieve rather than actually written out in full. The pacing just isn't there - some scenes go on for ages (the deadly dull scene establishing the Haywoods on a commercial shoot), some feel perfunctory and pointless (the Haywoods buying equipment at a Fry's Electronics), some are just right (OJ being stalked by pranksters pretending to be aliens in the horse barn). They never fit together, in part because the random Jupe scenes keep shattering the film's momentum every time it seems to have a clear direction, in part because the stakes are so flat ("we'll make money by proving aliens exist with a photo", in 2022? Maybe if it were being presented with an ironic sense of humor, but if it is, I completely missed it), in part because it takes so long for the characters to coalesce - surprisingly so, really. The performances are very good, and usually that's more than half the battle. But while Kaluuya's OJ is a clear person right out of the gate, with his exhausted monotone reaction to the unfairness of the world, Palmer's Emerald doesn't really have a strong center until quite a bit in the film (in part because the film makes a false attempt at giving her motivations with an early scene of backstory about their dad that doesn't inform the writing or performance after the scene is over), and while she's working like hell to give the character a vibe, it's pretty shallow. Of the other main characters, Jupe is basically a narrative dead end, despite Yeun's strong work, the Fry's employee Angel (Brandon Perea) starts as poor comic relief and only gradually evolves up to decent comic relief, and the deranged cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) never makes a damned bit of sense at all, except, again, due to his symbolic value in the thematic argument Nope is making.
So that gets us a long way into the film, and I found it largely miserable - there are individually good scenes, but they feel very lonely. And then, midway through, Jupe starts to put on a show at his theme park, and Nope snaps into place so fast and so hard that it's almost disorienting. Mostly, this is because this is the exact point where Nope starts worrying so much about being anything but a machine for dispensing suspense setpieces, with the story and the theme both taking a distinct backseat to, well, pure spectacle. And this is where Peele the writer recedes and Peele the director rages up to the fore. To be clear, Nope is always well-directed and mostly well-shot, by Hoyte Van Hoytema.* It's got some terrific sound design, aggressively throwing strange alien noises at us and contrasting that with the hostile silence of the desert night. It's just not until the second half that it starts to embrace its aesthetic strengths, and Peele starts hitting us one after another with some of the best thriller sequences in many years.
One of the really exciting things about Nope's turn toward popcorn movie thrills is that these sequences are not merely all fantastic, they're all different. One sequence is dominated by a long take that's partially obscured by a gauzy tablecloth, giving us a tense POV shot that nervously looks around, seeing only an incomplete fragment of some bloody slaughter, warily catching glimpses of the perpetrator of that slaughter. Another is all about pure excess, dumping Christ knows how much stage blood out in a garish, horribly overwrought waterfall of gore that feels like something out of Fulci - and this is itself cross-cut with an unbearably tense scene whose entire content consists basically of nothing other than Kaluuya's eyes, stark white in the pitch-black night.
It's a pretty remarkable collection of suspense-generating moments, once it gets going, enough to make me feel genuinely bad at how desperate I was to not be watching the first half. Even so, it's always a film of terrific individual scenes rather than a film that feels, as a whole, like it's building to some great crescendo; and indeed the last few minutes are a bit flimsy compared to the preceding hour, not really a crescendo at all, and certainly not a great one. Still, while I am insistently confident that Nope is a misstep, it's a misstep that comes from a place of extreme ambition and exceptional talent. And when it hits, it's demonstrating the same instinctive sense of cinema and obvious love for The Movies of the most wonderfully excessive moments in Us. Jordan Peele simply has it, even if in this particular case, I don't think his movie does.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*Some of the night exteriors felt pretty smeary to me, but I think it's not merely possible, but indeed likely that this was the fault of the projection.
