Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nope’ on Prime Video, Jordan Peele’s Provocative Flying-Saucer Spectacle (2024)

Now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, Nope finds filmmaker Jordan Peele once again coquetting with genre and racial dynamics. His skewed, odd-time-signature riff on sci-fi UFO-invasion movies stirs in elements of Westerns, thrillers, horror and comedy (of course comedy; how can you read that title with a straight face?) while tackling subject matter ranging from animal husbandry to showbiz and grandiose musings on ascension and perception. Whether Peele’s array of ambitious ideas all come together isn’t the question; it’s whether they all come together the first time you watch the film.

NOPE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Canned laughter. Goofy dialogue. Disconcerting animal noises. We fade in on the set of a ’90s sitcom. A ’90s sitcom called Gordy’s Home about a family and Gordy, their chimpanzee. A chimpanzee that has had enough and exerted its terrifying chimp strength. Its mouth and fists drip with blood. A boy sits under a table, paralyzed with fear. We’ll get back to that scene later. But now we move to zero-dark on a horse ranch in a dusty valley that’s a jaunt-and-a-half from Hollywood, present day. A four-wheeler engine revs up. The radio reports something about missing hikers. Sprinklers activate and dampen the dirt inside a cavernous barn. Pops (Keith David) sits on a horse named Ghost in an outdoor corral and his son OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) stands yonder. Strange sounds, clouds moving unnaturally, an eerie sensation – this is what you might call “phenomena.” Small objects rain from the sky violently. Pops slumps in the saddle. A nickel shot from the heavens, right through his eye, killing him. A nickel. Shot from the heavens. Through his EYE. Killing him.

Pops ran and now OJ runs Haywood Hollywood Horses. Their animals are on TV and in movies. To say OJ is a man of few words is like saying the universe is pretty sizable. He stands next to one of his horses on the set of some probably execrable production and a grotesque blond woman – the star of the show, we presume – blanches when she learns his name is OJ. Our man mutters a little something to the crew before his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) finally shows up and saves him. She gives a whole spiel about Haywood being the only Black-owned horse ranch in showbiz, and that she and her brother are descendants of the Black jockey riding a horse in the first motion picture ever, The Horse in Motion, and to keep in mind that she too is an actress and performer. Then a clueless production assistant doesn’t listen to OJ and spooks the horse and it nearly kicks some heads off and that’s that for that job.

Haywood is in trouble. OJ and Emerald pull up to a desert tourist trap, a faux-Western town with gift shops, saloon facades and other corny sh*t. It borders their ranch. Jupiter’s Claim, it’s called. OJ’s been selling horses to its proprietor Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) to stay afloat. Jupe opens a door in his office and shows off all the artifacts from the Gordy’s Home tragedy. Jupe was the boy. He says he usually charges people to see this stuff. Weird, how jocular he is about it. After dark on the ranch, it’s calm and quiet. Too calm and quiet? Damn straight. A horse gets out at night, a horse disappears, the electricity cuts out. It happens more than once. OJ is an unflappably calm guy. You don’t really see him smile or hear him breathe heavily, even when his eyes look up at the clouds and an almond shape moves through them with otherworldly speed and agility. He describes the scene to Emerald. “Are you sayin’ what I think you’re sayin’?” she asks. He nods as OJ does, with a barely perceptible twitch.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Signs, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, elongated-stretchy-suspense where-is-this-going stuff by Tarantino like Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, and maybe a smidgen of a neo-Western like No Country for Old Men or an old Western like Once Upon a Time in the West.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s a toss-up between Palmer’s combustible spirit and Kaluuya’s calm spirit. She has fire and verve. He says more with his wide, weary eyes than entire scripts. They’re an inspired dynamic pair.

Memorable Dialogue: An unlikely Haywood ally, Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), spiels and spiels to OJ about all the UFO myths and conspiracies:

Angel: They’re just waiting for the perfect time to shove probes up our asses!

OJ: Cool.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Whatever’s happening up there in the sky, it really needs you to look at it. Refuse – e.g., “nope” – and it won’t suck you up in an Oz-like dust devil tornado and swallow you and- I’ll stop there. But the plot has OJ and Emerald attempting to film what’s happening so they can get on Oprah or whatever and earn some major scratch, thus saving the farm for OJ and delivering fame to Emerald. They recruit Angel, an electronics-store counterboy, to set up security cameras, and eventually compel Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), a nutjob cinematographer who’s gotta be modeled on Werner Herzog’s gonzo persona, to help them capture “the impossible shot.”

So: movies movies movies. Movies. Nope is a movie about movies, but much more than that; it’s also about the mechanics and philosophy of seeing. The camera sees and the eye sees, and whatever that is in the sky, it sure looks like an eye, too. If the camera sees it, then it exists. Proof. The eye consumes – the thing’s “eye” and our eye. Kaluuya’s eyes take in this tableau in the clouds, but his eyes give, too. Give us reams, scores, novels. Look the horse in the eye and you’ll startle it. Jupe stages a show for a paltry crowd of onlookers, who have eyes, and aren’t going to believe them.

We certainly see strange things in Peele’s film. But what do we feel? Discomfort, excitement, the agitation of teased-out and suspenseful elongation of The Reveal. Does it pay off? Not immediately. Peele packs Nope with small mysteries (an image of a shoe standing on end) within medium mysteries (the relevance of the Gordy’s Home incident) within the big mystery (what the hell is that thing in the sky?). He underscores the story with racial tensions (the underacknowledged contributions to film history by Black people) and skittery satirical comedy (showbiz caricatures, OJ’s amusing inability to be riled up), the Peele signatures that define his work as a visual storyteller (which rendered Get Out and Us such exhilarating cinema).

Although Nope is impeccable in its visual conception, I refuse to judge its thematic coherence – Peele seems to sideswipe all manner of ideas, but the film is only hours old in my mind, and it continues to seep and linger and congeal. I was roused, chilled, provoked, occasionally transported, perhaps underwhelmed once or twice, but always, always engrossed. And observant. Can’t forget observant. Few movies inspire such an array of experiences.

Our Call: Yup. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

StreamNope