Grandiose terror meets B-movie mayhem in new film Nope, the third feature from acclaimed writer-director Jordan Peele and second collaboration with Oscar-winning actor Daniel Kaluuya. Best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible, it’s a collision of sumptuously ambitious scale: a sci-fi-horror-western that draws influence from a vast array of cinematic sources – from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind to Tremors; Jaws to Akira (which Peele was reportedly tapped to remake).
But Nope is a monster with much more than straight-up pastiche on its mind. In fact, so much of Peele’s film feels so wildly conceptual, so wonderfully original, that it occasionally buckles under the weight of its own ideas. Here is a tale about horse-wrangling siblings (Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) hoping to score a quick buck by capturing the strange goings-on in the skies above their Hollywood ranch that examines issues of trauma, capitalism, exploitation and the seemingly insatiable appetite for spectacle in an era of surveillance culture and viral video obsession.
It’s quite the thematic melting point, anchored by motifs aplenty – coins, keys, a single blue shoe – and a script that, in true Peele fashion, simmers with double meaning (“It’s in the cloud,” shrieks one character). Crucially though, Nope is the director’s most visceral film to date: a movie that, should one choose to park the rich subtext, retains all the surface level joy of a proper summer blockbuster. Cinematographer Hotye Van Hoytema, a regular collaborator of Christopher Nolan’s, brings an expansive beauty to the film’s sweeping rural setting, while sound designer Johnnie Burn and composer Michael Abels compliment the growing unease with a genre-hopping soundscape that jolts between rousing Western twangs and the startling screeches of something ghastly and unnatural.
Not all of it fits together quite as seamlessly, however. The delicate act of balancing extra-terrestrial shenanigans, sharp satire, and a brilliantly horrifying event on the set of a children’s sitcom means the narrative occasionally feels uneven, rendering many of the film’s supporting characters disappointingly underdeveloped. In the end, though, Nope is a film held together by the dazzling vision of its creator. As he did with Get Out and Us, Peele once again succeeds in crafting a carnival of nightmare-inducing visual delights that, while at times frustratingly paced, remains a bold, baffling, and oh so beautiful beast.
Dir: Jordan Peele (15, 130 mins)
Nope is out now in cinemas
words GEORGE NASH
