Nope – don’t look up at the skies, Jordan Peele is back in town.

Jordan Peele doesn’t make movies like other people. Even when exploring familiar themes, he does so with a unique perspective, employing the sharpest tools at his disposal. Even the title, Nope, suggests a tongue-in-cheek sensibility, although that doesn’t stop him from piling on the visceral intensity. Here, we have the unusual setting of a Californian ranch, whose horses are trained for and rented out to production companies. It’s an angle on the filmmaking process we don’t see very often, while we are informed that the subject of the first moving image was actually a black man on a horse.

Daniel Kaluuya, who starred in Peele’s signature movie – and still his best – Get Out, plays O.J. Haywood, a man more comfortable in equine company than with the pumped-up personnel of the entertainment industry. And Kaluuya, in spite of his turns in Sicario, Get Out and Black Panther, doesn’t play your movie star type. His O.J. is stoic, suspicious and even morose, a far cry from his muscle-clad, lantern-jawed Hollywood comrades. And O.J. is not prone to talking much. Indeed, when he first witnesses something out of the ordinary, while listening to his father, Otis Snr (Keith David), he has a glove clenched in his teeth. His father is sitting astride a horse when an eerie breeze whips up and objects plummeting from the sky kick up bursts of dirt. The next minute, Otis has been hit and is felled from his saddle.

But the film actually starts stranger than that. The scene opens on a chimpanzee in a TV studio covered in blood and wearing a party hat, with a neon applause sign lit up behind him. It’s a genuine WTF moment and as the various strands of narrative begin to settle into place, the viewer is as much on the back foot as O.J., who has begun to notice that a cloud on the horizon hasn’t moved for weeks. And that’s all we really need to know, as Peele feeds out his storyline with unique mastery, almost drawing the viewer in at right angles. The pay-off is intense, surreal and genuinely unsettling. At its most basic, Nope is little more than a 1950s’ B-movie with knobs on, but knobs you wouldn’t find on any ordinary door to hell.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Wrenn Schmidt, Barbie Ferreira, Terry Notary, Devon Graye, Donna Mills, Osgood Perkins, Keith David, Jacob Kim, Andrew Patrick Ralston, Jennifer Lafleur, Sophia Coto.

Dir Jordan Peele, Pro Jordan Peele and Ian Cooper, Screenplay Jordan Peele, Ph Hoyte van Hoytema, Pro Des Ruth De Jong, Ed Nicholas Monsour, Music Michael Abels, Costumes Alex Bovaird, Sound Johnnie Burn, Dialect coach Audrey LeCrone.

Universal Pictures/Monkeypaw Productions-Universal Pictures.
130 mins. USA. 2022. US Rel: 22 July 2022. UK Rel: 12 August 2022. Cert. 15.

Nope

Non-Fiction

Normal