Scare Value Award Winner – Best Director
Top 10 film of 2022
Nope review.
Out now on VOD, Jordan Peele’s Nope is another quality, if sometimes frustrating, entry in his growing horror filmography. Read the full Nope review below.
Reviews of recent movies will not contain spoilers.
Nope
Directed by Jordan Peele
Written by Jordan Peele
Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Steven Yeun
Nope Review
Jordan Peele is taking bigger swings. That’s the main thing you’ll take away from his latest movie, Nope. The thing about big swings is…your hits may be bigger…but you miss more often. Peele hits plenty here, providing the viewer with breathtaking larger than life spectacle that demands your attention. He misses a bit too. Nope is an at times frustrating, but ultimately fulfilling film. Peele’s in no hurry to tie together his themes. This may be because it never truly comes together at the high level of Peele’s previous films.
OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Em (Keke Palmer) own a horse ranch and make their living supplying trained horses to Hollywood productions. When an on-set incident causes their opportunities to dry up…they must find new ways to make money. This includes selling horses to Jupe (Steven Yeun) a former child actor turned theme park carny who should know all too well the risk of forcing animals to perform. Oh…and something in the clouds is abducting horses from the ranch while raining down blood and metal. So, there’s that.
At its core Nope is a film about the very thing it provides…spectacle. And what spectacle it is. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (Dunkirk, Let the Right One In) makes a meal out of the sweeping plains and clouded skies. Your eyes are in for a treat for Nope’s slightly over two-hour running time. One of the films main themes, however, is that you shouldn’t keep your eye on the spectacle. Is, then, providing images you can’t keep your eyes from Peele’s way of saying humanity is doomed by its addiction to the spectacular?
The film’s other recurring theme, the exploitation of animals (and people) for entertainment purposes provides the key for what Peele is trying to say about spectacle. What horrors we are willing to look away from so we can have something shiny to look at. It’s fine social commentary on the surface…it just never fully ties into the film itself in a way that feels as purposeful or confident as Peele’s Oscar winning work on Get Out. You’re left with a kind of disconnect from a message that you believe in and confused about how exactly it applies to the actions in Nope’s story payoffs.
Nope is very well cast. Kaluuya creates a quietly reserved OJ that is perfectly juxtaposed by Palmer’s confident, charismatic Em. Yeun plays the misguided Jupe with an interestingly grounded, humanistic, take on what could have easily been a one note character. Supporting turns by Brandon Perea as electronics expert Angel Torres, and Michael Wincott as respected cinematographer Antlers Holst, round out the cast with memorable moments of their own.
The biggest flaw in Nope is its pacing. Peele lets everything in the first 2/3rds of the movie develop at a snail’s pace. This works just fine for building the tension of the first half of the movie. Once we understand the situation, however, it works far worse for exposition scenes. Peele makes up for this with a fantastic final act. We won’t be talking spoilers, so we’ll just say that any slowdown leading to the climax is worth it.
The finale isn’t the only great set piece Peele treats us to. Memorable scenes in a barn, Jupe’s theme park, a particular rainy night, and a flashback to Jupe’s backstory will all leave you thinking about them long after the credits roll. Peele also has a lot of fun with electronic outages throughout the movie. He’s showing off in some of these sequences as his confidence as a filmmaker and eye for what to put on screen grow exponentially with each film.
Perhaps the greatest strength of Nope is that for all of its held off mystery…it offers satisfying explanations. One of the traps of the genre is unsatisfactory reveals. The difference between a movie that fails in the end like M. Knight Shyamalan’s Signs, and one that succeeds like Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is razor thin. There are Close Encounters vibes in Nope…but it’s a different Spielberg classic it shares the most in common with. The movie that redefined the modern blockbuster, Jaws.
Like the characters in Jaws, ours find themselves confronted with real danger from something that is largely hidden from the viewer. Characters in Nope may not have direct counterparts to the 1975 classic…but there are traits and shades of them here. Both movies eventually focus on a dangerous hunt…there for a shark…here for visual evidence. Nope never rises to the height of Quint’s backstory monologue in Jaws. The backstory of Jupe that we get to see, however, is a fine enough replacement. It’s interesting that a scene of someone showing doesn’t quite match a scene of someone telling in this visual medium. However, given this film’s position of showing you the spectacle it does narratively fit better.
Scare Value
With a director at the peak of his confidence, Nope sees continued success for Jordan Peele. Beautiful to look at, but occasionally weighed down by pacing issues, Nope is a big swing that mostly connects.
4/5
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