Jordan Peele creates horror of the second kind. Within the theater, I feel the dread and menace and suspense; when I leave the theater, though, I stop glancing over my shoulder. His films aren’t like Hereditary where I pull the sheets tighter and try not to look at the shadows in the corners of the room or swallow hard when I turn out the lights. Still, the experience of a Peele film does not end when the lights come on and his name crosses the screen because there is intellectual puzzling still to come. What was he saying about the world? What did that situation represent thematically? Why did those characters behave that why and what can we take from their decisions?
His latest production, Nope, is less pure horror than sci-fi/horror but the effect is the same. My heart pounded during the movie; my brain took up the mantle right afterward as it tried to make intellectual sense out of his crafting. Hell: during Nope, I’d maybe even say both happened simultaneously as a part of me kept trying to sort of how the disparate pieces all fit together. No matter, though: Nope is a blast that picks at flying saucer tropes in a heart-pounding way that plays brilliantly on a large screen but yet always in a grounded way as well.
OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) trains horses for Hollywood productions on his family’s ranch. His father (Keith David) runs a well-regarded operation, allowing OJ to serve as a general ranch hand, but a freak accident forces OJ and his brash sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) to take over. Times are hard, though, forcing the siblings to sell multiple horses to the nearby tourist trap run by a former child star, Jupe Park (Steven Yeun), best known for his starring role on a sitcom that ended when his chimpanzee co-star violently attacked cast members. OJ hates this—he wants to buy back his father’s animals, not sell them off—but they have no choice.
Things turn, though, when OJ and Keke spot a UFO above the ranch. Just as their great-great grandfather was the first man captured on film, they aim to be the first to capture extraterrestrials on film. An alien-obsessed clerk at Fry’s named Angel (Brandon Peres) joins them in setting up cameras and traps to lure the UFO out, but Jupe also has plans to capitalize on the situation. When things turn deadly, the three still refuse to give up and must set in motion an intricate plan not just to record the UFO but also survive.
Nope looks pretty great from start to finish. Set amid sprawling hills in Southern California, the scale of everything feels pitch perfect. This is a place where a UFO could appear while evading wide detection, for one, but there’s also something barren and dried out and dying about the place that sets the mood for the film as well. The camera work here is engaging, using majestically centered shots that feel cinematic but are always slightly askew, the extra tilt or twist lending uneasiness and tension to the story. The CGI is less perfect, particularly with Gordy the chimp and a few late, close shots of the UFO, but neither hampers the film at all. Every sequence is visually inventive and cleverly framed to make the movie feel large, sweeping, and epic in scale even when the stakes are low. (The now-defunct Fry’s electronics store will never be rendered more generously.)
Behind the dynamic look of Nope is a carefully constructed script in which everything present is there for a reason. No random item or bizarre scene here is without purpose from start to finish; given time, the place for each will emerge. Even the hokey Jupiter’s Claim, with its large balloons and fake wells and too-good-for-this-place arena, is a masterpiece of cinematic problem-solving. It’s hard not to admire that attention to detail (and how so many of these clever adornments splash color against the dead hills.
Performance-wise, the cast really fits together. Kaluuya was fantastic here in an understated performance; his OJ is calm and patient but also gritty and resourceful. We see that, when the winds swirl and alien things appear, everyone screams while Kaluuya appears scared but somehow unflappable as well, making OJ both heroic and impossibly human. For her part, Palmer brings the kinetic energy that Kaluuya resists, talking at a hundred miles a minute and always dancing and moving and shaking; they are perfect counterpoints as leads. Yeun plays Jupe as a bit slimy and myopic, maybe even arrogant, but the character’s traumatic back story and the actor’s easy likability give Jupe additional depth. (I’ll give a shout out to Jacob Kim who plays Jupe as a child for a convincing depiction of mortal fear in his one scene.) And Peres skates close to being in a different film than everyone else—Angel yammers about Ancient Aliens and seems about 25% too goofy for the tone here—but he finds his way and eventually settles in as part of the team rather than forced comic relief. On that note, Nope is a film with jokes, not a comedy, and Angel’s role is the only one that left me uncertain about that fact. On the flip side, there are moments that lean into audience expectations in great ways that underline that Nope isn’t truly horror either, and those head fakes are delights as moments where Peele can show off his authorial command.
By the end, some larger themes develop, although there’s so much there that it took me awhile to chew things down. Nope explores animals, particularly the way we use them and attempt to tame them but so often resist understanding them or respecting their unknowability. The quest for the perfect shot or the perfect show and leveraging something terrifying for attention and fame comes up repeatedly in the film, particularly with Em and Jupe, and the film points to this and endorses the idea of hard, intentional work toward success rather than capitalizing on something, a conflict that exists on the micro level two between the Haywoods. It’s difficult to tackle these big ideas without either sounding incredibly vague or veering into spoilers, so I’ll leave things at that.
Peele’s movies are interesting films that do things I haven’t seen before and they always feel bigger, grander, and more resonant than the canvases they paint on. Even when the pieces don’t all line up, like in Us, or they feel maybe a tad bloated, which I fear happens a bit in Nope, they never cease to be entertaining and thought-provoking as well as exceedingly well-made and visually original. I will always aim to see his creations on day one so that I can soak them in and chew on them myself before any other voices can pollute my thoughts. Nope is a success, though, a thrill to watch and a joy to dissect, and I look forward to watching it again soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment