Barbarian (2022)

Barbarian is a horror film that twists like few others. What starts as heart-pounding claustrophobic suspense pivots into what I will only describe as…other things…right at the moment that such turns would seem least appropriate. I knew this going in—Will Leitch’s phenomenal newsletter piece on that very thing convinced me to strain my schedule and squeeze seeing it in—but I underestimated just how engaging this presentation could be. 

 

I make this statement because, in the midst of a climactic scene with about fifteen minutes remaining in the film, something happened in our theater. The lights flashed brightly on the wall twice and then the screen cut to black before giving way to a translucent red hue. The audience was silent, sharing a collective curiosity over what had just happened. Phones came out, some muttered dialogue floated under the suddenly silent air conditioner, and a member from each of the two parties present with me—seven teens sharing three vape pens between them and a quiet couple in my row—left to speak with a manager. 

 

I, on the other hand, continued to munch on my popcorn. This is crazy, I thought with a grin so wide the others might have pegged me as a promotional plant for Smile. Will didn’t say it was interactive too.

 

It turns out: there was a power surge that caused everything to reboot. Ten minutes later, the film picked up again, and we all watched the conclusion that went over pretty well. In all seriousness, though, I assumed the cut and flashing were part of the movie. That speaks to the level of disorientation that Barbarian conjures at its finest moments. 

 

Dramatics aside, Barbarian is a masterwork of tension in the early going. Tess (Georgina Campbell) is in Detroit for a job interview, but her Airbnb is double-booked by charmingly awkward Keith (Bill Skarsgård). The two agree to share the tiny house for the night, with Tess in the locked bedroom and Keith on the couch, but Tess wakes in the night to the door open but Keith asleep in the other room. After her interview, Tess returns to explore the house, and the less said about what follows, the better.

 

Ultimately, there’s some very familiar horror stuff going on in Barbarian, but the film deftly evades ever feeling that way while watching. The pivots and twists are beautifully orchestrated, the performances are pitch-perfect all around, even if characters and motivations don’t always add up, and, as I said before, the effect as a whole is spellbinding. The set design, particularly the house’s interior, establishes an uneasy atmosphere that manages to imbue menace into the mundane in a way that screams “something is coming” but still subvert and toy with expectations. Barbarian feels confidently made and well-executed despite its many bold choices, and I’d say that all five principal cast members do well in their respective roles. 

 

If you’re looking for a fresh horror movie experience that takes some chances but mostly lands it, Barbarian is worth the price of admission. The experience of watching it is indeed remarkable, even if everything doesn’t entirely hold up under post-viewing scrutiny, and some of what it’s saying ends up pretty on the nose. As much as any genre, horror movies are about the visceral experience of watching them and the tangled web of emotions that flare up along the way. In that regard, Barbarian is a definite win.

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

No one can know what an intimate relationship is like from the outside. When friends or family members get divorced, someone always acts surprised. “I never saw it coming,” they say with misplaced incredulity. Even among the closest friends, there’s a sizable chasm between what an outsider sees between two people and what that connection is like in private. 

One of the elements I appreciate about Don’t Worry Darling, the new film from director Olivia Wilde, is that it willfully subverts this idea. The tight suburban world of Victory, suffocated on all sides by a deadly desert landscape, is predictable and familiar; it is the domestic sitcom sandbox Wandavision played around in where roles are clearly-defined and everyone waves in synchronized motions around the cul-de-sac when the hubbies leave for work and the wives buckle down for a day of cooking and cleaning. We are supposed to know what those marriages are like on the inside because they are archetypes we know.

But, of course, knowing what is happening inside leaves us uneasy. We aren’t supposed to know about the passionate love-making sessions Alice (Florence Pugh) has with her husband Jack (Harry Styles). We’re not supposed to believe such chemistry is possible! It is so perfect that we immediately question it, particularly while taking in an immaculate world that is an anachronistic terror of perfection, not unlike Pleasantville. Tension grows while we wait for Alice to catch up with us and finally question the apparent unreality of her heavenly, if decidedly antiquated, world. Punctuated by a haunting score full of musical throat-clearing and stomach-churning lines that sound sugar-coated by repeat and syncopate in grotesque and unnerving ways, the film urges Alice forward until she is literally trapped between a wall and a glass door and on the verge of suffocating under the weight of questions she has somehow failed to answer.

While Alice begins to question whether she, from the inside, truly understands her own marriage, the world around her grows increasingly sinister. A former friend Margaret (Kiki Layne) appears at lavish celebratory functions with dead eyes and claims of rampant lies. The optimism of best friend and doting mother Bunny (Wilde) clashes with the creeping, self-important guidance of development organizer Frank (Chris Pine) whose wisdom fills the airways between fun little fifties hits. We see a cult of sorts, or maybe aliens—the bizarre monolithic mountain the husbands enter for work each day certainly leans that way—but only Alice seems willing to confront it, and confrontation has costs.

If this all reads like glowing praise, it is: I really do admire what the film did well. Nothing here is truly new territory—you get shades of Luhrman’s Great Gatsby cocktailed with some Black Mirror vibes and a healthy note of Shymalan and the aforementioned Wandavision—but the construction that we see on film is powerful. Pugh elevates this even further, once again excelling at the center of emotional torture porn; for every moment when Styles doesn’t quite get there with the emotion of his Jack, Pugh nails three others with an intensity that confirms her dynamic abilities as a leading woman.

But, like everywhere in Victory, what meets the eye doesn’t quite match what gurgles under the surface. Don’t Worry Darling is so on the nose at times—the trailer scene of Pugh wrapping her face in plastic wrap meets a moment where her marriage is, would you believe, suffocating her—that the presentation borders on condescension, but the film is also so packed with characters and threads and ideas that it can’t possibly pay them all off. Without spoiling anything, for instance, there’s a high-intensity scene with Gemma Chan playing infallible Frank’s wife that plays on-screen with gravity matching the richest moments of Alice’s…but why? We’ve seen Chan in only a handful of scenes; our profile of her character runs directly counter to her actions here. The entire moment is a miscalculation—either that pr evidence that many embiggening elements got chopped from the final cut (I could believe this).

But this isn’t an isolated incident: the film is so dense with ideas that I had trouble tracking all of them. Foreshadowing lands flat; explanations work but under the weight of blunt reveals that again show so much that I worry Wilde and her writers think we are idiots incapable of internalizing nuance. The message of Don’t Worry Darling is unsubtle, which is fine, but in the place of a meticulous script is one with dozens of shiny things and ideas that Wilde goes out of her way to point to, only to leave to rust off-screen when we finally are sponged our answers.

I liked Don’t Worry Darling—there’s too much good stuff here with too much Pugh excellence to hate what is an aesthetically strong, well-made movie. I liked it, but I really wanted to love it despite its many unoriginal elements. It carried a potency throughout its runtime: maybe it was Pugh, maybe it was the similarity to Wandavision, or maybe it was the unbearable tension it gripped me from the moment the film began with raucous disorienting dialogue among six people spilling on top of itself. Hell, maybe it’s that I’d gone exactly two movie theater-less months since seeing Nope on opening night in July. (Or perhaps it’s the tabloid-level drama that had plagued the film’s promotion but kept its title in front of me for weeks.) Whatever the case, I have a definite affection for this film…I also know that it squanders a ton of potential by trying to do too much and insisting so hard on beating me over the head with a message and themes I’m already on board with.

Prey (2022)

I was just graduated from high school when Alien vs Predator released and, from the marketing fervor around it, I knew I was supposed to think that clash of franchises was a big deal. Although my parents were and are big sci-fi fans, I had seemingly missed both franchises, though, rendering AVP as a movie I never even thought to see. My first film in the franchise was The Predator a few years back; my lack of institutional knowledge posed no problem for me there. 

Because I have such a limited history with the Predator franchise, I hesitated about turning on Prey, the newest entry streaming exclusively on Hulu. It wasn’t so much a concern about missing something as a non-fan—I understood these films don’t exactly build that kind of mythos—as simply a lack of interest. The best reviews I heard and read came from longtime fans of the franchise. I took their endorsement as coming from a different place than would serve me. 

But the concept behind Prey intrigued me. I love those alternate pathway stories that play with convention. always thinking of Red Son, the Superman comic series that imagines Kal-El landing in Communist Russia rather than Metropolitan City. I had real curiosity about how a violent and advanced alien killing machine would grapple with Comanche warriors. It was different and I wanted to see it play out, a fact that combined with a series of insistent recommendations to compel me to watch over dinner. 

And I’m glad I did because Prey impressed me. 

Prey follows the intense and often grisly conflicts that arise when a Predator arrives on earth in Comanche hunting land centuries ago. As soon as it’s shimmering but translucent feet hit the ground, violent confrontation looms, but the story focuses first on Naru (Amber Midthunder), a talented Comanche healer who prefers to hunt. Her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) who leads the hunting parties humors her but doesn’t hesitate to diminish her obvious skill or discourage her participation. When the Predator arrives, though, it begins to attack everything in sight except Naru, whom it deems a non-threat. Soon, though, it is Naru who must contend with the ruthless hunter and try to outsmart it despite its abundant physical and technological advantages. 

The success of Prey owes great credit to its fun premise, but that premise only soars because of Midthunder. Although the first act is a familiar conceit—the younger sister wants to participate but is discouraged from working in the “man’s” world—even that section still plays behind the leading performance. Midthunder, whom I knew only from her work on Legion, is perfectly cast: her diminutive stature and young face lend instantly to the idea that both the tall and muscular hunters and the massive Predator would see her as physically unimposing. Likewise, this heightens the drama when she gets sucked into a skirmish: there’s a terrifying menace to seeing her face off against larger foes and forces. But it’s not just her stature that plays but her expressive intensity as well. We see big swings of emotion in her eyes that range from mortal fear to gritty determination and even diabolical hatred; when she enhances those looks by painting her face, she becomes not just a clever problem-solver and rooting interest but a haunting threat of her own with demons to exorcise. 

Even with such a great character and performance at its center, Prey still could have been a silly exercise, but this is a film that not only excels in its story but that looks and sounds great in every frame. This is a beautifully filmed work with grand sweeping shots of the Great Plains but also intense close-ups of muddied and bloodied faces alike. Despite the vast battleground, there’s a sense of intimate geography present too; I felt like I could follow Naru’s planning because the filmmakers familiarized us with the terrain in a way that made her decisions feel logical and satisfying. The soundscape of this natural world comes out wonderfully—we hear Naru approaching the hungry party early on through the same slight sound the men do, for instance—and contributes to the immersive depth of this world. The score is also great, evocative and stirring while used in just the right moments. 

Not knowing the Predator franchise well coming in, maybe it’s wrong of me to make this statement but I will anyhow: a super powerful alien hunter movie didn’t inherently demand the quality craftsmanship and thought that Prey delivers. With a few clever kills and enough story, CGI, and fake blood to get from A to B, the result could have surely still experienced moderate success from its built in loyal fans without pushing itself. But the team behind this film went hard on making Prey sing and that effort shows, making what could have been a fun but disposable sci-fi slasher into something far greater. It’s hard not to admire and appreciate that effort. 

The Bad Guys (2022)

Effectively a heist movie for a children’s audience, The Bad Guys mimics the slick style of the Ocean’s trilogy. It’s got the cuts and costumes and double-crosses and MacGuffins you’d expect from a genre staple, but it also features zany, child-friendly plot lines with zombie Guinea pigs and (explicit and methodical) lessons about how to be nice. I like this in theory far more than in its execution but, even when I knew what was coming from a mile away, I found this earnest spoof enjoyable enough. 

The Big Bad Wolf (Sam Rockwell) leads a gang of criminal masterminds, his surly best friend Snake (Marc Maron) among them. Pulling off elaborate thefts and toying with the police along the way, the five outcasts live together as friends, but things change when Wolf’s gang is badmouthed by Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), prompting the proud Wolf to lead a rushed operation at a charity gala. While there, Wolf inadvertently saves an old lady and gets a taste for good deeds which stirs conflict among his crew. They oppose his new lease and want one last high-stakes job, even when they get caught red-handed and must rehabilitate themselves working with philanthropist Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade). But a grander conspiracy swirls around the bad guys and Wolf can’t help but be sucked into its center. 

I caught a trailer for this months ago and, while the “breaking good” story intrigued me, it was the unique animation that drew me in first. It evoked Into the Spiderverse for me in a way, an effect that wasn’t lost watching at home from my kitchen. Up close, though, the limited detail and cartoonish faces of the animal characters could be seen. There was still something visually interesting about it, particularly when the varied animals burst into action, but the novelty had a short half life. 

The Bad Guys includes an eclectic but notable voice cast beyond Rockwell, Maron, and Beetz, with Awkwafina, Craig Robinson, and Anthony Ramos rounding out Wolf’s crew. Outside of Ramos, who has a blast with the wildest performance including a lively musical number that showcases his vocal chops, though, the voice work felt oddly generic. Even after looking up the performers behind the characters mid-movie, I struggled to hear them in the roles—isn’t that the point of stunt casting celebrities? A lot of that issue probably falls to Rockwell capturing the cool conflicted vibe of Wolf but playing things so understated and Clooney-esque: I love Rockwell but a kid-ified script and what feels like an impression robs his work of memorability. 

Having never read the books that inspired the film, I enjoyed a plot full of surprises and changing allegiances that never robbed the film of its gentleness or accessibility. Are all of these telegraphed? Oh, for sure—you’ve seen everything here before in better films. But that familiarity bothered me less in a movie made for a young audience. Give me this over Sherlock Gnomes any day. I do fear that some of this twisting results in mixed messaging for younger viewers—bad being good and good being bad could leave an aftertaste of TRUST NO ONE EVER—but a film about redemption arcs and accountability is nice to offer up. 

As one might expect from a childrens’ caper, The Bad Guys isn’t high art with dynamic characterization or smooth pacing. Elements don’t always add up here and things lurch between tropey set pieces from better-crafted adult movies. But I won’t lambast a kids’ movie, particularly one that entertained me and kept me engaged, even when it seemed to aim lower than its aesthetic and idea seemed capable of. I’d watch a sequel for sure. 

Let Them All Talk (2020)

I have a history of watching films superficially similar to Let Them All Talk. I outright rented Poms (2019); I had a theater to myself for a screening of Book Club (2018). I have no idea why—although I might speculate around a fondness for the Grumpy Old Men franchise—but that history certainly informed my choice to seek out Let Them All Talk, the Steven Soderbergh-directed cruise movie released during the pandemic. Whereas I think of this as Diane Keaton’s genre, the presence of Meryl Streep (as well as Soderbergh behind the camera) piqued my interest. What would these Hollywood heavyweights bring to this gentle but predictable genre?

For most of the film, the answer was a fresh perspective, with rich relationship dynamics, an endearing-if-silly espionage plot line, and both the ancillary characters and sufficient intrigue to keep me engaged even while cleaning up a small cup of Greek yogurt that fell three feet from my unreliable hands and somehow splashed all the way to the ceiling. I thought that I had stumbled onto an “old ladies movie” gem and I eagerly waited to find out where it would go. 

This was a mistake. 

Because it went precisely where all the others do. 

Alice (Streep) is a celebrated New York City author with a dilemma: she has received a prestigious British literary prize but can’t fly. Her new agent, Karen (Gemma Chan), suggests she take a cruise on the Queen Mary 2 and Alice accepts on the condition of bringing a trio of guests. Two are her estranged friends from college: Susan (Dianne Wiest), a lawyer who comes with an optimistic outlook, and Roberta (Candice Bergen), a retail saleswoman who holds a grudge and plans to confront Alice over a particular grievance. Also tagging along is Alice’s nephew Tyler (Lucas Hedges) who lends a hand as his favorite aunt’s pseudo-assistant. 

The majestic boat—it is effectively a horizontal hotel floating in the Atlantic—makes for a grand setting for reconnection…but Alice has other plans. Informing her guests that she plans to work on her new manuscript the whole time, she’ll see them at dinners. Probably. This complicates things: Roberta stews and begins aggressive flirting while waiting to pounce, Susan shrugs and tries to enjoy her escape, and Tyler gets roped into a plot by Karen to unearth dirt about Alice’s manuscript to report back to her publishing house. The ship is gargantuan but far from infinite; these issues, among others, will all come to a head. 

Those pieces all combine to generate far more drama than I initially inspected. Roberta’s bitter fury crackles; what revelations will the inevitable confrontation unearth? Tyler and the much-older Karen have a warm chemistry; where will their relationship go? Susan and Karen both hit it off with thriller writer Kelvin (Dan Algrant); how will that play out and impact the aloof and pretentious Alice? And why in the world did Alice orchestrate this entire trip? 

That last question is key but also where Let Them All Talk goes awry. The answer is…well? It’s probably one thing but it plays out as another thing and that other thing is so conventional that it sucks all the air out of the film’s ending. This fresh take on familiar fare suddenly turns into familiar fare. For such a simple premise, this had a swearing, yogurt-cleaning me genuinely intrigued, but then seemed to dip its script into a bowl of cliches to clean up all of the glorious messiness it had set up. 

And those cliches rendered the film instantaneously inert. At one point during the final scenes, characters sit down and debate what they should next do. The question couldn’t help but sound meta-textual even though it was rhetorical: now you do what the characters do in every one of these movies. 

What’s the penalty for a film like Let Them All Talk that squanders everything in the last fifteen minutes? I really enjoyed the setting on the massive cruise liner, Streep was solid as the enigmatic Alice who can’t face her friends but wants them nearby, and I grinned many times throughout the dalliances between Hedges’ and Chan’s characters. I don’t dislike this genre that, even when it condescends, leaves me with a bit more perspective on the privilege of relative youth. But the ending undoes my good cheer and my willingness to laud this as something greater than its genre’s middling staples. 

This a good movie, except for the parts that are trite and terrible. This is a bad movie, except for the parts that feel fresh and populated by characters with depth interacting in an immaculate setting. I wouldn’t have thought this film would land here in such a mediocre place, but I guess I didn’t thing yogurt from a small cup could leap ten vertical feet either.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Lamb (2021)

I’ve listened to 77 episodes of the Grierson & Leitch movies podcast this summer while walking which is staggering in its volume: I’m averaging more than one per day. At the same time, it’s also staggering in how little progress into their catalog that translates to, since Sunday will deliver their 326th episode. Listening to these two men discussing movies daily, though, means that I know the show’s rhythms but also its vernacular: it’s hard not to catch some patterns across 200+ movies worth of conversation. And, as one might expect, their diction and perspective has informed mine. I find myself thinking about what I’m watching with much the same language that Tim and Will use. 

One such phrase of theirs that has grafted itself onto my film viewing voice is “on my wavelength”. When a film is out there but they still find themselves following it where it goes, they are “on its wavelength”; when there’s something about a production that never settles with them, they “never got on its wavelength”. I‘ve internalized this term as a way to convey whether or not the film “worked” or engaged them in a way that let them enjoy the experience in spite of components that didn’t quite work or story threads that didn’t quite land. Sharing a movie’s wavelength is like vibrating at its same frequency: the result is melodious and pleasing, not dissonant and jarring. 

If you’ve read this far and suddenly been struck by the presence of two paragraphs about podcast colloquialisms and not a single mention of the A24 psychological horror(ish) fable of a film Lamb I’m purportedly here to review, then congratulations on breaking my not-so-subtle code. I’m not dying to review Lamb because I never got on its wavelength. Curiosity during the first half hour of its runtime gave way to counting down the minutes until it would end as even its most cryptic moments produced a shrug. I am watching fewer movies now in fear of having to forfeit 45 minutes to reviewing movies that didn’t work for me. So yes, you caught me: two paragraphs about vocabulary are two less about Lamb. 

Set on an Icelandic farm in the foggy shadows of a mountain range, Lamb follows a childless couple, Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guōnason). Saying almost nothing, the pair tend to their animals, struggle with an uncooperative tractor, and eat small meals. They share a routine—a monotonous one to be sure, but a routine nonetheless. One morning, though, that routine gets interrupted when they birth a lamb. They did this twice the day before without a second thought, but this time their eyes go wide. Soon this lamb is wrapped snug in a blanket and sleeping in a crib by their bed. A warmth enters their home with this change, at least until Ingvar’s brother Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) arrives and takes an immediate dislike to the creature, throwing a wrench into the idyllic lifestyle. 

If you’re like me, the inherent mysteries probably sell you the most on Lamb’s concept. What is the creature? Why have Maria and Ingvar made special room in their lives for it? Where did it come from? Where will its presence lead them? These are all good questions, all of which the film eventually addresses and answers. En route to those answers, though, is a lot of strange nothing. Once we get our bearings with the special lamb, the film just…proceeds. We return to routine. The film appears to be building toward something, but without any urgency. 

I normally avoid reading about a film before reviewing it—I want my reaction and takeaways to be authentic—but with Lamb I was so not with it that I flipped through a handful of takes. One called this entire operation “minimalist” and that definitely nails the aesthetic. Action and dialogue are sparse; the plot boils down to “unique lamb and troubled brother-in-law appear”. Everything looks great, with the vast landscape conveying a sense of scale that prodded me and the visual effects around the titular creature are so impressively realistic that I too shrugged and adopted it into the film’s reality, but I filled up on those pieces early and just wanted something to happen. Something explosive preferably, but I would have taken something minor but dramatic instead. 

But Lamb is allergic to drama and addicted to understatement. I’ve liked a great many films that adopt this approach, but here nothing worked for me. Forced into giving a reason, I imagine some of my response is extratextual—I just wasn’t in the right mood for a minimalist film like Lamb last night—but I also wonder if I wasn’t responding to the way the film seemed to tease the audience about its central mysteries. At one point, Ingvar talks about scientific principles of time travel; the film leaves a cryptic scene of television visible on the edge of the screen another time, feeds a steady diet of religiously evocative imagery throughout, and has heavy breathing from an unseen source once and dense, all-encompassing fog floating in from what might well be an alien world during another. Each of these moments stoked the flames of curiosity for me, a curiosity that needed to sustain me through the meticulously crafted but intentionally unexciting rest. 

But the juice is never worth the squeeze for me in Lamb. The ending is pretty unambiguous (not to mention as close to explosive as this gets), and yet I desired no followup. I felt no compulsion to rewind back and inspect scenes anew. Unlike Nope last week where I couldn’t wait to piece together thematic ties between the assorted parts, I held the remote in my hand, my finger excited to finally press the off button. I was a sixth period class on a Friday afternoon when the teacher solicits questions. No thank you, sir, please just let me inch closer to this whole thing being over with for awhile. 

I did not enjoy Lamb but I’m not prepared to dismiss it as a bad film. With a piece like this, I suspect the cryptic minimalism and matter-of-fact treatment of the aforementioned lamb are less bugs than features for many fans. I’d have pegged myself as someone in the wheelhouse of this movie but that’s not the way it struck me last night. My favorite part was when it ended. But this is well-made, it stays on tone, and it presents some interesting ideas in a unique package. That wasn’t enough to hook me last night but that’s how things go sometimes. I will always loathe Guardians of the Galaxy 2 for reasons that have nothing to do with the movie itself; maybe Lamb is just another entry on the list of films that I watched at the wrong times. 

All I will say in summary is this: Lamb just wasn’t on my wavelength.

Nope (2022)

I’m of two minds when it comes to “horror” films. One part of me feels like the best horror leaves the theater with you; like stepping on a piece of chewed gum, it gets into the crevices of your brain and it’s tough to fully remove it, the mind tricked into a jumpy state of unease because of fictional fear from the screen. The other part of me, though, prefers horror where the tension and dread ooze from the screen and into an audience fearing vicariously through the actors in the film…but, when the credits roll, that fear vanishes completely. One is a haunt that stalks future nightmares; the other is a rollercoaster of temporary terror. 

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.