On the Hollywood set for a commercial, two siblings, OJ and Emerald, try to successfully wrangle a horse. It goes awry. The scene sets up important dynamics and frissons in their relationship that will be central to the rest of the film. It occurs some minutes into the recently released film “Nope”. It is preceded by two preludes, and each of them seem to redirect the focus of the film so that we spend a long time wondering what exactly Peele is up to. But the clarity that derives from the restraint is one of the best things about “Nope”. Peele’s third film finds him in an incredibly relaxed cinematic mode and his languid approach to building tension becomes one of the most engaging parts of the film’s allure.
“Nope” is billed as a science-fiction horror film about potential UFO sightings. That premise comes with certain expectations, and in many ways “Nope” might not be the exact kind of film that one might anticipate based on either it or on director/writer/producer Jordan Peele’s previous films, “Get Out” and “Us”. Beyond its premise and its genre, “Nope” feels les concerned with hair-raising horror and more dramatically interested in fielding the bond of the specific sibling pairing at its centre and the ways that they confront an extra-terrestrial visitor in the wake of their grief, a canvass that offers Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer chances to use their star personas in engaging and intriguing ways.
Palmer has a star-entrance that you can feel the “Nope” working up to, as if waiting with bated breath for her to enter and pierce the tension. Her arrival comes as a way of easing the nervousness of her OJ, who we find awkwardly waiting for her. He is out of his element on the Hollywood set, nervously shuffling as he explains that he’s waiting on his sister. We already anticipate that she will have a different energy, and she bursts into the frame with a propulsive candour that is immediately irresistible. The ways that Palmer evokes Emerald’s aggressive charm in that scene feels instructive to how the rest of “Nope” plays out, juggling our expectations of it, our previous knowledge of Peele and our expectations of the genre.
Keke Palmer is one of her era’s most effervescent stars; her ability to turn live-interviews into memeable moments makes her immediately knowable to us and her entrance plays into that. Emerald’s energy in that scene is very much the Keke Palmer we know, but not quite. There’s a needling undertone of desperation there. It is intentional. The monologue that launches her introduction is a performance within a performance. She is playing a role for the films on the film set, but she’s also playing a role for us, foreshadowing sibling-dynamics that prove valuable later. When she arrives, the stoicism of Kaluuya’s OJ falls into place and suddenly “Nope” announces what its central concern is. And we’re off.
Much discussion might emerge from whether “Nope” truly falls into the horror genre. Indeed, the overall vibe of the extra-terrestrial visits is more unsettling than truly horrific here, and “Nope” is never truly unnervingly terrifying. Yet, within the context of Peele’s filmography, which has been steeped in the horror genre, “Nope” is the first film of his that I was left immediately enamoured with. The loose confidence in it feels so much like a filmmaker in full control of their gifts. Some of it is in the way that “Nope” is less overtly concerned about the social contexts of the world as metaphors and is instead completely focused on the duo at the centre. In doing so, Peele adopts a languorous approach to plot that feels confident and engaging. There’s consistent energy in his approach to the way “Nope” builds up to its first big reveal. There’s no sense that the film is rushing to give us what we expect but is instead completely confident in its unusual approach and configurations. Even as I might feel “Nope” weakens in that final act, it’s less because of the film’s internal limitations and more because Peele is at his glorious best when teasing us with questions and building to a crescendo.
It’s not just in the easy charm of Emerald’s introduction that shows Peele’s ability to lure us in. Later introductions of characters (Steven Yeun as a carnival creator, Brandon Perea as an inquisitive salesman, Michael Wincott as a famed cinematographer) all work because of Peele’s ability to entrance us while unsettling us, so that the early swells of uncertainty in “Nope” carefully thread a mood of potent expectation that keeps us hooked. It’s all grounded by the ways each new act keeps deepening the context of OJ and Emerald’s relationship.
Peele’s building is well realised in the film’s visual language, which hews the way Kaluuya and Palmer perform. Whereas Palmer’s work is playing into, and then subtly resisting, how we think of her as a performer, Kaluyya is playing more against type. This is not the towering personalities of his work in “Widows” or “Judas and the Black Messiah” but someone less ostensibly commanding. But it’s a fully realised performance with expert physicality – OJ’s shuffling countenance is unlike how we typically think of Kaluuya on screen. The same frisson informs the visual language where cinematographer Hoye van Hoytema’s work acknowledges our ideas of the genre, and then subverts it. A consistent motif is returning to things we had previously observed or seen, recontextualising what we had previously considered and then needles and excavates specific tableaus – to excellent repetitious effect. This is built into the sound design where peripheral sounds become repeated until we begin to unearth the nuance in the familiar. That this is all in service of really focusing, not on larger questions of extra-terrestrial concerns, but on human feeling is the best thing. What is more familiar than sibling relationships? In “Nope”, Peele asks us to consider them as more than incidental.
In the last moments of the film, a character in distress spots someone in a distance and a look of such intense emotion crosses their face. I was moved by it, and I was excited. There’s something incredibly exciting about a film willing to submit full scale spectacle to something so human and tender. It is confident enough to not feel a need to argue for its importance by something in the macro. Instead, the film earns its plaudits by a gentle inward focus on the micro and the interpersonal. It might be disorienting for those expecting a largescale level of horror, but I’ll say this for “Nope”: when the credits rolled, I immediately thought, “I want to go see this again”.
“Nope” is now playing in local theatres.
