Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Steven Yeun
Director: Jordan Peele
Released: 2022
Mood: If you’ve been in a rut and every day feels like the same old thing and you need a movie that can seriously shake you up.
NOPE was on my to-watch movie list at this same time last year, but for some reason I thought it wasn’t really a horror Western. And watching horror Westerns is apparently now my entire personality every October.
I was wrong. Not about the personality thing – about NOPE.
This movie has rampaging murderous chimps and malevolent aliens haunting the skies above a ranch, sucking screaming horses up into a giant jellyfish-like maw.
If you appreciate suspenseful Sci-Fi horror with big-budget visuals, NOPE is a must-see.
NOPE is told in a series of parts, each prefaced with the name of a horse on the Haywood family’s ranch. Generations of Haywoods have trained horses to perform in TV and movies.
In the first scenes Otis Haywood, the ranch patriarch, is killed by an unexplained downpour of tiny metal objects falling from the sky. This leaves his son, Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), with no clue what happened and an obligation to step up.
Otis is a man of few words, better at understanding horses than humans. His sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) the social one, if a little chaotic. They do their best to keep the business going, but Otis is forced to start selling off horses.
One is sold to Ricky ‘Jupe’ Parker (Steven Yeun), a former child TV star who was the sole survivor of a bizarre incident in which a chimp performer murdered a whole bunch of people. Jupe has a creepy Western theme park that looks like it belongs on the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, and uses the horses to put on shows for pathetically small audiences.
One night a horse disappears from the Haywood ranch, and the security cameras all happen to fail at the same time. Otis, Emerald, and a big box store’s tech support guy (Brandon Perea), start witnessing increasingly sinister events originating from the skies above the ranch. If they could capture evidence of alien life, they could make a fortune and save the ranch. But they seem a LOT more likely to die trying.
The cast of NOPE is strong across the board.
Daniel Kaluuya is absolutely outstanding. I love actors who can tell a whole story with subtle facial expressions. He embodies the stillness and patience of a character who has spent his whole life training animals, and it’s a fresh change of pace from the cocky, smooth-talking, overtly physical leads in so many movies these days.
Keke Palmer is effervescent and authentic from start to finish. At first she’s bouncing off the walls with big energy, then Palmer flips it to show a vast range of emotions and skills.
Brandon Perea is great as the comic relief, wanting to be part of the action but also freaking out. And Steven Yeun really leaves you hanging in his scenes. But the supporting actor who steals the show is Michael Wincott as Antlers Holst – a thinly veiled Werner Herzog-esque director and recluse.
The voice. The presence. Shrouded in mystery, camping it up – when Wincott is on screen, you almost forget everything else about the movie and want to follow him out of his scenes. He’s just that good.
NOPE is WAY darker than I expected, even after reading the plot summary, both with its body count and with its commentary on humanity.
I don’t know why I thought director Jordan Peele was all jokes – this guy has just as much horror cred as he does comedy. He directed AND wrote this script, and the movie has earned an astounding 179 award nominations and 42 wins across various panels. That’s more than any other Western or Western-adjacent movie I can recall.
NOPE has really good, clenched-on-the-edge-of-your-seat plot tension, supported by superior production quality. There’s a bit of clever dialogue, but the majority of the movie is focused on character development, shocking visuals, and sinister music and flashbacks – and it does all of these things really well. There’s a scene with blood rain that’s gorgeously, disgustingly realistic, and the sounds that the alien ship emits are terrifying.
The story highlights the diminished presence and influence of Black cowboys, stunt performers, animal trainers, wranglers, and performers. Peele also weaves in themes of animal and human exploitation, prejudice, and our obsessive pursuit and consumption of entertainment, all while still delivering a deeply satisfying mega-monster akin to the recent versions of King Kong and Godzilla.
Sometimes I felt a little lost, like there was almost too much significance to too many things and I wasn’t smart enough to get it. But that didn’t really prevent me from enjoying everything I was seeing.
There are tons of people online discussing all of the meanings to be found in NOPE, from the meaning of the upright shoe when the chimp kills everyone to all of the ways eye contact is used in the story. I highly recommend taking a deep dive into redditors’ theories after you watch the movie, and seeing if you noticed the same things.
