Before I set off to my local cinema to see Nope, I’d just like to say what a pleasure it is to go to the movies almost utterly cold. All I have gathered from trying hard not to read reviews is that the film is a masterpiece of sound design (over 50% responsible for an audience’s emotional engagement). Do I have to prove that? Watch Psycho with the sound off. I had picked up the War of the Worlds vibe and that there was some sort of extraterrestrial involvement. But that really was about it. I loved Get Out and have Us on the list of ‘will get to very soon’ and it’s obvious that Jordan Peele is a talented filmmaker who invites his audience to come halfway in terms of ideas and meanings to be mined and pondered upon. For that alone, he stands out, proud and individualistic. My cinema reviewing lately has been somewhat curtailed by being a secondary carer to my vulnerable mother-in-law. Covid is off the headlines as is the war in Ukraine but those facts don’t mean people are not still needlessly dying from both causes. But it’s a Sunday afternoon on a sunny day. How many bona fide cinephiles are going to join me? I’ll start my review by revealing how many shared the screening this afternoon…

Zero! I had the cinema all to myself… Not great for Nope’s box office perhaps but it’s doing well enough. Several hours later…

But then again, maybe a horror film is not best watched in the dark with no one else around you. Lots of dark spaces… The movie had its scary moments, one in particular that prompted a few seconds of my fingertips pressing in on my ears much to my shame but let’s examine the pull of a film directed by a gifted filmmaker knowing what little I did know going in. Is it just me or is the first thing on the list ‘What do the aliens look like?’ It’s sad, I know but you have to realise that I was a young child watching the 1953 Byron Haskin directed War of the Worlds on TV and was mildly traumatised by the one torchlit close up of the Martian, something today that would qualify as a pathetic joke. If I had to describe that alien today, it would be a traffic light rammed into cookie dough. It certainly wasn’t funny then. So there’s always that intense curiosity. Are the filmmakers going to come up with something we’ve not seen before and/or something to knock on the door of the astounding design of H. R. Giger’s alien all the way back in 1979? Never topped, forever mimicked. Remember, the director of the greatest science-fiction film of all time, (2001: A Space Odyssey) as agreed by the world’s critics, baulked at actually visualising extra-terrestrials. Stanley Kubrick let the soundtrack do the heavy lifting. Intellectually, he came to the conclusion (which left him conveniently off the hook) that it was a fool’s errand. Just how do you show the ineffable? The unknowable? Well, Stanley didn’t. But 2001 is still a masterpiece.

Steven Spielberg had the same problem with Close Encounters so did what he could to make the images of his ETs ethereal and other-worldly by conforming to the bottom probing, abducting aliens’ reported physicality, large head, child’s body cliché but lighting the shit out of them so you could never get a handle on how real or how actually mundane their humanistic design forms actually were. The first alien out of the mothership was a long limbed creature, a tall, diaphanous Messiah puppet never glimpsed again once the alien children swarmed out of the ship’s shiny maw. Well, as this is a non-spoiler review I will say simply this. The extraterrestrial design and behaviour of Nope’s ET(s) is damn close to unique. I’d seen something very much like the first ‘aliens’ we glimpse but as I was set up to expect horror… we’ll just let that slide. I cannot believe I fell for that (just as much as our lead character did). It was this scene in the stable that made me realise just how staggeringly powerful suggestion actually is.

OK. So we witness the aftermath of a behind the scenes violent animal attack during the shooting of a scene from a corny American family TV show. Its producers clearly had no idea that cute chimps could turn and respond über-violently if prompted to do so by outside events – birthday balloons popping in the hot studio lights – something that no one on the show could have predicted. I’ve worked with chimps both trained and wild. Underestimate them and their raw power at your cost. Google poor Charla Nash for horrific proof. We leave the scene as the homicidal blood soaked simian turns and looks right at us…Or at whoever’s POV the camera was representing. More on him later.

Otis Haywood Sr. (played by the ever dependable Keith David, Roddy Piper’s sparring partner in John Carpenter’s They Live and Kurt Russell’s co-survivor in The Thing) owns a ranch on which he trains horses to perform in Hollywood films and TV. In a singular scene, things start to drop from the sky, human objects but objects that wouldn’t normally be falling at such a velocity… Haywood’s horse starts to move forward as Haywood Sr. drops from the saddle to the ground. A nickel has embedded itself into his head via his right eye and bleeding profusely, he’s rushed to hospital where he succumbs to his injury. Otis Jr., played by Peele favourite Daniel Kaluuya, wears his grief as a heavy cloak. His body language is muted and his movements are small and precise. Like ex-Spiderman Toby Maguire, Kaluuya has mastered the art of stillness in the frame. Hyperactively contrasted against Kaluuya’s performance is his sister Em played by Keke Palmer. She’s the one with the dreams and the chutzpah and I have to say how refreshing it is to see siblings as leads in a movie and the fact that a shoehorned romance is nowhere to be (close) encountered.

Each chapter of the movie is named after one of the Haywood’s horses except for the last, Jean Jacket. I can’t really say anything about that name. After being fired from a studio after one of their horses kicks out after being (irrationally and profoundly stupidly) shown its own reflection in close up very suddenly, OJ and Em talk about selling up. One of the interested buyers is Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park (played by Walking Dead and Minari’s Steven Yeun). It was his POV in the last shot of the chimp opening, and the boy to whom the chimp started to move towards… Jupe has exploited his fame on the infamous chimp TV show and does western themed performances for paying customers next to the Haywood ranch. After a normally well trained and placid horse bolts and electric power goes out across the ranch, both brother and sister suspect something abnormal might be in play. After glimpsing a saucer shape fitting through the clouds, both brother and sister decide to get a shot of the craft to prove that UFOs exist (an ‘Oprah’ shot). Be aware that the “What? Really?” you may think disappointedly seeing a ‘flying saucer’, the most clichéd depiction of alien craft since 1947, may turn into a ‘Whoa!’ as the film develops. While this part of the plot conveniently dismisses the idea that any photo or video can be almost childishly but still expertly faked, the Haywoods install CCTV systems to capture the UFO on a recordable medium… The movie duly acknowledges the change in terminology. What was an ‘unidentified flying object’ is now a UAP, ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’. Whatever. Weird stuff in the sky.

I’ll say this for Nope. Almost every single signpost, especially the ones you do not consider as signposts, is beautifully paid off. Even those ridiculous plastic tubes with arms and eyes and wild hair pushed into motion by air pumps play their part. OJ comes to the conclusion, rather insightfully early on, that if you are looking up, then you present yourself as a potential victim. Don’t look up! There is no other explanation for sewing lemon slices as ‘eyes’ on the back of your hoodie’s hood. There seems to be a lot online about Nope’s relationship to Jaws. Uh… OK. Director Peele even states on one of his scene breakdowns on YouTube that his wish was that the sky be regarded as full of terror as the open ocean in Spielberg’s masterpiece. Not sure he succeeded in that goal. Sharks are very real. Extra-terrestrials (however physically, cinematically manifested) are not.

One aspect of the film I found quite playful and irreverent was that we start with an ominous quote from the seventh book of the Hebrew Bible:

OK… Lovely sentiments. A great deal has been made about Peele suggesting that human beings regard spectacle as more enticing to concentrate on than other people. I’m not sure how relevant that observation about the film is but the biblical aspect it does get wonderfully insightful about is, as I mentioned, playful. What if Nope’s extra-terrestrial being(s) represent the God and/or angels of the Old Testament. Its/their way of (uh…) ‘interacting’ with people certainly ties in with the gloop of miraculous nonsense that runs through the good book like effluence onto an English beach. In fact, it’s not only playful but hilarious to suggest that humankind in its infancy had dealings with alien creatures that caused the birth of Christianity. Oh my. Just a few more things. The line of fluttering pennants tied to the life size model of the white horse that plays a significant role in the film, could literally be regarded as a loose end. And there’s no doubt that Nope pays some tangential homage to Shyamalan’s Signs; country folk mixed up with alien invaders. The excellent score by Michael Abels, who borrows subtly once or twice from James Newton Howard’s Signs masterpiece of a score, works gangbusters. The only time it doesn’t is when it’s divorced from the film and played in track order. The pop songs liberally sprinkled throughout interrupt the emotional effect of the actual film score and the decision to present on the album the artificially slowed down songs when the electricity fluctuates is like asking us to appreciate low bass drones interrupting an orgy of staccato scares.

Nope is a wonderful work with many levels of substance and subtext that could keep a cineaste academic engaged for months. Am already looking forward to a home viewing and a further dive into its many themes. Nice one, Jordan.

* https://www.indiewire.com/2022/07/nope-jordan-peele-interview-filmmaker-toolkit-episode-162-1234744449/