Written by Patrick Capaloff-Fowler
The ease with which Jordan Peele accomplished his transition from a beloved sketch comedy star to horror auteur was fascinating in its completeness. His literacy of the genre is palpable, and he has performed wonders establishing his style as a genre unto itself in a short career. [SPOILER ALERT]
With Get Out, he delivered a twist on the city slicker trapped in a backwater town and lectured on the terror of casual racism, while Us riffed on the home invasion genre and attempted to teach us about the fear of the other. Get Out was wildly successful in every aspect of execution, while Us crumbled under the weight of its urge to deliver the message.
In the case of NOPE, Peele’s frontloading of moral subtext, while delivered with immaculate technical skill and consummate wit, presents us with a plate piled too high for the horror to make any lasting impact.
The concept of horror films playing the moral majority and seeking to question why we watch awful things happen to nice people is not a new concept. If anything, it’s a healthy arm of a genre whose job is to show us the darker side of ourselves.
From watching freak car accidents to animal attacks, our sense of schadenfreude; our ‘better them than me’ is potent, and in a world of short-form media, it’s never been easier to tickle it; to capture and view trauma while simultaneously placing it firmly at arm’s length. There’s a perverse comfort there, as much as we might deny it.
Jordan Peele’s NOPE is a picture that’s arguably bloated with many ideas but questioning our compulsion to see unfortunate events unfold for others is The Twilight Zone moral lesson at its core.
NOPE’S opening shot, or lack of one, is a mission statement of the stance it’s taking. It taunts us with the audio track of the ill-fated final episode of middle-of-the-road sitcom Gordy’s Home! We hear Gordy, the titular chimp of the show, getting his birthday gifts from hack actors delivering self-aware hack comedy before brutal chaos ensues when Gordy has enough and mindlessly attacked his co-cast.
It shows us snatches of the aftermath; of Gordy in his post-bloodlust stupor as he confusedly pokes a co-star’s limp legs and a shoe, miraculously standing on its tiptoes before it snatches this horrific, captivating moment from us, withholding any payoff until midway through the movie.
Immediately, this unimaginable event has piqued our interest, and the denial of the gratification of seeing it in all its gory glory is potent.
We view this moment through the eyes of traumatised child star Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park (Steven Yeun), hiding under the table as he potentially breathes his last at the mercy of Gordy’s indifferent rage. Ricky survives this moment through his fixation with the blood-stained shoe; its macabre serendipity draws his gaze from Gordy, and it’s this lack of eye contact that saves him.
Leap forward twenty years, and Rick has salvaged a career as the star of an afternoon Western show and now runs a frontier nostalgia theme park ‘Jupiter’s Claim’ on the outskirts of LA.
One of NOPE’s major mistakes is side-lining Ricky to subplot status, treating him more as an example for the overlying moral of the film, failing to explore the fascinating angle of a childhood star condemned to mediocrity, literally stranded in a desert, surrounded by memorabilia from a career that never lived up to its potential, performing lame light entertainment shows to audiences of a dozen customers. Now, that’s horror.
Instead, NOPE follows Daniel Kaluya’s OJ and Keke Palmer’s Em Haywood, two siblings who have inherited their father’s horse-handling business after he’s inexplicably murdered by a high-velocity nickel falling from the sky. Their ranch in Agua Dulce brushes uneasy shoulders with Jupiter’s Claim, and the two share an awkward partnership with little understanding or care for the other.
Kaluya and Palmer are a light and shade duo played to perfection. Palmer is the personality of the duo, big on the icky personality that works wonders greasing the wheel on the LA backlot, while the quiet stoicism that got Kaluya to the dance is in full flex as OJ. It’s uncommon for an actor to get their flowers for giving such minimal turns and the amount of restraint required while playing opposite big characters deserves appreciation.
NOPE is overlong and saturated with concepts that drain its immediacy, so fantastic character chemistry, something Peele is a dab hand at engineering time and again, acts as a saving grace. As a prelude to the film’s forty-five-minute climax, Palmer and Kaluya share a powerful rapid-fire multiple-barrel high-five that wasn’t just a personal highlight of the movie but one of 2022’s most memorable cinema moments.
Like Ricky, OJ and Em aren’t hunting for the unseen threat in the sky for revenge; they just want evidence of it; they want ‘the Oprah Shot’. Like the first man to appear in a piece of cinema was black, or like Sydney Poitier in Duel in Diablo, a classic western for which a poster hangs on OJ’s wall, they’re seeking to be re-enfranchised in a genre and industry that has side-lined them.
Proof of the ethereal menace that lurks in the clouds and terrorizes their land is the impossible shot that would bring some recognition to their dusty ranch, replenishing the cash flow that has dried up since the death of the father. So the mission of NOPE becomes a wild game hunt, not for a trophy, but for the lucky snapshot that will make them famous.
This brings us to the nature of the being in the sky. Much like Gordy, it doesn’t take well to being looked at. In fact, its predatory instincts take this as a direct threat. It lurks invisible and silent in the clouds and would rather keep things that way, but its obscure mystery is simply too much for human eyes to resist.
The sound design for the being affectionately named ‘Jean Jacket’ emphasises silence. As it swoops semi-unseen through the vast open ocean of sky above Agua Dulce, it’s this effortless stealth that makes it such an irresistible focal point. It has to be seen; otherwise, it simply isn’t there.
The only time it does make itself known through sound is by the ethereal chorus of screams of its victims, trapped inside it’s fluorescent innards. This disembodied sound of terror raining from the sky becomes the voice of the creature. Much like the mangled bear from Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), the sound of this mindless, terrified screaming being forced into a position where it heralds the coming of the monster is a deeply effective tool that focuses on anticipation rather than payoff.
NOPE’s most horrifying moment, it’s only horrifying moment, in fact, depicts the innards of Jean Jacket as it digests its latest quarry. Here the sound design team combines the terrified screams of people going to their deaths with the joyful screams of how they’d sound on a rollercoaster.
This unnerving combination of emotional extremes combined with the static, plasticky sound of being dragged through the horrifyingly claustrophobic digestive tract of this creature only lasts for a few seconds but is so desperately awful that we find ourselves drawn to the indifferent horror of being eaten alive, and like with the Gordy incident, we’re left almost disappointed by how brief our taste of this glimpse behind the mystery is.
Once Jean Jacket consumes this conspicuous meal, word gets out that something isn’t right at Agua Dulce, and OJ and Em’s scheme to capture it on film gets fast-tracked before legacy media come and steal their prize catch.
They assemble a ragtag group of DIY filmmakers, consisting of Angel (Brandon Perea), the angsty employee of a local electronics store and Michael Wincott’s ludicrously named auteur cinematographer Antlers Holst.
Peele’s casting is once again in full force here. Perea shines in his acerbic, disagreeable breakout role, and Wincott’s unmistakable gravelly delivery has been dialled up to almost self-parodic levels. He blends aspects of Werner Herzog and Jaws’ Captain Quint into a wizened camera-toting shaman who seems to have glimpsed the beyond and brought a little of it back with him.
It is, however, the overwhelming likeness to Robert Shaw’s Quint that began to distract from NOPE, as this isn’t the only place where this overenthusiastic homage can be found.
The entire final act of NOPE, though not exactly note for note, is so close in its delivery and rhythm to Jaws’ that all I could find myself thinking was how perfectly Jaws executes the rising tension that NOPE failed to elicit.
From tricking Jean Jacket into swallowing flags to hamper its stealth, echoing the buoys in Jaws, to the strange choice of having Wincott deliver Sheb Wooley’s Purple People Eater, which felt like a reference to Quint’s thousand-yard stare recount of his terrors after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis; there’s a point where homage becomes a parody of the original, and the question of what Peele is actually trying to achieve becomes too big to ignore.
The tightness of Jaws’ script results in a climax that carries unbearable tension. Every beat is purpose-built to tighten the screw, and by the time our three unlikely heroes are on their final voyage, the relentless driving force of their mission can’t be stopped. NOPE’s runtime is a little longer than Jaws, and within that extra space, it packs in a bunch of superfluous, though not uninteresting, ideas that may embellish Peele’s overall mission to teach us about our fascination with horror and the alienation of POC from their rightful place in cinematic history, detract from the immediacy of the script.
While in isolation, this might be forgivable, NOPE positions its narrative so closely to Jaws that it positively begs a comparison between the two.
To send up Jaws so brazenly is a wily move for Peele to make as a director, and his audacity has to be applauded, but it’s a roll of the dice that doesn’t pay off. Where Jaws is simply an exercise in masterful filmmaking, NOPE, while expertly made, busies itself with spinning many plates. The lasting impression is a pleasing collage of several ideas, but it lacks the pinpoint accuracy of its progenitor picture, and while the multi-stage climax builds effectively, Peele has been unable to previously establish the rising dread that a tighter script would have afforded him.
There’s a moment in South Park where the government attempts to enlist M. Night Shyamalan to get them out of a narrative bind, but Shyamalan fails to understand the difference between plot and twist and proves a useless lead. Peele has proven himself a far more technically gifted director than M. Night, but his concern with prioritising subtext over plot at times threatens a similar outcome.
The comparison between Peele and M. Night is valid, considering the most renowned contemporary ‘aliens on the farm’ film goes to Signs, a film I think, while not as deserving of its apparent station, won’t be toppled in the long run by NOPE. Signs, while less frightening than the consensus has agreed, settles for a tighter narrative thread that concerns itself less with the agoraphobic isolation of life on the farm. Like Peele, M. Night also has the savvy to dose the horror with plenty of pressure-release comedy moments.
Signs focuses on character; Gibson’s Hess is taunted by an off-kilter feeling on his farm, the loss of his wife and subsequent loss of faith. His desire to protect his family is primal and pathological and far more resonant than OJ and Em’s desire to acquire acclaim with UFO, or UAP, footage.
Us started out promisingly, but its plot buckled under the slightest scrutiny at the expense of dishing up an ultimately vague and diffuse moral lesson. NOPE doesn’t fall nearly as short of the mark and is a far more entertaining coherent picture that will provoke plenty of discussions. In a love/hate world of criticism, NOPE falls firmly into the hallowed middle ground. Its middling overall effect is no failure. The house that horror built is laid on the foundations of perfectly passable, entertaining horror movies that serve to entertain and thrill.
NOPE is executed with technical prowess, an entertaining twist on the sci-fi genre populated with likeable and memorable characters and driven by a unique angle and premise with flashes of narrative glee throughout its padded script, it shoots for the moon and lands firmly in the clouds.
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