Review: Nope is a compelling and beautiful disaster spectacle

Film history is bursting with images that seemed impossible until the moment of their creation. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge published his groundbreaking, later animated photo series The Horse in Motion, which showed that a horse at a gallop becomes completely free from the ground, albeit not when the legs are extended, as is often believed, but retracted under the rump – something invisible to the naked eye. On one of Muybridge’s horses sits a black jockeywhile it would take another nearly a hundred years before Sidney Poiter the very first mainstream Hollywood western around black main characters realized (Buck and the Preacher from 1972, starring Poitier and Harry Belafonte in the lead roles).

In the year 2022, every visual invasion can be realized analogously or digitally. A country house, overrun by a torrent of blood. An empty shoe, balancing straight on the heel. Yet the impossible image still exists. The film that definitively proves that our planet is visited by aliens has still not been made.

May sound like an arbitrary list, until you find Jordan Peeles nope sees. All the above images and shots find their place in this compelling, sometimes almost experimental disaster spectacle, in which horse trainer OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya, overwhelmingly phlegmatic) and sister Em (an instantly captivating Keke Palmer) experience highly bizarre things on the California ranch of their father (Keith David): Why does the electricity go out all the time? What’s that whining sound in the air? Could it be true that that one cloud has been standing still for months?

Of Get Out (2017) and us (2019) Peele presented himself as a highly idiosyncratic cinematographer who exposed the racism and class distinctions of American society in highly layered horror films. nopePeele’s best film to date is hard to describe. horror, western, monster movie, nope is it all, and yet it is not; the film deals with urgent themes, but does so with a striking veil, relying on the audience’s capacity for interpretation and association.

(Eye) contact is a crucial motive in nope, not only between people but also between man and animal, between earthling and alien and between character and spectator. Just take that horrifying opening scene, where a bloodied chimpanzee fidgets with a corpse on a television set and then, just before the screen fades to black, looks straight into the camera. Throughout the film, and long after, you can keep puzzling over what the chimpanzee scenes have to do with the rest of the plot.

Senses

The film is chock full of details that will make your brain crack. At the same time nopeFrom the camera work and music to the superb sound design, it is definitely a film for the senses. One that follows the tradition of the blockbusters from the eighties, full of Spielberg-esque shots of characters looking at the sky in fear and hypnotism. Rarely beautiful and exciting how the Dutch cameraman Hoyte van Hoytema follows or anticipates that gaze and how in the nightly cloud cover the full moon slips out from behind the darting silhouette of – yes what, actually?

In solving (and exploiting) that riddle, OJ and Em get help from a pushy technician (Brandon Perea) and an eccentric camera virtuoso (Michael Wincott), while there also seems to be a link to ex-television star Ricky Park’s nearby western amusement park. (Steven Yeun). Peel connects it all neatly, although the whole thing starts to waver in the broadly drawn-out finale.

No point: what nope then loses coherence, it simply gains in beauty and pure cinematic excitement. Afterwards, try to describe what you saw, as it raged, roared and fanned over the mountains. We can be eternally grateful to Jordan Peele and co for those impossibly beautiful images alone.