- UK release: August 2022
- Director: Jordan Peele · Writer: Jordan Peele
- Studio / distributor: Universal Pictures; Monkeypaw Productions
- Genre: Science fiction spectacle thriller · Runtime: 130 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Widows) as OJ Haywood; Keke Palmer (Hustlers) as Emerald Haywood; Steven Yeun (Minari, The Walking Dead) as Ricky “Jupe” Park; Brandon Perea (The OA) as Angel Torres
- IMDb: 6.8 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 83% critics / 69% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Jordan Peele earned his reputation on two tight, low-budget horrors that worked like puzzle boxes. Get Out turned a meet-the-parents weekend into the sharpest American satire in years, and Us doubled down on the unease while losing a little of the control. Nope is the third film, and the first time Peele has reached for the scale of a summer blockbuster: an IMAX-shot, desert-set chase after something enormous in the sky. It is a bigger swing than either of its predecessors, and it spends a lot of that size on a question about why we point cameras at the things that frighten us.
The setup
OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) run a horse ranch in a dusty valley outside Los Angeles, training animals for film and television. The family business is older than Hollywood itself, and it is quietly failing. Then something starts moving in the clouds above their land, killing the power, spooking the horses, and refusing to be photographed. OJ wants to understand it; Emerald wants to film it and sell the footage, the shot that would put the Haywoods back on the map. Down the road, a former child star turned theme-park showman (Steven Yeun) has his own ideas about turning the thing in the sky into an attraction. I will keep the rest under wraps, because the slow disclosure of what they are dealing with is most of the pleasure.
The cast
Kaluuya plays OJ as a study in withheld reaction, a man who communicates in flat single syllables and long looks, and it is a brave choice for a leading role in a film this loud. He lets Keke Palmer carry the noise, and she takes it gladly: Emerald is a livewire of patter and ambition, and Palmer gives her a charm that keeps the film warm when the sky turns hostile. The two of them work as a genuine sibling double act, one all surface, one all interior. Steven Yeun is the unsettling third point, a man who survived something terrible as a child and learned exactly the wrong lesson from it, all showman’s smile over a fault line. Brandon Perea provides the comic energy as a bored electronics-store tech who attaches himself to the Haywoods’ surveillance project, and the film is better for his enthusiasm.
The craft
This is where the budget shows, and shows beautifully. Peele shot on IMAX film stock with Hoyte van Hoytema behind the camera, and the high-desert vistas have a depth and a weight that most digital blockbusters cannot touch. The valley itself becomes a character, vast and indifferent under that watchful sky. The creature design is genuinely strange, withholding its shape for a long time and then revealing it in ways that keep rewriting what you thought you were looking at. Michael Abels’ score and a precise, predatory sound design do a great deal of the work; you come to dread certain noises. Peele paces the build with confidence, trusting silence and scale where a lesser film would cut faster and explain more.
How it stacks up
The reference points are deliberate and worn proudly. This is Peele’s Jaws, a creature-feature where the monster is mostly the suggestion of the monster, and his Close Encounters of the Third Kind, all upturned faces and lights in the dark. There is Signs in the rural family staring at the sky, and King Kong in the running theme of spectacle as something we cage and sell. Where Get Out was a scalpel, Nope is closer to a Spielberg adventure with an essay folded inside it, about the hunger to capture an image and the price of looking at what should be left alone. It is the most purely entertaining of Peele’s films and, by a margin, the least tidy.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely on board, sitting around 83%, praising the ambition, the imagery, and the sound. Audiences are cooler at 69%, and the gap is easy to read: this is Peele’s most elusive film, more interested in mood and ideas than in the clean satisfactions of Get Out. The complaints are fair. Some threads, the chimpanzee flashback above all, are more provocative than resolved, and the theme can feel underlined. None of that sinks it for me. I would rather a blockbuster overreach with real ideas than play it safe with none, and on spectacle and atmosphere this delivers more than almost anything else in cinemas this summer.
Verdict
Nope is a big, strange, properly cinematic film that knows exactly what it is doing with a camera and is only sometimes sure what it is doing with its themes. The craft is first rate, the central pair are a joy, and the slow reveal of the thing in the sky is the kind of thing I will happily watch again, even knowing where it goes. It keeps you at arm’s length where its predecessor pulled you close, and the symbolic reach occasionally exceeds its grasp. But it is ambitious, memorable, and made for the biggest screen you can find, and I value all three. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in IMAX if you possibly can; the format is not a gimmick here.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Nope has settled into its reputation as Peele’s most divisive film, the one his admirers defend hardest and casual viewers bounce off, which feels about right. It came to digital and 4K disc in late 2022, with a handsome transfer that preserves the IMAX framing, and streams on Peacock and other platforms depending on region. The chimpanzee subplot remains the most argued-over sequence in his filmography.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong language, threat, bloody images. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There is moderate violence including from a chimpanzee who goes on a rampage attacking humans. There are brief, grainy documentary images of natural world violence between a tiger and a python.
Threat and horror: A chimpanzee goes on a violent rampage in a television studio and a young performer looks traumatised as he hides under a table witnessing the mayhem. There are sustained scenes of threat to characters from an alien entity, with long build-ups of tension and jump scares.
Language: There is strong language (‘fk’, ‘motherfker’), as well as milder terms such as ‘bitch’, ‘shit’, ‘ass’, ‘dick’, ‘hell’, ‘God’ and ‘damn’, and a reclaimed use of racial language (‘n**a’).
Sex: There are infrequent moderate sex references.
Injury detail: There are splatters of blood and viscera as an animal is shot off-screen, and from other fantastical off-screen violence. There is sight of a wound across a man’s eye which has been sliced by a falling object.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
