Nope

Siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) inherit a Californian horse ranch from their industry-legend father.

Nope is as much a celebration of what’s great about film as it is a parody of its monstrous tendencies. Peele’s regular composer Michael Abels fashions a score that cuts between the plucky tension of past work and something more grandiose, recalling the motifs of classical Westerns. Visually, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema opens up the frame through IMAX photography, and even with that newfound height, Peele is masterful at manipulating and restricting perspective, delighting in leaving just enough out of view to allow the imagination to worsen the horror. With impressive precision Peele remixes a broad range of influences, including the incomprehensible terror of Lovecraft, more niche genre fare like Ron Underwood’s Tremors, classic Hollywood, and even beyond, such as a direct reference to Akira, through thrilling replication of the famous bike-slide shot (perhaps his tribute to a cancelled remake he was once linked to). Also fascinating is genre cinema legend Michael Wincott, playing a Quint-from- Jaws-type as a hermit cinematographer, ominously growling a rendition of the 1958 novelty alien song ‘The Purple People Eater’, among other poetic and vaguely creepy turns of phrase. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer show delightful chemistry as OJ and Emerald ‘Em’ Haywood, children of a renowned Hollywood horse trainer, apparently descendants of the jockey in the 1878 photography series The Horse In Motion (a key milestone in motion-picture history). Between clashes of Palmer’s manic energy and Kaluuya’s cool stoicism, their close encounter with the unknown becomes an obsession and a potential solution for their inner turmoil, maybe even a route to fame. For his latest sci-fi horror, Peele characterises the film industry as a ruthless beast, and wonders about who gets led into its jaws, and for whose benefit.

Jordan Peele's genre-melting third feature stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as brother-and-sister horse wranglers defending the family ranch from an ...

He’s also a showman, and as such an avatar of the film’s ambivalence about the business of spectacle. As in “Jaws,” a fractious posse forms to deal with the threat, including Angel (Brandon Perea), an anxious techie, and Antlers (Michael Wincott), a visionary cinematographer who shows up at the ranch with a hand-cranked IMAX camera. The moral of “Nope” is “look away,” but you can’t take your eyes off it. Jupiter, whose back story as a child actor connects him to that wayward chimp, is a bit like the mayor of Amity — less a villain than the representative of a clueless, self-serving status quo. A horse’s flank is pierced by a falling house key, and Otis Sr. takes an improbable projectile in the eye. The climactic scenes aim for — and very nearly achieve — the kind of old-fashioned sublimity that packs wonder, terror and slack-jawed admiration into a single sensation. The ape is a wild animal behaving according to its nature even though it has been tamed and trained for human uses. Emerald (Keke Palmer) and O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) claim the rider as their ancestor. O.J. — it’s short for Otis Jr. — is the main wrangler, a laconic, sad-eyed cowboy more comfortable around horses than people. A sketch-comedy genius before he turned to directing, Peele never takes his performers for granted, giving everyone space to explore quirks and nuances of character. There are sequences here that nod to past masters, from Hitchcock to Spielberg to Shyamalan, and shots that revel in the sheer ecstasy of moviemaking. At the same time, he’s an artist with the freedom and confidence to do whatever he wants to, and one who knows how to challenge audiences without alienating them.