Nope
Directed by Jordan Peele
Written by Jordan Peele
Produced by Jordan Peele & Ian Cooper
Starring Daniel Kaluuya
Keke Palmer
Steven Yeun
Michael Wincott
Brandon Perea
Cinematography Hoyte van Hoytema
Edited by Nicholas Monsour
Music by Michael Abels
Production company Monkeypaw Productions
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Nope opens with two vignettes that at first seem to have nothing much to do with the main plotline. The opening scene shows a wrecked television set of a living room, in which a blood-splattered chimpanzee is poking at the bare foot of an unconscious and possibly dead girl. Nearby, a clearly extremely traumatized boy peers out at the chimp.
Then we see a pair of horse trainers auditioning their animal for a commercial shoot. A technician holds up a reflective ball to the horse’s eye, causing the animal to panic, rear and kick out. The trainers are fired.
There’s a lot going on in Jordan Peele’s film. It’s a horror-action flick, a film about UFOs, and it takes a hard look, as Peele’s films often do, at the role of African-Americans in society and history. It looks at the commercialization of tragedy, and the endless market to sell conspiracies, false narratives, and bombast to the masses. He covers more bases than the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But the part that stood out to me was the interaction between humans and non-human life forms. We exploit animals, we like to use them, and we are often very fond of them. But we don’t really understand them.
We know what spooked the horse, and later in the movie, we learn what spooked the chimpanzee. Seemingly unrelated, as I said, but actually vital to understanding how the human characters eventually learn to take on an extremely powerful alien being. In a deft bit of story-telling, Peele uses the same elements used to control the horse and the chimp, combined with elements that caused the humans to dramatically lose control of them, and applies it to the alien nicknamed Jean Jacket.
Ironic touches abound. The little boy traumatized in the chimp’s rampage ends up as a neighbor to the horse wrangles in the desert area of northeastern LA county, running a five-and-dime wild west show and on the side, making spare coin exploiting the secretive and sensational story of the chimp attack. He puts on show once a day explaining the tale of a supposed UFO attack ten years earlier, and on that particular day when Jean Jacket attacks again, he has in attendance, wearing a veil, the woman who was hideously disfigured as a girl by the chimp. They both pay for the human attraction to ersatz spectacle, along with the rest of the gullible innocents in the crowd.
For all its complexity, this is probably the most relatable of Peele’s movies thus far. Some of the characters might be vile, but they all fall within the range of what we consider normal human behavior. And with that step, Peele has entered a realm of genre directing where it’s not too out of hand to start comparing him to Alfred Hitchcock. Idiosyncratic, fiercely intelligent, unwaveringly precise, and with a sense for suspense and tension that makes even the innocent sound of a song being played a bit slowly infinitely disturbing.
Outstanding performances from Daniel Kaluuya (OJ), Keke Palmer (Em, OJ’s sister), Steven Yeun (Jupe, chimp victim and park owner), Michael Wincott (cinematographer) and Brandon Perea (computer techie) made for an engaging and worthwhile 90 minutes.