Aug 31, 20224 min read

Film REVIEW: Nope - ★★★★★

Nope is tipped as Get Out and Us director Jordan Peele’s greatest horror masterpiece.

Director: Jordan Peele

Writer: Jordan Peele

Stars: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yuen, Michael Wincott, Brandon Perea, Wrenn Schmidt, Barbie Ferreira, Keith David

Genre: Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Themes: Horse, U.F.O., Alien

The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.

The film received praise for its ambition, performances, cinematography, and direction, though the screenplay and themes polarized critics and audiences.

In Cinemas Now - Age 15

MIX UP REVIEWS:

★★★★★

Charlie - ★★★★★

"Nope was probably the most amazing horror movie I have ever seen (it's the only one I have seen) but it was still very thrilling and scary at times and the characters were very funny 6/5 very great"

Have you seen it yet?

Nope movie backstory - what's the first thing I need to know about Nope?

Nope is the third movie from rising US horror maestro, Jordan Peele. That statement alone should prick up your ears and send a bead of cold sweat trickling down your back.

Still just 43, the precociously talented New Yorker has made his own lane in Hollywood with whipsmart, socially charged and unsettling horror movies, trading not so much in jump scares as skin-crawling existential dread.

First came 2017’s Oscar-winning Get Out, in which a secret society of ageing white supremacists harvested the bodies of young black men to attain eternal youth.

Next came 2019’s Us, offering the nightmarish premise that each one of us has an evil doppelgänger living deep underground, all plotting to rise up and murder us with giant glinting scissors.

Now, there’s Nope. We’d love to give you a blow-by-blow synopsis of Peele’s third movie.

But much of the anticipation surrounding the Nope film is that – even after a couple of cryptic trailer drops – nobody really knows what the director has up his sleeve.

“The discovery and the surprise of it is part of the fun,” explained Peele during a Nope Q&A at CinemaCon.

“Trailers will give you a taste, but we want to retain some of the mystery, so you can be satisfied going to the damn movie.”

Nope movie meaning - what's the Nope film about?

In the age of oversharing, Peele has done a great job of keeping Nope as a riddle wrapped in an enigma. The Nope movie’s first appearance on social media showed us nothing more than a cloud looming over a hicksville American town.

“What if Nope is actually a Pixar-style romp about a hapless sentient cloud that just wants to help people?” mused The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage.

That seems unlikely. If you pull together all the strands, a picture starts to emerge of the Nope movie plot – and it’s humming with evil.

This much we know. James and Jill Haywood are horse-trainers to the Hollywood movie industry, running a remote ranch in the dust-blown wilds of California.

Life is good, until one night the power dies, the ranch is plunged into inky-black silence and the horses shriek in terror as ominous lights fill the skies.

With characters looking skywards throughout the first Nope trailer, it seems there’s been some kind of visitation.

But standard-issue aliens and monsters seem too simple for a visionary like Peele, who has always been more drawn to the internal horrors of our human nature and psyche.

Perhaps the biggest clue is James’s significant-sounding line as he sits in the darkness trying to make sense of it all.

“What’s a bad miracle…?”

Nope cast - who stars in the Nope film?

Every generation, a great director and actor settle into an unofficial partnership.

Think Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Think Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson.

After his unforgettable, Oscar-nominated performance in Get Out, Peele has turned once again to British actor Daniel Kaluuya (Black Panther) for the lead role in Nope.

As Peele told Empire: “I wrote Nope with Daniel in mind for the role – a humble man destined for an epic and otherworldly confrontation.”

“Daniel’s craft is on a different level, but it’s his warmth that grounds audiences even during points of absolute madness. You may be watching a nightmare, but when he’s on screen, at least you’ve got your brother with you, and that’s all you need.”

Just as important to the Nope cast is Keke Palmer (Night at the Museum, Ice Age: Continental Drift), who plays James’s sparky sister.

It seems her character might change the most over the course of the movie, from the carefree young woman who dances to old records with a glass of bourbon – to the terrified victim who is swept shrieking into the air by unknown forces at the end of the Nope trailer.

“Daniel and I are very much like our characters,” Palmer told PopSugar, “and you’ll understand what I mean when you see the movie. I just love that Jordan is normalising Black people being leads and stars in movies.”

Nope fan theories - what does the internet think the Nope film is about?

The web loves a conspiracy theory, and Nope’s head-scratching promotional campaign has sparked some pretty out-there ideas.

Some believe the Nope movie will tap into the real-life events at Sherman Ranch, Utah, where a family claimed to have been visited nightly by aliens in the mid-’90s.

Others point to the Nope poster of an airlifted stallion as evidence that horses will be central to the plot, with the movie perhaps drawing parallels between the subservient creatures and America’s treatment of immigrants.

Meanwhile the ‘fistbump’ moment that occurs at 1:33 in the Nope trailer is thought to be between a human and a horse/alien hybrid.

And the wildest Nope fan theory of all? That the ranch owners are themselves centuries-old extraterrestrials, due to be beamed up by their returning fleet. Okay…

How do you rate these movies?...