Review | Nope movie review: Get Out and Us director Jordan Peele’s third feature, a horror sci-fi production, is one of the great studio movies of 2022
- Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya star in a tale about aliens in California that mixes the science fiction with a good dose of horror
- Set around the entertainment industry, it pays tribute to Westerns, celluloid and old-school camera technology
4.5/5 stars
At first glance, this latest effort reads more like a straight sci-fi – a story of UFO spotting in contemporary California. But be it a chimpanzee that goes wild in a TV studio or the gruesome fate suffered by Keith David’s horse wrangler, Peele soon warns us that Nope will enjoy its fair share of grim scares.
When it comes to the film’s extraterrestrial presence, think John Carpenter’s The Thing rather than the benevolent beings of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T.
The central pair are OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his younger sister Emerald (Keke Palmer), who run Haywood Hollywood Horses out of a dusty ranch after the death of their father. Business isn’t great – OJ is even selling off his nags to Ricky ‘Jupe’ Park (Steven Yeun), the owner of the nearby Star Lasso Experience, a Western-themed live show.
A former child actor, Jupe was part of TV show Gordy’s Home, which suffered a bizarre tragedy when Gordy – the aforementioned chimp – went utterly crazy on set.