Nope, review — audaciously weird spectacle is Jordan Peele’s most supersized film yet

Jordan Peele does not scare easily. For many directors, being hailed as a saviour of cinema might nudge them towards safety first. Nope. And for proof, see Nope, Peele’s most supersized movie yet. Consider the prologue. Stanley Kubrick opened 2001 with primal apes about to evolve into humans. Peele begins his space odyssey with an enraged chimpanzee in a party hat. But the party is over. The whole scene hums with menace and WTF-ery, staged on the wrecked set of a TV show. Something has clearly gone very awry.

That Peele can riff like this on a cinematic giant is part of why his movies are an event. Another is the splash made by his 2017 triumph Get Out, whose star Daniel Kaluuya returns here as Otis Haywood Jr, a horse wrangler for the entertainment industry. Peele’s debut was a shot in the arm for the movie business, a take-no-prisoners satire of race wrapped in a midnight crowd-pleaser. His second film Us divided opinion (I rated it even higher than Get Out). But that breakthrough has kept studio hopes pinned to the director. Now in the midsummer box office feeding frenzy, he unveils a blockbuster of aliens among us, a grandly ambitious sci-fi-horror-thriller. All of Hollywood’s favourite things, whatever Hollywood is in 2022.

It is still the client base for Otis and peppy younger sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer). Early on, the pair inherit Haywood’s Hollywood Horses after the sudden death of their father. The business has been in the family since before movies were movies. The anonymous black jockey in the (actual) 19th-century photographs of cine-pioneer Eadweard Muybridge? A (fictional) ancestor.

What is often seen as Peele’s blessing-and-curse is already evident: the sheer abundance of his storytelling. Five minutes in, real film history has been spliced into the imaginary, loaded with chewable stuff about America and the moving image. Two adult children must confront life without a parent. And don’t think we’ve forgotten the chimp.

Answers take shape on the ranch. A spoiler warning is due. In fact, the whole movie is best seen without knowing anything in advance. If you’re still reading, a clue lurks high above the Haywoods’ California homestead: a lone, unmoving cloud. But in a film tied up with everything we spend time staring at — social media, virtual reality — who watches clouds? Of course, that changes when horses start to vanish. And horses are just the beginning.

This being the 21st century, Otis and Emerald’s first response is neither to befriend the visitors or go to war as the world has before. Instead, they plan to film them — and monetise the footage. Peele has his own plot in mind. As mayhem breaks out, the back catalogue of American movies is knowingly quoted. Nope is nothing if not its own film, but it also takes the form of bloody horror. The shadow of a million Westerns falls across it too. (Steven Yeun co-stars, running an Old West theme park.) And most of all there is Jaws: Spielberg evoked in sly deadpan and gliding death.

But Peele is more than a recycler. At the heart of Nope is a whole pop culture of his own invention, one of fictitious 1990s sitcoms and their second lives on YouTube. The coup isn’t just the fun involved, but how complex themes of viewership and consumption brilliantly fuel a big-screen fairground ride.

Could the focus be tighter? Sometimes. But better a busy head than an empty one. Would an old-school producer hurry Peele along? Probably. And how many ideas would be lost in haste — how much of some of the most audaciously weird spectacle to ever see the inside of a multiplex? No, flaws and all, the beauty of Nope is being two things at once. Art and cheap thrills, popcorn and provocation, blockbuster and brainfood: the old, mixed-up formula that is still cinema’s secret weapon.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from August 12 and in US cinemas now