Nope (2022)

For me, the central problem with Nope is that it’s claiming to be “a new terror from the mind of Jordan Peele”. The idea is that, like Get Out, this is a thinking person’s horror film. It’s a kind of Glass Onion of horror films that asks you to puzzle through things, to look for hidden meanings, especially racialized meanings. 

Peele is, in this way, attempting to deliver – or being asked to deliver – on a kind of promise left unfulfilled by M. Night Shyamalan’s series of terrible movies following The Sixth Sense. (Ari Aster is also in this same unenviable position as Peele.) 

But if you do pay close attention to Nope, your attention is unrewarded; worse, it’s frustrated. The film makes less sense the more you pay attention to what it’s doing. The plots don’t hang together, the worldbuilding seems to go nowhere, and the characters seemingly act with inscrutable motivations. 

Peele is promising a different kind of genre movie, but I think he’s asking us to pay attention to the wrong things. If you want me to pay close attention, you have to have something interesting to say. As far as I can tell, Peele has a series of cool ideas, and he puts them onscreen. But I'm not sure what any of them has to do with one another, and I don't really think anything means anything, despite what the film seems to promise.

Ok, also: Why is Daniel Kaluuya a zombie in this? What's happening?