‘Nope’ is strange, new and definitely from the mind of Jordan Peele

Since his claustrophobic racial horror Get Out became a global smash in 2017, writer, director and producer Jordan Peele has become synonymous with a new genre of film that redraws the ways in which horror tropes are used and why.

His films and series, whether directed by him or produced under the banner of his company Monkeypaw Productions — Us, The Twilight Zone, Lovecraft Country, Hunters, Candyman — pay homage to his love of horror and science fiction while also pushing these genres into satisfying new directions. Peele uses familiar genre elements as a means of exploring issues of race, oversights in mainstream accounts of US history and the anxieties of our digitally oversaturated present.

It’s no surprise that Peele’s latest film — an original, smart, inventive and provocative take on the Spielberg-style alien arrival summer blockbuster — comes with high expectations and vigorous debates about the bigger-picture issues behind its satisfyingly delivered genre pleasures.

Without spoiling too much, Nope mixes elements from films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the tropes of John Wayne-style westerns to create something that is strange, new and definitely from the mind of Peele.

It stars Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah) and Keke Palmer (Akeelah and the Bee, Alice) as OJ and Emerald Hayward, two very different siblings and heirs to their family’s horse-wrangling-for-Hollywood business, who become obsessed with capturing the strange goings-on in the sky above their California ranch.

They’re not the only ones who have noticed that the clouds in these parts may be hiding something. There’s also former TV child-star-turned-western-theme-park-owner Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) and the local electronics shop assistant (Brandon Perea), who is soon enlisted in a technical support role. There’s the gruff, mysterious cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), whose skills are vital if the goal of getting it all on film is to be realised.

As the quest to solve the mystery of what lurks in the sky grows ever more eerie, Peele’s summer spectacle weaves a memorable mash-up of horror and sci-fi that delivers many chills, occasional screams and plenty of Easter eggs for obsessive movie fans. In true Peele style, it also begins to work its magic to ask big questions about our addiction to spectacle and the mania with which we search to document everything around us. 

Peele says the pandemic — this global feeling that we were “sort of watching ourselves walk towards this awful bad miracle, all the while with our phones in our hands” — definitely influenced the story, atmosphere and themes of the film.

The helplessness that pervaded the world during 2020, when he wrote the script, made him feel a responsibility “to take in what was happening around me and turn it into something magical. It’s not an accident that the agency and hope and adventure, joy and love come through in this film in a more determined way because by the end of that process that was what I felt like we needed — and I needed.”

After the psychological horror chills of Get Out and its 2019 follow-up Us, Peele says he's known for a while that “a flying saucer film was in my future” but adds: “I didn’t want to make a movie where people were just trapped in a house with a flying saucer dancing around it. There’s an agency there and a fun that if played real could be the exciting engine to a movie.”

The impetus to make the film was given extra urgency after the death of George Floyd, when “African Americans and so many in the world were feeling this anguish”.

Peele became certain this project would be “the one ... because of that agency and joy and because of the rejection of the pain and the horror of it”.

“I did very much feel this movie came at a time when it's about black horror but it needed to be about much more than that.”

For Kaluuya the script was expectedly surprising but also “audacious and I just loved the brother and sister narrative at the heart of it. You rarely see that.”

The actor was also struck by the film’s broader concerns with “attention and how we focus on things that are not good for us, especially in this Instagram era where you spend hours on the phone looking at random things that just take away from you — your spirit and whatever you’re going through.

“I think OJ and Emerald are just going through that ... [They’re] obsessed with what’s up there and capturing it but running the risk of it just capturing [them]. That’s what really stuck with me.”

With the film’s release in the US and the UK earlier this month, the online debate is already raging as fans and critics unpack what they feel are the deeper currents running beneath its easily pleasing genre surface.

For Peele, that’s the most satisfying metric for the success of any of his films. “I try to create something that offers an escape and a film that people can choose to watch in the moment or stew on later. The reward is watching the conversation and watching people take a spectrum of ideas from it — any film that can do that, I think, is amazing.”

Finally, OJ and Emerald’s mission to capture the impossible resonates with more than audiences used to the image-hungry social media age. As Peele points out: “The idea of trying to capture the impossible is in the conception of every film. Every film is about an illusion, about bottling magic, creating a sequence and a world and an immersion in something that doesn’t exist.”

• 'Nope' opens in cinemas on August 19.