Took two viewings for my thoughts to settle on Jordan Peele’s latest, partly because on second viewing I wasn’t being distracted by whatever the hell was going on with the projector bulb in theater 7 of the ol’ Pittsburg 8. More streamlined and cohesive than US and, at least on the surface, less About Race than GET OUT, NOPE plays like a sorta clever, slightly arty old fashioned creature feature. Having inherited their father’s ranch, the Haywood siblings, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer), get spooked when, one evening, a freak occurrence shuts off all the power across the property and causes one of their horses to flee. More upsettingly, OJ hears a strange sound out there — something he last heard when his father (the great Keith David) was killed by a falling object: a nickel falling at something like terminal velocity, to be exact — surrounded by other falling objects like forks and keys and whatnot. So begins a quest to find out what that thing out there is, which leads them to buy a security camera system from Fry’s Electronics salesman Angel (Brandon Perea) and eventually bring in eccentric cinematographer Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott, whose bizarre spoken word take on a classic novelty song is — I don’t know that I’d call it a high point, but it sure is SOMETHING) to document the mysterious phenomenon in the sky. Like US, NOPE does slide in something tangential that feels like it might just be a combination of weird fixations of Peele’s — the Haywoods’ nearest neighbor is a small-scale theme park called Jupiter’s Claim, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child actor who was traumatized in a freak occurrence involving a chimpanzee co-star in the late ’90s. And yet, Jupe’s story does wind up figuring into the overall plot, both thematically in a couple of ways and — it took me ’til the second showing for this to become clear — straightforwardly as well. There’s a lot to chew on here, but it also works well as a pure suspense flick about ordinary folks being terrorized by and challenging an unknown force. It also has some very funny moments — honestly, the timing and delivery every time the title is invoked is near-flawless (Kaluuya kills with his deadpan delivery throughout), and Perea is highly amusing all thru the entire initial installation of the camera setup. It’s a good, highly idiosyncratic time at the movies, with some nice flourishes, some splendid weird design work, and some light genre-bending insofar as what influences Peele obviously threw into the stew that is this flick. It’s definitely grown on me.
