Nope

OJ and Emerald Haywood run a horse ranch in an isolated valley north of Los Angeles. Their family has been training horses for Hollywood productions for generations, a legacy that stretches back to the very first moving image ever captured. When something in the sky begins terrorizing their horses and the surrounding area, the siblings decide to do what nobody has managed before: get undeniable video proof of a UFO. That’s the hook, and Jordan Peele uses it to build his most sprawling and ambitious film to date.

Nope arrived in the summer of 2022 with enormous expectations following the success of Get Out and Us. It crossed $170 million worldwide, earned strong reviews overall, and immediately became the most debated film in Peele’s catalog. Community reception split along familiar lines: those who loved the ambition and those who wished the ambition had been more focused. Unlike his previous films, which operated with tight, controlled structures, Nope sprawls. It has ideas about spectacle, exploitation, the entertainment industry, animal training, and the human compulsion to look at things we shouldn’t. Whether it ties all of those threads together is the central question.

The Sky Over Agua Dulce

The creature at the center of Nope is one of the most original alien designs in recent memory. Peele and his team avoided every convention of UFO cinema and created something that feels biological, unpredictable, and deeply unsettling. The reveal of what’s actually in the sky, and how it feeds and moves, generates genuine awe. It’s a creature design that trusts the audience to be frightened by something truly alien rather than something that looks like a variation on familiar movie monsters.

Hoyte van Hoytema shot the film on IMAX, and the photography is Nope’s most consistently excellent element. The wide shots of the Haywood ranch against the California sky have a grandeur that serves both the Western genre and the horror genre simultaneously. When the creature appears, the scale registers in a way that smaller formats simply could not achieve. Van Hoytema previously shot Interstellar, and his ability to make open landscapes feel simultaneously beautiful and threatening is perfectly suited to what Peele needed.

Keke Palmer is the film’s most dynamic element. As Emerald, she brings an energy and charisma that lifts every scene she’s in, playing a character who is brash, funny, commercially minded, and deeply capable. Her chemistry with Daniel Kaluuya’s quieter, more reserved OJ creates a sibling dynamic that feels authentic and provides the film’s emotional anchor. Kaluuya does excellent work with a role that requires him to communicate primarily through stillness and observation, though Palmer’s performance is the one that generates the most enthusiastic response.

A set piece involving the creature and a crowd of spectators at a tourist attraction is the film’s high point. It builds tension methodically, executes the horror with restraint that makes the payoff more disturbing, and demonstrates Peele’s ability to stage large-scale sequences with precision. The sequence earns comparisons to the best work of the filmmakers Peele clearly admires.

Too Many Ideas Fighting for Screen Time

Nope’s most persistent problem is structural. Peele is working with at least three films’ worth of thematic material and trying to fit it all into one movie. The result is a narrative that stops and starts, with stretches that feel like they’re building toward something significant followed by diversions that undercut the momentum.

Peele’s Gordy subplot is the most divisive element. The film spends significant time on Ricky “Jupe” Park, played by Steven Yeun, a former child actor who survived a horrifying on-set incident involving a chimpanzee that attacked its costars during a sitcom taping. The scenes depicting the incident are among the most viscerally intense in the entire film. But their connection to the main story, thematically about the impossibility of truly taming wild creatures and the human tendency to commodify trauma, remains fuzzy in execution. Many viewers leave the film unsure what the Gordy material was ultimately saying, and that uncertainty weakens rather than enriches the experience.

Pacing is uneven throughout. Individual scenes can stretch beyond their utility, particularly early establishment sequences on the ranch and a shopping trip that does functional plot work without generating much energy. Peele’s previous films were remarkably tight. Nope feels like the work of a filmmaker reveling in a bigger budget and longer runtime without the same editorial discipline that made Get Out so effective.

Thematic ambition, while admirable, doesn’t fully resolve. Nope wants to be about spectacle itself: why we watch, what happens when we commodify the dangerous and the unknowable, how the entertainment industry treats both animals and people as consumable resources. These ideas are present and interesting, but they compete with each other rather than building toward a unified statement. The film gestures at connections between its threads without drawing them tight enough for the audience to feel the full weight of what Peele is proposing.

Peele’s Most Confident and Most Vulnerable Film

Nope is clearly the work of a director operating with complete creative freedom, and that freedom produces both the film’s best moments and its weakest. The confidence is visible in every frame. The vulnerability is in the structure, in the moments where ambition outpaces execution and a tighter film is clearly trying to emerge from a looser one.

What keeps it compelling despite its inconsistencies is how personal it feels. The Haywood family’s connection to the origins of cinema, and the film’s argument that Black contributions to Hollywood have been systematically erased, gives Nope an emotional undercurrent that grounds even its most scattered moments. When OJ sits quietly with a horse, reading its body language with the patience and respect that nobody else in the film demonstrates, you can feel Peele making a point about attention, about care, about what it means to truly see something rather than just capture it.

Should You Watch Nope?

If you’re interested in a horror film that swings for something bigger than scares, Nope delivers individual sequences that rank among the best in recent genre filmmaking. Fans of Peele’s previous work will find plenty to appreciate, and anyone who values visual ambition and original creature design should make time for it.

Skip it if you need a film’s themes to land cleanly and its structure to stay focused. Nope asks for patience during its slower stretches and doesn’t always reward that patience with clarity. If Get Out’s precision is what you loved about Peele, this looser approach may frustrate more than it satisfies.

The Verdict on Nope

Nope is Jordan Peele at his most ambitious and his most unruly. The creature design is inspired, the IMAX photography is gorgeous, and Keke Palmer delivers a star-making performance that holds the film together during its weaker stretches. The Gordy subplot remains a fascinating puzzle that doesn’t quite connect, the pacing needs tightening, and the thematic threads needed one more pass to weave together fully. It’s not the masterpiece its best moments suggest it could have been, but it’s a bold, original piece of filmmaking from a director willing to risk messiness in pursuit of something new. That willingness counts for a lot.