A yes for Nope as Jordan Peele makes us love horror again
Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea in Nope.
In just five short years of film directing, decorated comedian turned Oscar-winning horror writer and director Jordan Peele has redefined the modern horror genre.
His 2017 directorial debut Get Out is universally acclaimed and made Peele the first black winner of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and 2019’s more traditional horror Us followed with widespread critical and commercial success.
Nope, so named for the reaction Peele hopes to elicit from audiences, is his eagerly-awaited third film: an uncanny science-fiction horror and social thriller examining humanity’s lust for spectacle and telling a tale of bizarre extra-terrestrial activity.
Written in 2020, Peele has said that the film is “a reflection of all the horrors that happened that year, and are still happening”.
The details of the film have been kept carefully under wraps in trailers and advertisements, ensuring cinema-goers are in for more than a few surprises when they take their seats.
Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya returns to play protagonist OJ Haywood, the son of a legendary Hollywood horse wrangler. He and his sister Emerald, played by Keke Palmer, inherit their father’s ranch after a bizarre incident leads to his death.
“I really grew as a performer on Get Out,” says 33-year-old Kaluuya, adding that he loves working with Peele because “you’re going to do something new, but in a way that really challenges you, and he’s really gonna push you”.
“It was really exciting, I’m a big fan of his,” says 28-year-old Palmer on working on her first Jordan Peele film. “I just remember reading the script and really being excited about what that process would be like on set, and all the different major themes he added to it, watching how he was able to pull it all together.”
When OJ and Emerald begin to observe some unexplained, potentially alien phenomena on their ranch, they fall down an obsessive rabbit hole, attempting to capture it on camera by any means necessary.
Their new discovery, if successfully recorded on film, could see the big bucks coming their way. This cash windfall is much-needed as, despite their skill and heritage in the animal wrangling industry, the siblings are facing financial challenges after prematurely inheriting their father’s ranch.
OJ is the moral centre of the narrative, a man of few words whose personality is in direct contrast with Emerald’s extroverted charisma.
As they work together to try and get their bizarre experiences on film, what follows is a spectacle of horror with an emotionally-complex core, in the classic Peele style of blending abject terror with cerebral social commentary.
“There’s a brother and sister narrative, there’s two people that annoy each other, but love each other. And they have each other’s back no matter what,” explains Kaluuya.
“I love when characters are written in that way, where they actually complement each other, but it still can encourage conflict. So then it was cool that when Emerald goes on one, OJ just sits in her pocket and supports that joke. Like from a technical standpoint, you lay it up, and then boom! Keke just smacks it down.”
“They’re not the entire antithesis of each other,” adds Palmer. “So though they are different — Emerald, she’s more outgoing, and he’s a little bit more reserved — over the course and the change of the film, you start to see her change, and him become a little bit more… forceful. You start to actually see that they are quite similar at the same time.”
In a style that fans of Peele’s horrors have come to know well, the tempo of Nope’s narrative — and of audience’s heart rates — accelerates rapidly over the course of the film.
Working with an oscillating pace, which blends dark comedy with white-knuckle fear of an unknown enemy, was a challenge for Kaluuya and Palmer — as was the fact that much of the film’s visuals were achieved in post-production.
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, whose work includes Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Tenet, was enlisted as director of photography, working alongside a fantastic visual effects team to turn Peele’s imagination into cinematic reality.
“It was challenging. But it was challenging in a sense that you didn’t have any outward trigger,” says Kaluuya.
“I mean, a lot of the moments are in post-production. So to conjure up that kind of fear, you had to use your imagination really deeply.”
While Nope can be enjoyed as a quintessential science fiction horror, there is certainly a deeper societal message to be gleaned about the chokehold social media, spectacle and exhibitionism have on society.
It’s not uncommon for horrors to have an underlying message, but as with Get Out before it, Nope brings this metaphor closer to the surface, making sure audiences leave cinemas carrying the film’s sense of dread and ruminating on the questions it poses.
“For me, Jordan’s work is like a painting: it means something different to everyone,” says Palmer, astutely.
“I think for myself, watching the movie makes me think so much about exploitation and the capturing of things on film, whether it be for play or whether it be for performance, and just what that means to the subject.
“Kind of like the violence of viewing, especially in this era that we’re in now, where everything is up for exploitation and for grabs, even if you’re just walking down the street, or ringing the doorbell."
- Nope is in UK cinemas now
