Nope: the horrors of being seen

• This review contains spoilers.

From the rectal probes of Communion (1989) to the sphincter-like ships of Independence Day (1997), the anal associations of UFO pictures are well established. Nope, however, frames the flying saucer as a different orifice: the iris. Jordan Peele’s third feature is a film about seeing, structured around the understanding that to “make you a spectacle” (as its opening Biblical quotation puts it) is to expose you to violence or destruction. If the film’s title suggests various refusals, the most urgent is the refusal to make yourself available to the gaze of the other. This, the movie suggests, might just save your life.

Nope follows Peele’s debut, the tight, terrifying Get Out (2017), and its follow-up, the unnerving, dreamlike Us (2019). In his films, Black characters are placed in existential jeopardy by brutal fantasy figures – covetous body-snatchers, vengeful doppelgangers, predatory aliens – that connote the ongoing traumas of racialised injustice. Peele uses genre in bold, distinctive attempts to trouble America’s idea of itself, through style and subject matter as well as by mobilising movie per se, both as a medium of mass communication and as an industry capable of helping shift structural norms. Nope, however, is his first story about filmmaking itself.

Siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya, cautious and solemn) and Emerald (Keke Palmer, dynamic and flighty) inherit their father’s Hollywood horse-wrangling company, but neither has his knack for it. When strange things start happening at and above their ranch, OJ and Em recruit a tech whiz (Brandon Perea) and a grizzled veteran DoP (Michael Wincott) in hopes of securing lucrative footage of alien activity. Another industry veteran (Steven Yeun) is thinking along similar lines at his goofy gold-rush theme town nearby.

Though these characters are after fame and fortune, this is no glib critique: Peele is interested in the power dynamics of the urge to see and be seen, how central this queasy spectacularity might be to America itself, and whether it should be understood as a kind of death wish. Cameras are all over the screen here, on film and TV sets, CCTV loops and mobile phones. One character talks about aliens as “viewers”.

Such concerns run deep here. OJ and Em, we’re told, are descended from the jockey seen in Eadweard Muybridge’s earliest attempts to photograph movement, making the hypervisible Black man on horseback the foundational figure of cinema, at once pioneering virtuoso and object of exploitation. Kaluuya’s character conspicuously avoids the camera while handling horses on set, even as his name puts us in mind of another Black man’s spectacular Bronco ride across Los Angeles.

The extractive underpinnings of both moving-image-making and mounted American expansion merge in the cowboy genre, to which Nope gestures in ways both dignified (the siblings’ father) and absurd (the goofy theme town). But the film is also interested in more primal, animalistic links between observation and destruction, the ways eye contact can feel like or lead to death. Three key instances: a horse panics on a soundstage when looked in the eye; a rampaging chimpanzee withholds lethal force from someone whose eyes are obscured; and, most audaciously, the extra-terrestrial object keeping the ranch under surveillance is ultimately revealed to be not a ship but a living creature. Its way of looking is not that of an alien scientist or colonist but a predator.

This hunter looks like a giant eye, ravenously ready to ingest whatever meets its gaze while keeping itself unseen; there’s thrilling fun in trying to glimpse it darting between clouds and over hills. Without neglecting the stunning California landscape, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema offers vistas of the wide open sky (populated with digitally crafted clouds) to be anxiously scanned for signs of movement, complemented by sound designer Johnnie Burn’s eerie wind textures.

Nope aims, then, to do for the sky what Jaws (1975) did for the ocean, or Tremors (1990) for the desert floor. Yet it lacks those pictures’ satisfying clarity, tension and bite. For a filmmaker so attuned to the conceptual and political potential of genre, Peele delivers its pleasures oddly unevenly. The first hour is somewhat lumpen, the logic around the alien hazy. The film’s publicity calls this a “horror epic” but it’s neither particularly epic (the canvas is big, the cast small, the stakes local) nor terribly frightening, with impersonal jump scares and attacks in place of the sustained, uncanny dread of Peele’s earlier films.

Still, Peele is unique in delivering original, timely and intriguing satirical blockbusters that get under the skin. Nope is worth seeing, even if its tagline could be ‘don’t look now’.

► Nope is in UK cinemas now.