The Fame Monster

In Jordan Peele’s Nope, what’s stalking the skies isn’t the only horror.

- ALISON WILLMORE

THERE'S A SPEECH that Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) would give during safety meetings on the film sets where he worked as a provider and handler of trained horses. You can tell by the way his son, Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), mutters some of it on a soundstage at the start of Nope, just six months after his father’s bizarre and disturbing death, that these words have been a familiar, perhaps daunting refrain in his life. OJ may be dedicated to maintaining his father’s legacy, but he’s no talker. When his little sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), makes her late arrival, he immediately cedes the floor to her, and she picks up easily where her brother trailed off.

The spiel has to do with a series of photos of a galloping horse that was projected as one of the earliest instances of a moving image in the late 1800s. The photographer was Eadweard Muybridge, but, Em asks, does anyone know who the unnamed jockey riding that horse was? She then reveals that he was the siblings’ great (times three) grandfather, proof that the Haywoods have been in showbiz since its predawn era. Now, though, they’re barely holding on, having inherited the business just as Hollywood started opting for computer-generated animals.

Nope is a work of sly devastation from writer-director Jordan Peele that, like his previous films, Get Out and Us, is a horror comedy with a speculative premise—in this case, that a saucer-shaped UFO is lurking in the clouds above the Haywood Ranch in Agua Dulce. Unlike Get Out, in which Kaluuya’s character, Chris, discovers he has been lured into a trap by a cabal of body-snatching white liberals, or Us,