Jordan Peele’s third film premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on July 18, 2022, and Universal Pictures released it in the United States four days later. Nope runs 130 minutes. Horror, science fiction and thriller all apply. It is the most unsettled of Peele’s three features — a movie about spectacle that keeps asking who pays for the show.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
A Nickel Falls Out of a Clear Sky
The Haywood family trains and handles horses for film productions out of a ranch in Agua Dulce, California. Early in the film, small metallic objects begin falling from the sky over the ranch. A nickel strikes Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) in the head and kills him.
Six months later his children are still in the business and losing ground in it. Otis Jr., called OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), and Emerald, called Em (Keke Palmer), get fired from a production after their horse Lucky reacts disruptively to his reflection in a chrome ball used for visual effects. To raise money, OJ has been selling horses to Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun).
That is the whole engine of the first act, and it is enough. A family that supplies animals to an industry built on illusion gets taken apart by an industry built on illusion.
Jupe, Jupiter’s Claim and a 1998 Sitcom
Jupe is a former child actor. He had a role on Gordy’s Home, a family sitcom whose star was a chimpanzee. In 1998, while that show was shooting, one of the animals playing Gordy heard balloons pop, turned violent, and mauled most of the people on set before someone shot it.
Jupe now runs a Western-themed amusement park called Jupiter’s Claim. He has a wife, Amber (Wrenn Schmidt), and three sons. He exploits his trauma from the attack in the hope of reviving his career.
Peele does not treat the sitcom backstory as a side room. It is the film’s argument in miniature: a child performer survives a massacre, and the only use he can find for the survival is a ticket line.
Something Takes the Horses at Night
One night the Haywoods notice their electricity fluctuating and their horses reacting aggressively to an unknown presence. They find an unidentified flying object that has been taking their horses.
The siblings decide to document the UFO and sell the evidence. They recruit Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), a tech salesman at Fry’s Electronics, to set up surveillance cameras. The UFO arrives and abducts a horse that has broken out of the ranch stable, along with a metal horse statue Em has stolen from Jupiter’s Claim to use as a decoy.
Em then tries to recruit Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), a renowned cinematographer. He declines. He does not want to encourage her in what he considers an unfulfilling pursuit of wealth and fame.
That refusal is the sharpest line in the film. The one character who knows how images get made is the one who says no to making one more.
What Kaluuya and Palmer Do With the Quiet Parts
Kaluuya plays OJ as a man running on a low flame. He is the sibling who watches the horses, reads the field, and says almost nothing about it. Palmer’s Em is the opposite — loud, fast, selling the idea before it exists.
The pairing carries the movie. OJ’s stillness is not passivity; it is attention, and attention is the skill the plot eventually rewards. Em’s hustle is not a flaw either. She is the one who understands that evidence is worthless until someone buys it.
Yeun gets the hardest assignment. Jupe has to be a showman and a wound at the same time, and Yeun plays the showman first so the wound lands late. Wincott’s Holst is a man who has already decided what his work is worth and will not be talked out of the decision.
How Nope Got Made
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| November 2020 | Peele announces Nope, his third directorial film |
| February 2021 | Palmer and Kaluuya join the cast |
| March 2021 | Yeun is cast |
| June 2021 | Filming begins in Los Angeles County |
| July 2021 | Peele reveals the title |
| November 2021 | Filming wraps |
| July 18, 2022 | Premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles |
| July 22, 2022 | Theatrical release in the United States by Universal Pictures |
The film was produced under Peele and Ian Cooper’s Monkeypaw Productions banner. Peele wrote, directed and produced it. He cited King Kong (1933), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Jurassic Park (1993) and Signs (2002) as his main inspirations.
That list is not a marketing flourish. You can feel every one of them in the movie’s bones, and you can feel Peele pushing against them too.
Ambition Carries It
Nope grossed $172 million worldwide and drew positive reviews for its ambition, performances, cinematography, themes, visual style, score and Peele’s direction. The American Film Institute named it one of the top ten films of 2022. Since release it has appeared on lists of the best science fiction films of the 21st century.
The praise is earned in the frame. The film looks like nothing else released that year, and the sound design does as much narrative work as the script. The UFO is not a ship in any conventional sense. It is a presence with rules, and the movie respects the rules.
The Gordy’s Home material is the strongest thing in the film and the most underused. It does more to explain Jupe than any scene set in the present. The film knows this. It just does not go back.
What Nope Is Actually About
Strip the UFO out and Nope is a film about labor. The Haywoods train horses. Angel sells electronics. Holst shoots. Jupe performs. Everyone in the movie is trying to get paid for being seen, and the thing in the sky is the purest version of that transaction — it takes what it wants and leaves nothing behind.
The tagline asks, “What’s a bad miracle?” The film answers by showing you one. A nickel falls out of a clear sky and kills a man, and the family’s response is to keep working, because the alternative is to stop.
Nope is a film of accumulating dread and accumulating rules, and its power comes from the fact that the rules never fully resolve. That is a harder trick, and it mostly lands.
Where This One Lands
Nope is Peele’s least tidy film and his most visually assured. It has a cast that can hold long stretches without dialogue. Kaluuya and Palmer are the reason the first hour works. Yeun is the reason the second hour has a pulse.
It is also a film that reaches for a resolution it has not earned. The Gordy’s Home thread is strong material, and the film treats it as backstory.
That gap is why this is a strong film rather than a great one. The ambition is real. The execution is uneven in a way that is more interesting than a smooth failure would have been.
7.7 of 10.
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