Nope, the latest release from pop-horror writer and auteur Jordan Peele drops this week, in a cinema-exclusive release.
Frequent collaborator Daniel Kaluuya gets to flex his Oscar-nommed chops once again, alongside Keke Palmer, Steven Yuen, Brandon Perea and Keith David.
Nope’s trailers promise an intriguing, typically genre-bending set up: Kaluuya and Palmer star as brother and sister OJ and Emerald Hayward, who encounter extra-terrestrials that don’t seem altogether friendly, while trying to grow the family business.
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Their business, in a Westworld-esque hat-tip, is horse-training for film: an advert made by the siblings sells a romantic corrective to racist film history, alluding to an early, pivotal clip that heralded the birth of moving pictures: a Black man on horseback, in full gallop. Though not too far from the lights of LA, Nope makes the siblings’ ranch seem remote, wild and bleakly beautiful at times, faintly tacky with a showbiz adjacent glitter, at others.
Palmer’s character, seen creating a video for social media in one scene, tries and fails to engage bored tourists, while another sequence features a Disney-fied live show that recalls the many iterations of Wild Bill Hickock and others like him, emceed by a man much more ringmaster than cowboy.
The rural Californian setting deployed here allows for some striking set-pieces, designed to maximize a sense of isolation in endless space, in direct contrast to the horror standard of tight close-ups of terrified faces and wide eyes.
Nope promises pointed commentary on the Hollywood machine: particularly the still-pervasive myth making around the Wild West (one need look no further than Disney’s egregious Lone Ranger for examples). It also invites critical thought on who is and is not represented in such myths. Several characters imply in dialogue that there’s money to be made in images and that pictures represent the ultimate truth in our age: proof and profit in ‘the Oprah shot’.
Nope repositions Black and Asian communities front and center in these familiar Old West tropes, correcting the misconception that the American West’s pioneers and grafters were exclusively white. It suggests, in a sardonic, slant-wise way, that the real work of building America’s reality, as well as its fairytales, then and now, falls to non-white hands. Such themes are of a piece with Peele’s earlier work, in films like Get Out and Us: each pokes gleefully at racialized and gendered horror conventions.
Like all the best genre pieces, Peele’s films hold a funhouse mirror up to our modern preoccupations and anxieties: the fear rooted less in teases, jump-scares, aliens and monsters than the feeling we’ve still plenty to worry about from each other.
Nope’s distribution forms part of an old-fashioned summer of film, engineered to fill theatres: it also promises to cement Peele’s importance to modern horror. It might even prompt more conversations about representation in genre fiction and film.
Worth checking out for horror fans, film history nerds and those who enjoy their popcorn, and their viewing, a little salty.
Related: ‘Nope’ Could Make Jordan Peele the New Quentin Tarantino at the Box Office: Here’s Why
When and where will Nope be streaming?
After its theatrical release runs its course, Nope, a Universal film, will eventually stream on Peacock. However, unlike some of its recent blockbuster releases (The Northman, Ambulance), Nope will only be available for customers on a paid price tier.
As to when it will release, it depends. If the film does well at the box office, if NBC Universal opts for a 4 month release window as it has with Jurassic World: Dominion, expect to see it sometime in November. Otherwise, a 45 day window would put it somewhere around the first or second week of September.
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