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So good it’s worth watching more than once

Nope is screening now in select cinemas.

Nope (R13, 135 mins) Directed by Jordan Peele Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★

In the present day, not too far from Los Angeles, there is a horse ranch. Haywood’s Hollywood Horses is a family business, run by generations of Haywood men, ever since greatgreat-grandpa Haywood was filmed riding a horse, in a two-second assemblage of still frames that has become known as the world’s first motion picture.

That brief backstory, embedded in the early scenes of Jordan Peele’s Nope, is a wonderful assemblage itself – of historical fact and the unknowable.

The film clip is real. It was created in 1878 by the inventor – and later, murderer – Eadweard Muybridge. But nobody knows today who the rider was.

And somehow, that moment in time will echo and resonate through Peele’s Nope.

And the idea that a sequence of still photographs might still change how we see the world will form a quite beautiful coda to all the madness that has preceded it.

Nope is a film of many ideas, competing for primacy in a script that somehow dodges being muddled and instead hits the screen as a cohesive and engrossing mosaic.

It is an ‘‘alien visitation’’ movie, with roots in Close Encounters, Arrival and Signs especially. But it is also a meditation on childhood fame, man’s treatment and expectations of ‘‘tamed’’ animals, race and Hollywood.

And, maybe, a plea for a return to physical media and the integrity of 35mm film.

At the ranch, the adult Haywood family – Otis Sr, Otis Jr and daughter Emerald – are maintaining the business and getting by, even if Otis Sr (Keith David, who appeared in John Carpenter’s The Thing) seems to be the only one who really has a feeling for how to work with a trained horse. A bizarre event strikes the older man down and it is left to Otis Jr (Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out) and Emerald (Keke Palmer, Hustlers) to keep Haywood’s Hollywood Horses afloat, even while the skies above the ranch are filling up with inexplicable phenomena.

At its most obvious, Nope is a sci-fi movie, with a not-of-this-Earth creature dropping in to menace – or perhaps redeem – the lives of the people it encounters.

But the obvious and most marketable story here is only a backdrop to Peele’s oblique missives on race, fame, memory and the ways in which fear can shape individuals for the rest of their lives.

The opening scene – which is superficially unrelated to the rest of the film, but which casts a spell of unease and apprehension over everything that comes after – takes us into a 1990s TV sitcom set, where a chimpanzee performer has been startled by a bursting balloon.

What follows is horrific and bloody. But why two of the children in this scene should reappear in the film as adults – and what freight they are carrying – is never overtly explained.

As with Peele’s earlier Get Out and Us, Nope works just fine as a genre piece. If Get Out was an updated Stepford Wives, played as an allegory of racism, and if Us was a Stephen King-ish horror of doppelgangers and mirror-worlds, but shot with the intensity of a Michael Haneke acolyte, then I guess we can sit back and enjoy Nope as a Spielberg-style youngadult thriller about a family and friends on an isolated Californian ranch being menaced by an aerial monster.

And as nothing more than that, Nope is easily worth the price of the babysitter and popcorn. But, as a film of ideas and associations, some of which I might not ever really unpack, Nope is a keeper. I don’t often say this, but I’m looking forward to seeing it a second time.

Entertainment

en-nz

2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282376928359077

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