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Nope, 2022

OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) run a floundering business renting horses to film and print projects. Financially stressed in the wake of their grandfather’s mysterious death, OJ is slowly selling off his horses to Jupe (Steven Yeun), a former child star who runs a Wild West theme park nearby. But soon it becomes clear that *something* is out there, and OJ and Emerald must figure out how to protect themselves and their livestock.

Somewhat oblique in its themes, this is nonetheless an effective and compelling horror film.

After a debut film with such intense themes and messages, I think that there’s a temptation to charge into this one trying to crack the code and suss out what it’s all about. While there was one thematic element that really stuck out to me, I think that overall this serves as a strong horror film with or without any deeper meanings.

On the straight-ahead story front, I thought that this was a spooky and disturbing film. There were multiple sequences that gave me the heebies. An opening scene where a mysterious rain of objects leads to OJ’s grandfather being struck, but also metal embedded in the flank of one of the horses. A later sequence (which I will not describe to avoid spoilers), builds on an audio cue, then shows us the harsh reality that goes with that audio. Afterward, the audio alone is enough to evoke what we now understand to be happening and it’s horrifying, especially if you have a particular phobia.

Kaluuya is such a great presence on screen, and he does so much through physical movement and facial expressions. He’s well matched by Palmer’s energetic and chaotic performance as Em. Yeun also delivers as a man who lives in a perpetual state of confronting a trauma from his childhood. Rounding out the cast are Brandon Perea as an electronics store employee who gets roped into the siblings’ plan to document what’s happening to them, and Michael Wincott as a cameraman fixated on the notion of a perfect shot.

I also just really, really like the way that this movie was shot. So many angles and setups that were incredibly effective. There were several “wow” shots that were included in the trailers for the film, something that usually leads to a bit of a “oh, right” moment when actually watching the movie. Instead, each of those moments was somehow more powerful and unexpected when given the context of the film. There is some great use of exterior shots, and the film really taps into the horror of wide open spaces where there’s nowhere to run.

Thematically, something I couldn’t stop thinking about during the film was the idea of how people use filming (or recreation through film) to document, process, and control events from their lives. This is most at the forefront with Yeun’s character. Jupe was a child actor on a show where an animal actor went out of control and killed or maimed several people while a horrified Jupe looked on. What happened to Jupe has been seized by pop culture, memed, turned into a SNL skit. Jupe puts on a brave, joking face, but he is haunted by what happened to him. “Owning” his past trauma is his way of controlling it, even if it means suppressing the very real horror he felt as a child. Early on, we see a horse get spooked by its own distorted reflection, and this is very much what happens to Jupe as he is forced to encounter garish variations on what really happened to him.

As OJ and Em try to battle whatever has been hunting their horses, their main weapon is documentation. They get help setting up surveillance cameras all around their home. Eventually, the want to call in a professional cameraperson. It is not enough to defend themselves, or to survive what is attacking them. They must document it. They must have irrefutable evidence. And while this next piece is very personal to my viewing experience, I couldn’t help but think of the line “That’s a celly; that’s a tool” from Childish Gambino’s song “This is America”. Increasingly, documenting events--everything from police violence to Ring camera footage of drunken interlopers--has become a huge part of seeking justice and solidarity. To be believed, you must have proof, and there’s a burden of coming up with that proof.

So I’m still sorting through these ideas, but I keep coming back to the notion of the role of documentation in rendering our experiences and our emotional reactions to them, as well as mitigating how those events will be understood by an outside “audience.”

My only complaint is a very vague one, which is that I never totally feel that I got my hands around the movie on a deep level. But maybe that’s just a me problem. Even though I didn’t feel like I was being given a clear, direct message, this film evoked a lot of thought for me. My ideas might be totally off-base, but I appreciated that it prompted such thinking in the first place.

I also appreciated that for a film that involved so much animal content, there wasn’t a sense of mean-spiritedness in terms of how the animals were treated.

I’ll definitely need a rewatch to process this one.