NOPE on 70mm

Jordan Peele’s sci-fi-horror outing transposes the alien-invasion thriller to America’s wide-open West, where the family behind Haywood Hollywood Horses—descendants of the anonymous Black rider in Eadweard Muybridge’s proto-cinematic motion studies—finds itself battling not only the threat lurking in the sky but the industry that has long ago erased them. After their father (Keith David) dies mysteriously, the devoted, taciturn OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his restless sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) attempt to capture evidence of the phenomenon above their ranch while their neighbor Jupe (Steven Yeun), a former child star turned Western theme park impresario, makes his own spectacle of it. Peele has described NOPE as a film about “our addiction to spectacle” and the “insidious nature of attention,” and its conspiracies (like the best of them) are scattered as breadcrumbs throughout his wonderful third feature. Linking cinema’s erased Black origins, child-stardom trauma, and Hollywood’s exploitative labor hierarchies, the film quite literally reveals how an industry built on spectacle masquerades as entertainment while it, in truth, swallows people whole.

For more on Peele’s own framing of these ideas, see FLC’s 2023 series The Lost Rider: A Chronicle of Hollywood Sacrifice, curated by Peele around NOPE’s concerns with image-taking, child stardom, Hollywood exploitation, and the erased Black rider at cinema’s origins.

Filmed by Hoyte van Hoytema using both 5-perf 65mm and 15-perf IMAX 65mm cameras. FLC is screening from one of the 5-perf 70mm prints struck for its 2022 theatrical release.