NOPE

Jordan Peele’s latest, most assured sci-fi-horror outing transposes the alien-invasion thriller to America’s wide-open west. NOPE concerns the family of Haywood Hollywood Horses, a California horse farm whose owner (Keith David) dies mysteriously and bequeaths the family business to his two children: the devoted but taciturn O. J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer), an aspiring filmmaker-actor far less interested than her brother in horse wrangling. Not long after the siblings bear witness to an uncanny discovery above their childhood home, they hatch a plan to obtain video evidence of it, while their neighbor Jupe (Steven Yeun)—a former child star and owner of a nearby Western theme park—takes a different approach to capturing the phenomenon. A big and kinetic existential nightmare about what it means to be human, NOPE probes everything from America’s mythologized West and legacy of exploitation to the moral consequences of cinematic spectacle and image-taking, especially of those treated as outsiders. A Universal Pictures release.