It is a horse named Ghost who first signals that something is awry in the sky in Jordan Peele’s latest visually and thematically ambitious film Nope. OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) is the head wrangler of Heywood Hollywood Horses, an intergenerational, Black-owned and now struggling ranch that specializes in training horses for the big screen.
But it is his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) who notices that Ghost, one of their family’s veteran equine actors, is unexpectedly standing in an outdoor pen staring out into space, his light grey fur as sublime as the moonlight. Ghost jumps the fence and gallops away, saying “nope” in his own way.
