It has been three years since Jordan Peele broke our minds with Us and five years since he altered the horror landscape with Get Out. He’s a busy man - a prolific producer and a popular choice for voice work on high-profile cartoons - but as a director he’s opted to go slow. The fine art of building suspense is something this 43 year old has nailed.
Peele’s latest film is the most original event movie of the year, if not the decade. A playful riff on our obsession with UFOs, Nope blurs sci-fi, horror and cowboy movie tropes, while finding time to explore racism, climate change, advertising and Nineties sitcoms. If the film came with a reading list, it would include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
