Given all the surreally unnerving sights there are to see in Jordan Peele's "Nope" — a debris-choked windstorm, a weirdly undulating tunnel, a circular is-that-what-I-think-it-is gliding in and out of the clouds — it seems fitting that one of the movie's most arresting images should be of a pair of eyes. Those eyes, wide and terrified, belong to a Southern California horse rancher named O.J. Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), who peers up from the darkness of a stalled truck as something very big and very bad looms overhead. Until now, during much of the story's slow, suggestive buildup, O.J.'s gaze has been downcast and hard to read, reflecting an indifference that verges on exhaustion. It takes a lot to shock those eyes wide open, but what he sees now gets his attention, to say nothing of ours.
You probably remember Kaluuya's eyes staring into the sunken-place void of 2017's "Get Out," a triumph of socially conscious horror that proved his and Peele's breakthrough. Their latest collaboration, though also solicitous of your shivers, has something rather different in mind. The labyrinthine funhouses and shadowy, subterranean depths of "Get Out" — and also of Peele's messier, more ambitiously scaled 2019 freakout, "Us" — have given way to a vast kill zone of wide open spaces and bright desert sunshine, shot in magnificently dusty vistas by Hoyte Van Hoytema (known for his frame-filling Imax work on Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" and "Dunkirk").
And so while evil still lurks within, as it often does in Peele's movies, here it also swoops and soars overhead in a cheekily outlandish story that the writer-director seems to have cooked up during an epic binge of "War of the Worlds" (both versions), "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "The Thing From Another World" (and its better-known remake, "The Thing"), "Signs," "Arrival" and especially "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Peele is nothing if not a pop-culture savant, and here he drops any number of classic Hollywood allusions — the spinning cyclone from "The Wizard of Oz," the cropduster sequence from "North by Northwest" — as easily as he tosses out a reference to "Saturday Night Live" and, by extension, the larger sketch-comedy world where he began his career.
