Nope.

Nope is the third feature film from writer-director Jordan Peele, who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the outstanding Get Out, which was a biting satire wrapped in a smart horror film. For some reason, the studio behind Nope tried to pitch it more as another horror film, but that’s not just underselling it, but also probably misrepresented it. This is much more of a sci-fi mystery with a surprising moral to it, another smart film from Peele but in a completely different vein from his debut. (I haven’t seen Us, his second film.) You can stream Nope on Peacock or rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as the siblings OJ and Em Haywood, who run a horse farm where they train the animals for roles in film and television. As Nope begins, their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), is killed by metal debris that falls from the sky, with a nickel impaling him in the eye and a key embedded itself in the horse he was riding. They assume these fell from an airplane and eventually they try to pick up more business, but when they find it’s lagging, OJ sells some of his horses to the nearby western theme park Jupiter’s Claim, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star whose TV series ended in tragedy when the chimp who starred on the show became violent to several of the cast members – but not to Jupe. When the electricity starts going off on the Haywoods’ farm without explanation, and the horses start reacting badly to some unseen force, the siblings decide to invest in some high-tech cameras to try to figure out what’s going on.

Nope is a slow burn, similar to Get Out, but not quite the same – where Peele’s first film was sinister until the big reveal, this one unfurls its mystery by degrees, with more misdirection that allows you to experience the perspectives of multiple characters. It was also easier to figure out what was happening in Get Out, or at least get the sense, than what’s happening in Nope. The obvious answer would be that it’s a UFO, which, of course, most of the characters think is the answer, including the Fry’s Electronics employee Angel (Brandon Perea), who realizes from the start that something weird is happening out at the ranch and invites himself to be a part of the investigation. What they find is much more interesting on a literal level and a thematic one.

The cast is fantastic across the board. Kaluuya has never missed for me, right down to his pre-fame appearance on Doctor Who (where we get to hear his British accent for once). The steely reserve that made him so menacing in Widows here works in a different direction, as his character is so tightly wound that he feels like he’s about to combust. Yeun probably needed more to do, but he’s excellent, as always, as a huckster and entrepreneur trying to squeeze every dollar he can out of the limited assets he has. Perea is a scene-stealer in a comic relief character that’s actually well conceived and well written – he’s hilarious, but also plays important roles in the plot and helps illuminate the relationship between the siblings and also later provide some connection to a fourth character who helps them try to unravel the ultimate mystery. If there’d been any awards attention for this movie, he would have been worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, as well as a potential Original Screenplay nod for Peele. Wrenn Schmidt is a little wasted as Jupe’s wife, while Barbie Ferreira is even more wasted in a cameo as Angel’s co-worker, but I did enjoy the cameo from ‘80s prime-time soap star Donna Mills.

There’s one overarching theme to the story here that I might spoil by discussing, so if you haven’t seen Nope and intend to, you may wish to stop reading. The throughline that connects Jupe and the Haywoods is the use of animals for entertainment, with the implication that how we treat these animals in turn affects how they will treat us, or even what sort of animals they will become over time. OJ shows respect for their horses, and when he’s trying to show one horse, Lucky, for a commercial, he bristles at any suggestion from the director that might distress the animal, even telling a crew member not to make eye contact with Lucky for fear it will upset him. While we don’t see Jupe’s chimpanzee colleague being openly mistreated, the flashbacks – the one bit of the film where there’s some actual violence on screen – strongly imply that the chimp was being exploited, and that his rampage was the result of this treatment. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole about this, several critics and writers have noted that this subplot mirrors the actual story of Travis the chimp, who was separated from his mother at three days old and sold to a couple who kept him as a pet, only to have him turn violent one day, mauling and disfiguring a family friend.) All of this comes together in the film’s resolution, which also features some spectacular visual effects, to make it clear that the story is at least trying to make us realize the extent to which we are exploiting other creatures – and perhaps, on some level, other people – for no purpose beyond our entertainment. The characters who don’t understand this end up dead; the others survive. I don’t think you could make the moral much clearer than that.

Right now, I have Nope in my top ten for the year, although it could end up pushed out as I see more foreign-language films, since several of the most acclaimed non-English language movies, including two Oscar nominees, still aren’t available digitally as of February 27^th. (Here’s hoping I wake up to find The Quiet Girl is rentable.) Regardless of its exact ranking for me whenever I wrap this cycle, Nope is excellent, another cerebral, thoughtful undertaking from Peele, even if it’s not quite up to the high bar he set for himself with Get Out.