If you saw Get Out, you are already in for Jordan Peele’s third movie, Nope. It’s that simple. (This is probably also true if you saw Us, but I was too scared of that one.) The plot has been largely kept secret, which is fine. Now we have a trailer, and though it is fascinating and excellent, it still keeps the movie’s plot largely a mystery. This is also fine.
The creepy-ass air dancers, though, are less fine.
“Air dancer” is one of the terms for those goofy, Gumby-like things that wave their tiny T. rex arms around the edges of used car lots. They are also called “wacky arm inflatable men,” apparently, and there are a lot of them in Nope: lined up in fields, on the edge of the road, all going limp at once. I feel confident saying they have never been more creepy.
Nope is a story about Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer, whose characters run the only Black-owned horse training ranch in Hollywood. Palmer seems considerably more enthused about her work than Kaluuya, who slouches in the background and mutters, or hangs out with a horse instead of people.
It’s also a story about a weird cloud that seems to suck people up into the sky, and also maybe a rodeo? And horses. And Steven Yeun. Along with Kaluuya and Palmer, Yeun is one of the “residents in a lonely gulch of inland California who bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.” (Michael Wincott, ’90s villain par excellence, is also in here somewhere.) Maybe there are aliens? It’s a Jordan Peele movie. I’m not making any assumptions.
Nope comes to theaters July 22nd.
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