Nope Review: A Haunting & Humorous Twist On Hollywood Sci-Fi

screenrant.com:

Nope, Jordan Peele's new movie about a «bad miracle,» offers a thrilling and humorous twist on Hollywood sci-fi - and serves as a meta-love letter to filmmaking. Fans of Peele's prior horror entries, Get Out and Us, are likely to enjoy the filmmaker's latest offering; though, it's worth noting that, while still full of profound and layered ideas, Nope is closer in execution to the horror-comedy mix of Get Out than Us (which, although profound and more nuanced, was slightly more difficult for moviegoers to digest). Thematically, everything ties together but some plot threads are looser than others — serving the movie as an experience (packed with foreshadowing, homage, and clever ties to film history) more than the plot, on occasion.

Nope posits the unnamed Black jockey featured in Eadweard Muybridge's pre-motion picture photo series, «The Horse in Motion,» founded a horse training ranch for the purpose of supplying the burgeoning film industry with horses for production. Generations later and Haywood's Hollywood Horses falls on rough times, following a freak incident that critically injures family patriarch Otis Haywood Sr. (played by Keith David). Without their father to manage the business (and fickle Hollywood producers who would rather use CGI than real horses in their productions), OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his younger sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) struggle to keep the ranch afloat — resorting to selling off their beloved horses one at a time to former child-actor turned rodeo showman Ricky «Jupe» Park (Steven Yeun). However, when the Haywood horses begin breaking out of their stables and disappearing into the night, OJ begins to take notice of an increasing number of strange occurrences and mysterious sounds