Some of Nope’s enigmas are better left unsolved

polygon.com:

The alien invasion thriller Nope is likely to leave viewers walking out of the theater with their phones in hand, Googling movie explainers and looking for answers about what they just saw. Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out and Us veers back and forth between taut horror, sci-fi action, and sprawling character study, and its widely varying pace and puzzle-box approach put a lot of pieces on the board that it expects viewers to assemble for themselves.

Some of those questions have answers, for viewers willing to put the pieces together and apply some inference and deductive reasoning. But others don’t, and that’s one of the movie’s most central and significant ideas. Jordan Peele goes out of his way to leave blanks that viewers will have to either fill in for themselves or just embrace as mysteries, and accepting the unknown as unknown may be a better approach to Nope than trying to crack it like it’s an enemy cipher.

[Ed. note: Significant spoilers ahead for Nope.]

Initially, it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear connection between a chimpanzee unexpectedly attacking the cast of a TV show and an alien preying on a horse ranch. Both involve bloody, uncontrolled horror. But one is an animal acting out in fear. It’s unclear whether Gordy even kills anyone in the process, since we later see one of his victims alive, though horribly scarred by the experience. (Given that Saturday Night Live felt free to turn the event into comedy, it’s doubtful anyone died.) The other is a ruthless predator, efficiently slaughtering dozens of people and animals over at least a six-month period.

It feels like there’s a sliver of connection when OJ avoids getting eaten by the alien in much the same way Ricky “Jupe” Park (Jacob Kim as a kid,