Nope (2022)


director: Jordan Peele
release-year: 2022
genres: horror, western, scifi
countries: USA
languages: English

When a Hollywood horse-wrangling father is killed in an inexplicable accident of metal bits raining from the sky, his unprepared kids (including Daniel Kaluuya of Peele's Get Out and the bike-for-points Black Mirror) are left to try to salvage his horse-wrangling business. They aren't great at it.

Good with horses, not so good with people.

The wranglers sell some horses to the nearby cowboy amusement park to make ends meet. The owner of the amusement park survived a chimpanzee massacre on the set of a TV show when he was a child actor, which we get plenty of flashbacks regarding.

A highly memorable subplot with little bearing on anything.

Horses start vanishing. They hire a weird stalker from Geek Squad to install some security cameras, and discover that their horses are being stolen by clouds.

One specific cloud, actually.

The horse wranglers and Geek Squad stalker hire a cinematographer to catch cloud aliens on video. Everything goes awry and most of them are eaten by a cloud while Kaluuya looks up at the sky and says "nope!" a lot.

TMZ shows up to get eaten by clouds.

Kaluuya eventually brings the metaphor home, determining that the cloud is not a spaceship but a living creature, and partially tames it with his horse-wrangling skills. It unfurls into a massive sky jellyfish and they feed it a balloon, which is apparently very bad for jellyfish.

That is one angry cloud.