Few would have imagined that the Peele in Key & Peele, a show on MTV’s Comedy Central, would become a world-class director reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher. There is a sketch from Key & Peele, titled Town Hall Audience Member, one of the funniest outputs of the show, where Jordan Peele shows some promise as he acts entirely with his eyes to peak comedic effect. Other than that, at least to this author’s eyes, there is nothing to indicate cinematic genius or even a great acting turn.
And yet, the likes of Get Out, Us and, most recently, Nope exist to our collective surprise. All of them are horror thrillers, with first-rate plots, complex themes and fantastic direction that he has written and directed. They are original and show a sense of confidence and creativity we rarely see except with a few directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino. He is like if M. Night Shyamalan ever managed to repeat the greatness of The Sixth Sense. Nope might yet be his best work, even though it has received a mixed reception compared to his previous movies.
The film follows siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer). They claim to have descended from the African-American jockey in Animal Locomotion, the first assembled photographs to become a motion picture in the late 1800s. Not incidentally, OJ and his father run a business handling horses from their ranch for studio productions.
