Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Jordan Peele's Nope.Jordan Peele is the kind of filmmaker that needs only his name and résumé to consistently put butts in movie theater seats. His latest picture, Nope, was released amidst ravenous hype, a fact all the more impressive considering that until its premiere, the film's story was completely shrouded in mystery. If you’ve seen the first official trailer, you know: there was next to nothing about the premise or plot that was made clear. There’s a family of horse trainers, an ominous dark cloud, and Steven Yeun clad in a cowboy fit—practically everything else is a mystery. Yet, audiences still flocked to see Peele’s film, scoring it the highest-grossing launch for a movie based on an original screenplay since his last movie, Us. With Get Out, he proved himself a natural craftsman, a student of cinema who isn’t afraid to write his own rules while paying attention to those set out by his predecessors. As Peele continues to make more movies, his ambition continues to aim higher and higher, and the scope of his work—both technically and thematically—just keeps on widening.

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Of course, pursuing grand ambitions is much easier when you’ve got the funds to back them. With his debut, Peele proved himself to be a fantastic and profitable filmmaker, allowing him to meanwhile rack up some serious coin from studios. Get Out was crafted out of a $4.5 million budget, while Us was made for $20 million. Comparatively, Nope, in all its spectacle, cost $68 million to make—over ten times the cost of Peele’s debut. It also helps that his movies are consistently so damn good. Let’s face it: the man knows how to tell a story. Out of what seems like nothing, like a magician’s grand illusion, Peele conjures these immersive, original tales before our very eyes. He’s a world-builder, a crafter of strange and frightful universes that are worth disappearing into for hours on end.

The cast of Nope in the desert
Image via Universal

Nope is a visual spectacle that reaches Spielbergian heights while staying faithful to Peele's own signature style that he invented way back with Get Out in 2017. Though he’s come a long way from there and here, Peele started out as good as anybody could hope to with their first film. Really, Get Out is a staggering masterpiece and one of the greatest movies of the 21st Century, but it’s also a relatively unassuming horror flick that plays on the “city slicker who’s out of their element way out in the country” trope while telling an entirely unique tale along the way. It follows the deceptively simple premise of a man (Daniel Kaluuya) who gets way over his head when a trip to Upstate New York becomes increasingly bizarre and dangerous. On paper, it sounds like any number of films we’ve seen before, but in the hands of Peele, it becomes something exceptional.

Of the many things that Get Out proved, one is the fact that Peele has been a man of big ideas from the start. It’s a film loaded with metaphorical subtext and it’s got social commentary woven so deeply into every corner that there’s guaranteed to be plenty to discuss post-credits. None of it is as simple as it immediately seems, and there’s always more to it. Like Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or some of the other greatest horror pictures of the past century, Get Out crams its weighty message into the package of a masterfully-crafted film. On the surface, it’s a horror flick that hits all the right notes: it’s scary, insightful, and has just the right amount of blood to make it brutal, but not excessively so. Lingering devilishly beneath the surface, though, is its social satire that skewers the tone-deaf cultural appropriation and racial insensitivity (if not outright racism) of centrist-liberalism. The whole premise is skin-crawling and bizarre: black men and women are coerced—or outright abducted—into the countryside in order for super-wealthy white folks to kill them and commandeer their bodies.

Daniel Kaluuya and Alison Williams in Get Out

It’s brilliant—genius, even—and it shows that Peele’s self-proclaimed affinity for the horror genre serves as the perfect vehicle for his social commentary. The movie’s a slam dunk, as effective at manipulating your emotions into fear as it is at saying something insightful about the world around us. It isn’t a criticism to say that the movie’s contained. It is. Though it pulls from a bag of narrative and stylistic tricks (few movies are as immaculately paced as Get Out), keeping its focus clear. The movie’s trim, clean, and straightforward in its intention. After crafting such a universally acclaimed addition to the horror genre, Peele no longer had to prove himself, opening the opportunity to widen his scope with his next work.

With Us, in which a family is terrorized by an ominous group of doppelgängers, Peele aims higher and hits the mark. Everything about the movie is grander than its predecessor: its concepts, the world that it builds, and the very appearance of the film itself. It’s riskier and its meaning is hidden a bit more cryptically in the narrative than in Get Out. As Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) discovers the insidious truth of the clones (christened “the Tethered” in the film’s mythology), the plot unravels gradually, unspooling its mystery and drawing the viewer in.

Some critics decried the ambiguity of Us. It’s true that Get Out was, by comparison, much more blatant in its intent with a clearer message, but the fact that Peele’s emboldening ambition made him bite off a bigger mouthful of theme isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The result is a complex, more cerebral work and even if Get Out is the superior film (which is what this writer believes), what’s left is a film very nearly as good. A general thesis of the film can be boiled down to a portrayal of class conflict between the haves and have-nots, with the Tethered being stand-ins for the latter. When the Tethered rise from their subterranean domiciles to take back what they believe they rightfully deserve, the film makes a rallying cry: things don’t have to be the way that they are. Still, it’s a macabre allegory whose true meaning allows room for debate. Like a Rorschach blot, what each viewer takes away from it is likely to vary.

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Image via Universal Pictures

If Get Out left some questions unanswered, Us leaves the door open even wider. Who specifically made the Tethered and how? What went wrong in the experiment, and why was it abandoned? What’s happening to the rest of the world, and what are the Tethered going to do next? Looking at Peele’s outright talent as a writer, it seems less likely that he doesn’t know and more probable that he doesn’t feel the need to say. An explanation of the finest details aren’t necessary for the film to work, and the quick, light-footed pace would’ve been bogged down by excess explanation. A world is built and the film is content to exist within it, and its sprawling scope. As Adelaide and her family travel across the vespertine Californian suburbs to the sun-kissed beaches of Santa Cruz, and beyond, Peele’s imagination runs wild. He continues to build, to give more room for his ideas to expand. What begins as a home-invasion horror flick à la The Strangers quickly transforms into something else and Us continues far beyond into uncharted territory.

Us’s comparative boldness carries over to the technical side of it, too, with the camera taking the initiative to move more freely across the action with swan-like grace. Peele becomes more boldly experimental with the way he shoots, and from elaborately designed interior sets, Us takes us outdoors to brightly-lit beach-side exteriors, which are later engulfed in a massive body of flames that makes for one of the movie’s most arresting images. Part of what makes Us so much bigger than Get Out is its determination to look further outward. As in the greatest Romero films, the implication is that the horror exists far beyond the domains of the narrative, stretching out to the world at large. In other words, the stage where the action occurs is grander and the action itself is more rippling in its reach.

The UFO hovering over OJ in Nope
Image via Universal

Nope brings Peele into yet another new era, with an even wider scope than before. As a writer, he tackles more concepts than ever before (exploitation of black artists, mistreatment of stage animals, the human obsession with "spectacles," just to name a few), and as a director, he's got the chops to project each of them into a single, coherent narrative. There’s still the horror and the comedy from his first two movies, but now elements of science-fiction, westerns, and monster movies are tossed into the mix. And it works. It's a movie unlike any other you've seen, and while comparisons to movies like Bong Joon-Ho's The Host and Spielberg's Jaws may be inevitable, the originality of Peele's vision is more apparent than ever. It's a movie that is many things at once, says many things at once, but doesn't falter in the process of juggling it all.

Beyond the basic premise of OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer) investigating the strange and terrifying UFO looming over their Californian horse ranch, there's also the subplot of Jupe's (Steven Yeun) childhood experience with his chimpanzee co-star from a 90s sitcom going on a killing spree, as well as a wizened and grouchy cinematographer (Michael Wincott) who's obsessed with capturing the perfect shot. Comparatively, Get Out and even Us were stories more focused on smaller scales. Nope is a narrative epic that gives background to each of its characters.

Nope is also literally bigger than Peele’s two prior films. Shot on IMAX cameras (the first horror film to be shot with such equipment), Nope spends much of its time craning its neck upward, capturing vast, magnificent landscapes of Los Angelesean desert. The claustrophobia of Get Out’s containment is traded in for the fearsome expanse of the open sky, which is eventually taken up by an all-consuming alien monster captured in gloriously wide frames. Working with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, whose previous credits include the larger-than-life Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Ad Astra, Peele uses the sprawling locations as his sandbox. He’s able to think bigger, and it’s a stroke of brilliance that Nope, which is largely about spectacle, is also itself a spectacle.

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Image via Universal

What’s best is that while his reach extends, Peele doesn’t ditch his insight or his bite in favor of a grander scale. The substance isn’t sacrificed for style. Nope is a big-budget picture that boasts the same reflective intelligence and a passion for the craft that Peele showcased with his debut. His films aren’t just entertaining. They’re also thought-provoking. Get Out is all about race, portraying the US’s racial disharmony as a black protagonist surrounded by a sea of malevolent white faces. Us, a bit more broadly, looks at the US’s inability to overcome inequality, with a magnificent inclusion of a Hands Across America motif that studies the country’s tendency to depend on trendy, half-assed activist stunts rather than solving the issue at hand. Nope is about a list of things, from the exploitation of animals (and humans) for entertainment, the human tendency to look towards (and record) the spectacular and dangerous, and even the art of filmmaking itself.

It's all of this that makes Jordan Peele one of the most exciting filmmakers to watch. Since Get Out, he's become increasingly ambitious in his filmmaking with each picture and if Nope is any indication of the direction he's headed, we as a movie audience are assuredly in for a treat. When a fan recently dubbed Peele the greatest horror director of all time, the prolific filmmaker shot down the compliment. "I will just not tolerate any John Carpenter slander!!!" he retorted. Here's a guy who knows which prophets to worship and has the modesty to refrain from comparing himself to those at the pinnacle of the horror hierarchy. But, the thing is, three works into his filmography and Peele's already damn near the top himself.