Jordan Peele’s Nope doesn’t embrace easy answers or movie explainers

Alien invasion: The thriller NopeCustomers will likely walk out of the theater carrying their phones, searching movie descriptions and seeking answers. Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Move Out Contact UsThe board alternates between taut horror and sci-fi action. It also explores the character of a sprawling character study.

All of these questions can be answered if viewers are willing to piece together the pieces and use some deductive and inference reasoning. But others don’t, and that’s one of the movie’s most central and significant ideas. Jordan Peele is not afraid to let viewers fill in the blanks. Or, he may just encourage them to embrace mystery. Accepting that it’s all unknown might be better. Nope than trying to crack it like it’s an enemy cipher.

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

Is the Gordy scene relevant to the alien plot or not?

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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 cases involve uncontrollable, bloody horror. The other is an animal acting out of 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. This is a given. Saturday Night Live felt free to turn the event into comedy, it’s doubtful anyone died.) One is a vicious predator who killed dozens of animals and people over a period of at least six months.

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, Steven Yeun as an adult) avoids being mauled by Gordy in childhood. They both learn from each other that wild animals react unpredictable to aggressive behavior, including the screaming and exploding balloons that send Gordy away to direct eye contact with the alien. The reason why an alien without eyes is so agitated about eye contact remains a mystery. What does the alien know about human eyes and human gaze?

But the larger connection there is more about cause and effect: Jupe evades death or grievous injury as a child, but while he doesn’t show it, the experience clearly leaves him marked. Jupe’s casual dismissal and calm appreciation for the experience. SNL skit, his morbid collection of memorabilia from the show, including a blood-spattered shoe from his mauled co-worker — they all show how Jupe has tried to control and tame the event in his mind, the same way he tries to control and tame the alien.

Peele does leave some questions at the edges. It is up to the audience to decide who Jupe truly is. Did escaping death make him feel reckless and certain of his own immorality, to the point where he’s willing to bait a gigantic predator because he thinks there won’t be any consequences? Was he more intrigued by the lethal creature and more tempted to succumb to fate because of his fascination? Or is he compelled to try to control the alien because he’s frightened of it, the same way he’s turned his childhood trauma into calm patter and a sideshow exhibit? Yuen and the film don’t fully show their hands on Jupe’s motives, though there might be some clues in the wonderstruck way he looks up at the alien, with awe rather than fear or determination.

Why is it that the alien behaves the way it does

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Peele is not afraid to leave many unanswered questions about the alien. Among so many other things, there’s the question of how it got to Earth and whether there are more of them — questions Peele avoids by keeping the movie’s focus small and tight in one rural area. Also, Peele asks why the alien feels free to become a giant jellyfish after having been a manta-ray-like creature throughout the film. What’s going on when it unfurls those green streamers from its mouth? After spending almost the entire movie eating everything in its path, why does it not want to finish the film by eating the protagonists?

It’s possible to guess at the answers, mostly from comparing the alien’s behavior to animal behavior — for instance, when it hovers over the ranch house and rains blood on it, when previously we’ve only seen it excrete metallic detritus like keys and coins. Many predatory animals will poop all over their territory to stake their claim and warn other predators off. It can feel threatened by the tricks with the fake horse and blood-rain sequence. (Plus, anyone who’s owned cats is probably familiar with “revenge peeing,” which vets more tactfully call “stress marking their comfort items.”)

It’s unclear whether the alien is intelligent enough to make a vindictive or calculated choice to piss all over the protagonist’s home, but it is clear that its behavior changes when its environment keeps changing. The sequences where Antlers watches videos of predatory animals fighting and killing feel like they’re meant to remind us that the alien is just a bigger form of predator, and in some ways, it behaves similarly, whether it’s stalking its prey from camouflage, or jealously claiming a territory where food seems plentiful.

It could be that animal behavior is responsible for its unnerving transformation at end and slow responses. The way it unfolds into a larger shape for the first time in the film’s climax could be seen as a threat display. So could the way it flashes a previously hidden colorful part of its body at its potential prey — it may be trying to get an unknown adversary to back down and leave it alone, or test its opponent for defenses. The green streamers could be a sensory apparatus it didn’t activate earlier in the film when it was only going after horses and humans, prey that had already become familiar.

But no matter how many comparisons we make to the biological world we know, there are aspects of the alien’s behavior that we aren’t meant to fully understand. Aliens are the unseen and unknowable that make up the most frightening stories. Once an adversary is fully known, it’s much less frightening. The alien’s sheer aliennessit is designed to make the audience squirm and be frightening. Everything the audience doesn’t know about it and its reasoning is a feature in this horror story, not a bug.

Antlers is an alien who eats himself.

Universal Pictures

With OJ’s taciturnity and Jupe’s tactic of concealing his trauma behind an easy smile and a practiced narrative, Peele is in part telling a story about how humans are alien and unknowable to each other, too. But Nope Spends more time together with each of them, which gives us more information to consider when interpreting their personalities. Antlers the cinematographer is a much bigger mystery, because he’s a much smaller part of the movie. He gives us plenty of hints about what he values: He’s notably bored with the idea of the project Emerald (Keke Palmer) tries to lure him into, at least until she tells him they need to do the impossible. He tells her that the fame she’s hungering after is a nightmare he can’t wake up from. His behavior reveals him as a jaded man who’s long past caring about a career that’s become boring to him.

He sums up his own dismissiveness for the world in a cryptic line to Angel (Brandon Perea), about how “they don’t deserve the impossible.” He’s referencing the “impossible shot” Emerald asked him to get, but it isn’t clear who “they” are. His comments seem to refer to all of the world. He’s saying that he does care about getting the perfect image of the alien on film, but he doesn’t think it’s worth sharing with the world. When he runs to meet the alien’s devouring mouth, he doesn’t care if his camera survives. The camera seems to have been smashed with film canisters exposing the sun or rolling into the desert. He wants to get the impossible shot, but it’s for himself and himself only.

Peele’s mystery is here: How did Antlers become such a cynical artiste that he’s willing to commit suicide in an act of art he’ll never share with anyone else? It’s a rich, delicious question with no obvious answer, left open for the audience to fill in with any catastrophe they want, any romantic tale of idealism betrayed or artistry denied.

There are many more questions.

Universal Pictures

The movie has many other questions that remain unanswered. Why is a shoe on the set of Jupe’s sitcom balanced improbably on its heel? Did the sitcom’s dad-actor survive? What’s going on in OJ’s head, given what a quiet and internal man he is? Peele doesn’t outright answer these questions, or a lot of other tiny mysteries he threads throughout the movie. And that’s entirely intentional, like the ambiguity of Inception’s final shot, the end of John Sayles’ Limbo, or so many other movies that don’t fully answer the audience’s questions.

In the era of “End of movie, explained” recaps, that ambiguity can feel defiant. Reddit detectives around the globe can sometimes feel offended at mysteries, enigmas and symbolism that are left for individual viewers to interpret. But Nope It is full of mysteries. The story centers around an alien but the human characters of its humans are often just as strange to one another. Emerald clearly doesn’t understand why her brother is so beholden to a rustic, financially struggling farm. Angel doesn’t understand what Antlers really cares about. Jupe’s straggling, doomed audience doesn’t understand that the show he’s putting on for them is the external form of an internal struggle he’s been waging since he was a kid.

The unexplained and inexplicable — like that shoe, balanced perfectly in an unlikely, memorable way — is one of Nope’s biggest themes. Opening with a mystery, Gordy is seen bloody and puzzled on a TV set that has been abandoned. This sets the movie up for a deeper meaning than what it reveals to its audience. The mystery moves on to another: small, everyday objects falling from the blue sky. It’s a movie about mysteries, from the seemingly supernatural to the utterly mundane question of why, when those objects fall, they strike one man dead, while leaving another unharmed.

If you’re looking for the heart of Nope, you won’t find it in pinning down exact, specific answers about what everything means, or and why everything happens. You’ll find it in the idea that sometimes people don’t know other people’s minds or secrets. Sometimes they don’t know why two people can stand in the same place at the same time and end up with remarkably different fates. And they certainly don’t know everything about the universe we live in, or what we might be sharing it with. These unanswered questions make up part of the beauty and wonder that is “What makes…” Nope beautiful… and a lot of what makes it terrifying.