Jordan Peele continues his success streak with his third directorial film Nope. With a film marketing campaign wrapped in mystery, theater goers were unaware of what we were getting with this film. With a star studded cast and another original screenplay by Peele, there was little chance of this not being a wild ride from start to finish.

OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Em (Keke Palmer) find themselves picking up the pieces after the untimely death of their father (Keith David) and are left with the responsibility of keeping the family farm afloat. Finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with their expenses, OJ sells some of the farm’s horses to the neighboring theme park Jupiter’s Claim, ran by the former child TV star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), where Jupe also offers to buy the farm. While mulling over the offer that night, OJ and Em encounter a strange occurrence at their farm house. With ideations of money and fame, the two decide to explore further by recruiting the help of Fry’s Electronic employee Angel (Brandon Perea) to capture the phenomena on film.

Nope has a lot of great things working for it. Peele gets another phenomenal character out of Kaluuya after their work together on Get Out, and adds a great outing of Palmer as the fun character of Em. Peele again provides a phenomenal and unique story, and subverts our expectations throughout the film. The changing cause of the main conflict of Nope takes us from familiar territories to something that few stories have explored on a horror level and gives us something new to be terrified about.

Of course we would not have a Jordan Peele film without some exploration of deeper themes below the surface. Nope is a movie about our addiction to spectacle and our inability to look away from drama, even going as far as finding humor in it, and then how quickly we forget. Jupe is silently traumatized by an incident that happened when he was a child on the set of a sitcom with a chimpanzee animal actor. Instead of tackling the trauma that occurred, he creates a theme park glorifying it and even gleefully talks about a SNL skit that made fun of it. Peele further explores the exploitation of animals by exploring the dichotomy of OJ and Jupe’s characters and how they treat them. After Jupe’s assumed escape from the chimpanzee attack, he believes he has a certain kinship to animals and he can just get them to like him. OJ on the other hand recognizes that taming animals is not something you are born with, but a mutual respect you have with the animal. Without spoiling anything, this comes into fruition in one the more memorable moments of the film.

While Nope was a great film, the third act felt a little lackluster and drawn out. The decision to rely more heavily on FX for the final scenes and incorporating it during daylight brought quite a bit of the scare factor out of these scenes. Compared with the second act night scene, it falls short in comparison.

Regardless, Nope is a great entry on Peele’s resume. In a world of remakes and sequels, there is nothing but respect for a mainstream director/writer that will take chances on creating unique stories and starting a dialogue with their film. Peele continues to be a force of nature in the horror genre and will continue to line seats with his name attached to a film.