130 min | R | July 22, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A horse trainer and his sister try to film proof of the thing in the clouds above their ranch. They want the perfect shot, the money shot, the one that makes them famous. Jordan Peele turns the hunger to capture a spectacle into the monster itself.
OJ and Emerald Haywood run a Hollywood horse-training operation founded by their family generations back. Their father dies under strange circumstances, hit by debris falling from a clear sky. Something lives in the clouds above the ranch and feeds on whatever looks up at it. The siblings decide to film it and sell the footage. Jordan Peele builds a creature feature about the American compulsion to point a camera at every miracle and every horror until the act of looking becomes the thing that gets you killed.
Daniel Kaluuya plays OJ as a man who communicates in silences and sidelong glances. He keeps his eyes down and his words short, and Kaluuya makes that withholding read as both grief and survival instinct. Keke Palmer plays Emerald loud and fast, a hustler who fills every room OJ leaves quiet. The two performances run on opposite frequencies and lock together exactly. Steven Yeun plays Ricky “Jupe” Park, a former child star who runs a Western theme park and built his whole identity on surviving an on-set massacre he refuses to understand.
Peele writes and directs with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shooting on IMAX film cameras. The wide desert frames make the sky a character and the negative space above the ranch into a constant threat. Peele stages the central encounters in daylight, which strips away the cover that horror usual leans on. The sound design treats the creature as a wet mechanical groan that arrives before the image does. Michael Abels scores the spectacle like a Western, turning the showdown between the Haywoods and the thing in the sky into a frontier standoff.
This is a film about people who would rather die getting the shot than walk away unfilmed. Peele has a real idea and a striking way of staging it, and the IMAX imagery delivers genuine awe. The script reaches for more than it closes its hands around. The Jupe subplot and the meditation on spectacle gesture at a thesis the movie never fully assembles, and the back half trades ideas for set pieces. The ambition outpaces the execution, and what lands is a handsome, unnerving creature movie that wants to be a statement about looking.