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Six months ago, Otis Haywood, Sr. (Keith David), died in a freak accident in front of his son OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) while they were out sitting in the expansive front yard of the Agua Dulce ranch where they raise and train horses. (Their all-in-the-family business, Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, has for decades provided movies and TV shows with obedient equines whenever a scene calls for one.) What exactly happened stumps OJ to this day. After what seemed to be a brief electrical outage and some high-pitched whirring from behind the clouds, the sky appeared to belch a toolshed’s worth of scrap metal. Otis’ head happened to be in the path of a nickel hurtling down fast enough to puncture it like a bullet.

OJ hasn’t looked for answers in his grief since his dad’s bizarre death; he’s focusing on carrying on the family business with his far more outgoing sister Emerald (Keke Palmer). Though in Nope, Jordan Peele’s characteristically heady horror hybrid, they’ll soon enough come looking for him. Based on the movie’s increasingly loosely-lipped promos, it’s not much of a spoiler to say that most of those answers involve an alien spaceship or something like it or that, in typical Peele fashion, nothing should ever solely be taken at face value.

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