Writer-director Jordan Peele’s third film posits the notion that to observe others is an act of violence and to offer yourself up to the gaze of others places you in a position of vulnerability. The audience is a predator with a voracious appetite and those who try to sate that appetite must offer up more and more of themselves, to the point of placing themselves in physical or emotional danger. This is exemplified by the former child star and owner of the wild west theme park (underplayed in typical Jordan Peele style by Steven Yeun), a man who has taken his worst trauma and packaged it up into a theme park within a theme park, despite the fact it still haunts his waking hours.

It is telling that the first act of the brother/sister team upon determining what is happening on their land is to capture it on film and sell that film for fame and fortune. In this world of social media, everyone is willing to offer up their personal traumas for likes and shares. Despite this being gun-loving America, nobody points anything at the threat in the sky other than a camera. Even the successful Hollywood cameraman is looking for that one ‘impossible’ shot that will place his name indelibly in history, even to the point of risking his life.

It's perhaps a potent message for our times, but one of the recurrent problems with Peele’s recent resurrection of THE TWILIGHT ZONE was the inability to take the social theme of the week and weld it to a successful narrative, and that flaw also affects NOPE. The central story of OJ and Emerald’s situation is a strong enough one to stand on its own. The inclusion of the whole tragedy of the theme park’s backstory is, at best, sleight of hand distraction or, at worst, irrelevant filler. Considering the character is peripheral to the main plot, the inclusion of the detailed backstory overeggs the pudding. The sudden arrival of a mysterious biker, again armed with a battery of cameras, is also a step too far. Was there really any need for this extraneous character? Perhaps a few more passes at the script might have evened out the bumpy pacing.

The early section of the film is the most successful as the characters and audience alike are left to wonder what the hell is actually going on at the ranch. The solutions to the mystery are doled out slowly, with plenty of creepy sequences. Some of these perhaps don’t make sense later on (the four lights glimpsed earlier don’t seem to have anything to do with the eventual threat), but build a sense of tension. In this, Peele has borrowed from the likes of JAWS and, perhaps its closest inspiration, M Night Shyamalan’s SIGNS. Mystery gives way to tension, such as the sequence in the training barn where OJ comes face to face with apparently otherworldly creatures.

Then, in a startling about face, the final section of the film is the kind of rollercoaster entertainment vehicle the film has been questioning up to that point, giving the audience exactly the thrills it wants, feeding the beast its treats. This is undeniably entertaining, but does undermine the point it is trying to make. That is the dichotomy of trying to make an arthouse film on a blockbuster budget

The cast are excellent. Daniel Kaluuya manages to make a surly and taciturn OJ into a character we can empathise, without ever softening him. His fractious relationship with Emerald, played as a vivacious, optimistic fireball by Keke Palmer, is both difficult and believable. They love and exasperate each other in equal measure. Time is taken to set them up as characters before we get into the meat of the plot. The addition of Brandon Parea as a security camera technician desperate to join the siblings’ quest as a distraction from his own woes enhances the pairing rather than unbalancing it. Steven Yeun makes the most of his underwritten role as the traumatised theme park owner, a character who probably deserved his own film rather than the add-on nature he has in this one. The arrival of Michael Wincott late on as the jaded cameraman is less successful, but also much shorter-lived.

Despite the beautifully-captured emptiness of the wide-open spaces, NOPE has too much going on for its own good. Though the pace initially seems languid, its various plot strands don’t quite mesh into a cohesive whole. Allusions and images abound, but don’t necessarily reveal their significance. As a result, the audience is never bored, but is likely to come away either slightly confused or unsatisfied by the final product. NOPE aims high and misses, but it’s a noble miss, a flawed, interesting film that manages to be original whilst also borrowing from others.