Jordan Peele's 'Nope' Ending Explained: Don't Look At It

Nope was one of the most anticipated films of 2022 and especially coming from the mind of Jordan Peele, this film managed to wow audiences and showcase his talent as a filmmaker for all viewers. This film follows a horse rancher Otis aka OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) who has to run Haywood’s Hollywood Horses after his father, Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) passed away in a freak accident where projectiles fell from the sky and of them lodged itself in his eye, going right through his brain. Now, OJ has to take care of the business and the ranch by himself.

While he is at a shoot for a film, he is taking a safety protocol meeting to make sure people be cautious around the horse. But before he begins, he was waiting for his sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer) who shows considerably late but still manages to dazzle the audience full of sleepy crew members on set. Even with all the pomp, the duo still get fired after Lucky the horse got skittish of his own reflection and kicked a crew member on set. OJ realizes that now it may be difficult to keep the business afloat if he doesn’t sell some of these horses. So he goes to Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a has-been child actor who now runs an amusement park. He was part of a massacre committed by the chimpanzee Gordy. Jupe has been looking for some horses to serve as an aide to his new spectacular performance at Jupiter’s Claim. 

That day Emerald and OJ discuss the possibility of selling the ranch. OJ seems hesitant to do that but Emerald seems clear that this is what they’re supposed to do. Before anything goes further, the lights in the house went out and the horses made a strange sound while they fled away from the farm. OJ sees a flying saucer in the sky. He’s unsure if it actually happened but Emerald convinces him that they can photograph this UFO and sell it to the government or the press to make a lot of money. Cue Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) from Fry’s Electronics, a conspiracy theorist with very strong feelings about UFOs and aliens. He helps set up the cameras at the Haywood ranch and also secretly spies on the camera, looking for the aliens himself. 

At this point in Jupiter’s Claim, Jupe has invited people to the spectacle of a lifetime. Which is essentially him luring the UFO to come and beam up the horse he has been buying from OJ. In a spectacular failure (pun fully intended), all the audience members and Jupe get beamed up by the UFO while the horse remains unscathed. After this train wreck, the Haywood house gets drenched with blood, it is raining blood outside of their windows with projectiles falling from the sky again. This time, the brother-sister-electrical tech trio invites the director Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott) to capture the UFO for them. There’s a twist because OJ identifies that the UFO isn’t a spaceship but actually a predator and territorial animal that is killing people and animals that look directly at it. 

They set up a full plan to make sure none of them get a look at the being and get a picture at the same time. The plans runs successfully except Holst doesn’t think they deserve to have this moment captured so he runs directly in the line of the animal and gets himself killed, Angel would have also died but he managed to wrap himself in wire tethered to the ground. Soon, they have to fight against time to get a picture, lure the animal again and keep themselves alive. Emerald escaped to Jupiter’s Claim where she released a large balloon and stood next to the wishing well photograph place to capture the being and as she mentioned before, she got the Oprah shot. After the being consumed the balloon, it exploded, essentially meaning that Earth can be safe now. 

This film has a lot of call-backs to previous, unassuming shots, like the one with Gordy and Ricky, a rare moment where he felt like he could control a ferocious animal, or the shot with the children pretending to be aliens to prank OJ and then get taken away by the actual alien creature. Additionally, we do see OJ look directly at the animal and still survive the film, it is highly possible that he could now train and guide the animal in any way he seems fit to do.