Daniel Kaluuya, with Keke Palmer in the background, in Nope (Universal Pictures)

Trust Jordan Peele to make the weirdest Western you have ever seen. Though it is being advertised as a film about flying saucers, make no mistake, this is at heart a Western. One clue is its protagonist, OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), who takes over the family business after his father (Keith David) is killed by a quarter that falls from the sky and pierces his skull. The explanation is that it fell from a passing plane. That will prove to be wrong.

Haywood inherits a ranch that specializes in horse wrangling for films. Kaluuya, as OJ, is in Gary Cooper mode. Laconic and taciturn, he is much more at home with horses than with people and much happier on the ranch than on the movie sets that are the bread and butter of the ranch. Six months after his father’s death, OJ finds his himself in the red. Luckily, his younger sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), is an absolute motormouth and people person, which allows her to interact with the clients that OJ can barely look in the eye. Unluckily, she is more interested in advancing her acting/directing/influencing career than the job at hand. When OJ accuses her of not focusing on the ranch, Emerald reminds him that the ranch is her side gig.

So, to allay his costs, he has been selling some of his horses to a nearby roadside attraction run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star whose career ended when a tragedy occurred on the set of one of his TV shows. The gruesomeness of this incident matches Phoebe Cates’s Santa monologue in Gremlins, except Peele has the audacity to depict what happened. OJ plans to eventually buy the horses back, and when he mentions that to Jupe, Jupe hesitates a moment before saying, “Sure. Of course.” If you think that hesitation may mean something troubling, well, you’d be right.

One night at the ranch, the horses are restless, and OJ investigates. One of his favorites is somehow in the corral, and gets spooked and jumps the fence. OJ gives chase in his jeep and sees what definitively looks like a flying saucer hovering in the sky. The horse is gone, but in the distance we hear a screeching sound that sounds horse-like, yet strangely different.

It’s a complicated setup for what seems to be a movie about UFOs. But Peele is laying the tracks for something more ambitious. Nope is, for sure, a blast and meant to be seen in a large theater with lots of people. It is a popcorn film by design. But its themes are serious: the exploitation of animals, our relationships with predators, and how we think we can manipulate nature only to have it quite literally bite us in the ass.

Peele is subtle in unfolding these themes. He teases them out as Jupe’s very morbid story line dovetails with our heroes. He takes his time getting to the Big Bad, which allows us to marinate in OJ and Emerald’s relationship. Peele dispels with any strong familial dysfunction and focuses on the tenderness between them. Sure, they frustrate each other, but once they realize they need to be a team to dispel the threat to their livelihood and possibly the planet, the effect is instantaneous. Kaluuya and Palmer may well be the comic duo of the year. Peele has grown as a writer since Get Out (still his best film) and here reveals depth of affection with dialogue and not circumstance.

When we discover the intent of the UFO, the film shifts. In the second half, we are essentially on Quint’s boat from Jaws, if Quint’s ship were a ranch in the West. This is where Peele goes big. There are two fantastic set pieces that somehow combine Hitchcockian suspense with Cameronian spectacle. The first one, where OJ’s house is attacked, is a master class in building tension and then exploding it.

Though the film pays homage to both Westerns and 1970s blockbusters, it is by no means retro. The intent of the characters, even the sympathetic ones, are ripe with cynicism. Once the UFO reveals itself, Emerald sees it as her ticket to fame and OJ sees a way to help save his ranch. A wizened cinematographer (Michael Wincott, channeling David Carradine) has his own reasons to participate in Emerald’s scheme, and Jupe may be the most cynical of all. Peele is clear that even though we like these characters, and we do, they are not necessarily altruistic.

Ultimately, Peele is becoming his own genre. Nope combines dread, humor, horror, and social commentary, with an undercurrent of a sort of sly goofiness. Much like, say, David Lynch, no one makes films like Peele, and somewhat surprisingly, he has found a mass audience for his offbeat vision. In an era where algorithms dictate streaming and slick conformity is expected in blockbuster theatrical releases, it’s good to see there’s room for Peele’s unique vision.