Comedian Jordan Peele proved he was more than just a bag of tricks when he wrote and directed the industry-shaking psychological race thriller Get Out in 2017. He followed that with 2019’s slasher Us, slightly less beloved but still very good. Now, Peele is three-for-three with his enigmatic Nope, a sci-fi-western-horror that deals with a much larger threat—aliens in the sky.

Nope follows brother-sister duo Otis Jr. “OJ” Haywood (played by Peele’s muse Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald “Em” Haywood (Keke Palmer), who run and operate their late father’s ranch, training horses used in films and commercials. The circumstances surrounding their father’s death—a quarter falling from the sky and through his eye—hints that something strange is afoot, or rather, in the sky. While reviewing security camera footage, OJ realizes there’s a cloud in the sky that never moves.

Otis Jr. “OJ” Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald “Em” Haywood (Keke Palmer)

Also in the picture is former child star Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), who runs a western-themed attraction near the ranch called Jupiter’s Claim. We quickly learn Park has a traumatic backstory involving his ‘90s sitcom Gordy’s Home, in which a chimpanzee—the titular Gordy—suddenly snapped and attacked the actors on set. Park has no qualms about exploiting this tragic incident for profit, with one fan paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars just to stay overnight surrounded by Gordy’s Home memorabilia.

Not everyone may like how these two storylines converge, questioning what a once-popular television show has to do with a potential alien encounter, but the success of Nope is rooted in its big ideas combined with its expert craft, even if its individual parts don’t entirely coalesce. Yes, the film’s characters may feel more like one-dimensional pawns who only exist to express larger ideas (not unlike one of my other favorite directors, Christopher Nolan), but the film is consistently so intriguing, so well-executed, and so well-acted, that the lack of character depth didn’t bother me as much.

Comedy and horror may look like complete opposites at first, but they’re a lot more similar than you’d think, and it’s probably the reason Peele is so good at making these horrors. Both require setting the mood, setting things up for the punchline, the payoff, and timing. In Nope, Peele, with editor Nicholas Monsour (Us), composer Michael Abels (Get Out), cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Interstellar), and sound designer Johnnie Burn (Under the Skin) have done a great job creating a suspenseful, unnerving setting and tone, from the very moment the film begins. And some of the film’s scariest scenes are not even graphic, relying on just sound and our collective imagination to keep us in a state of anxiety. Peele understands that nothing on screen can ever be as terrifying as what we imagine.

The best thing about Nope, and any Peele films, is its thematic depth, particularly in ideas you wouldn’t normally expect with the film at hand. Get Out, a psychological horror, made general audiences think more critically about the horrors of racism. Us, a more slasher-type horror than Get Out, and featuring doppelgängers, was about privilege, about the haves and have nots. Nope, an alien encounter sci-fi-western, is about, to my pleasant surprise, spectacle and exploitation. You can see it in the obvious, like having a Black character named OJ, or Jupe Park’s monetization of his past trauma. But Nope cleverly weaves in other examples and metaphors for our real-life exploitation of spectacles and sensationalism, our need to film and share everything to our detriment, our desire to profit off of tragedy, and our hubris in believing we can control everything—especially wild animals.

Nope may be my least favorite of his three directorial features, but it’s still much better than the majority of mainstream films being released today. This is a boldly original, suspenseful, thrilling, and entertaining piece of cinema that proves, once again, that Jordan Peele is this generation’s Spielberg. This is a director who continues to push the boundaries of cinematic storytelling and boundless vision.

Five years ago, after the success of Get Out, Peele said he had “four other social thrillers” that he wanted to unveil in the next decade. I can’t wait for the next two.