Every Jordan Peele Movie Ranked
Jordan Peele wasn't always one of the greatest horror filmmakers in the world. First he was a prolific comedian, starring in five seasons of the late-night sketch comedy series "Mad TV," impersonating celebrities left and right. Then he created his own show with his fellow "Mad TV" alumni Keegan-Michael Key, appropriately titled "Key & Peele," and that show was a major comedy hit that's still actively memed to this day.
It made sense that, when Jordan Peele moved into the realm of movies, his first project was the phenomenally funny buddy comedy "Keanu." Peele co-wrote the screenplay and starred opposite Key as mild-mannered friends who have to step outside their comfort zone and into the world of violent crime in order to rescue their kidnapped, adorable kitten. Peele may not have directed it (that was Peter Atencio, also of "Key & Peele"), but it's a delight, and established Peele as a force to be reckoned with in motion picture comedies as well as TV.
And then it happened.
Jordan Peele's directorial debut, "Get Out," was a hit horror movie, and a great one, and revealed that the filmmaker's ability to mine social issues into insightful, expertly-timed comedy made him a preternaturally gifted horror storyteller. Over the course of three movies he's proved that it wasn't a fluke. He keeps making brilliant, scary motion pictures and he keeps getting more ambitious with every film.
While we'd love to include "Keanu" and the other films he's co-written — Nia DaCosta's creepy and subversive "Candyman" reboot, and Henry Selick's excellent stop-motion horror fantasy "Wendell & Wild" — it wouldn't be fair (or even remotely accurate) to call them Peele's. Instead, let's focus on the films he wrote and directed, starting with...
3. Us (2019)
There's only one thing Jordan Peele's follow-up to "Get Out" had going against it, and that's that it was the follow-up to "Get Out." Peele's debut film wasn't just a hit, it was a pop culture milestone. So even though "Us" is a spectacular horror movie in its own right — and even though it actually grossed more at the box office — the film is perpetually tethered to its more beloved next of kin. How unpleasantly fitting.
"Us" stars Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke as Adelaide and Gabe, a married couple whose vacation home is invaded by mysterious entities who look just like them, and just like their kids. Weirdly, Adelaide's doppelgänger (also played by Lupita Nyong'o) seems to be the ringleader of a gigantic homicidal movement, and directing carbon copies of everyone in town — who knows how far it's really spread? — to rise up from their subterranean purgatory and kill the versions of themselves who live in the daylight, eat real food, and do not perpetually suffer.
While "Get Out" was developed within an inch of its life, to the extent that every plot point falls together and practically every line of dialogue has multiple meanings, "Us" operates in a realm of dream logic. The story of "The Tethered" makes little rational sense but it's a terrifying allegory for class warfare, in which the monsters are tragic figures and their victims may indeed have it coming. And at the center of it all is a riveting dual performance from Nyong'o, whose alternately subtle and extreme character work belongs in the Horror Hall of Fame. So although "Us" is a little less focused and refined than Peele's other films, it's still a fantastic horror story.
2. Get Out (2017)
Peele's astoundingly (and justifiably) acclaimed debut feature is, at its core, a modern update of "The Stepford Wives," where an outsider comes to a new place, gets increasingly suspicious of the residents' socially regressive behavior, and uncovers — to their horror — that behind a veneer of conservative oppression lies an even more disturbing secret.
But however familiar that plot outline may be, "Get Out" is absolutely its own film, and a damning indictment of 21st century racial politics. Daniel Kaluuya plays Chris, a Black man dating a white woman, Rose (Allison Williams). Together they visit her rich liberal family at their remote home for the weekend, and Chris endures one racist micro-aggression after another, which pile up so fast they quickly become suffocating.
Peele's film dances the very thin line between comedy and terror, as so many of the passively bigoted interactions Chris encounters sound suspiciously familiar to real progressive talking points. The naive fantasy that we live in a post-racial America, Peele's film argues, does nothing to address the horrific racism and white supremacy that still — tragically and frighteningly — forms America's bedrock.
"Get Out" is an exquisitely constructed work of horror fiction. Peele's Oscar-winning screening is toweringly layered, so that the film functions just as effectively as pure horror as it does as a social satire, and even as a critique of horror cinema itself, which too rarely tells stories from Black perspectives. Even the film's strangest conceits are revealed, by the end, to have all been insidiously orchestrated by Peele, who hid the film's secrets right under our noses. It's almost hard to believe that Jordan Peele has made a better film. But he has!
1. Nope (2022)
Watching "Nope" is like watching the horror genre's "Star Wars." You can probably recognize Peele's many influences, but you've never seen all those pieces assembled quite like this before.
Ostensibly a sci-fi film about a U.F.O. that's abducting people in a small desert town, Jordan Peele uses the framework of an old-fashioned monster movie as a launching pad to explore familial bonding, Hollywood exploitation, and (of all things) the practicalities and dangers of animal wrangling.
Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play O.J. and Em, siblings who inherit a horse ranch from their father, and the latest in a multigenerational line of Hollywood horse trainers. They discover that something in the sky is killing their horses, and convinced that they've found evidence of alien life, they decide to become filmmakers themselves, and will stop at nothing to get the greatest shot ever caught on celluloid.
"Nope" isn't just one movie; it's obsessed with the possibilities of the whole cinematic medium and explores as many of its avenues as possible within a single, masterfully directed motion picture. "Nope" is thrillingly executed on every technical level and deeply rich with insights about cinema and obsession and mankind's ill-advised compulsion to assert our dominance over the animal kingdom. Peele's latest is an instant classic horror movie, an instant classic sci-fi movie, and one of the best and most exciting films ever made about filmmaking.