There are a lot of layers to Nope, and they don’t easily fit together – or so it seems at first.

Jordan Peele’s latest feature, which he wrote, produced and directed, has a lot going on, and it’s never quite what you think it is. The movie opens not on the horse rance beset by a mysterious UFO, as you see in the trailer, but on the set of a cheesy sitcom called Gordy’s Home about a chimp named Gordy that lives with a human family.

And on this particular day of shooting, Gordy (Terry Notary) goes apeshit, as something sparks him into a murderous rampage that leaves one of the few survivors, Ricky “Jupe” Park (played by Jacob Kim as a child and Steven Yeun as an adult) with a lifelong traumatized fascination with the incident.

The scene, with all its arresting imagery (a single shoe stands perfectly balanced on its toe on the set as the chimpanzee lurches around murderously) doesn’t exactly figure into the main story – but there is something happening there that will become important later on.

The main story stars with a flashback with the great Keith David as Otis Haywood Sr., owner of a Hollywood Horse training ranch, working with his son Otis Jr. – OJ, played by Daniel Kaluuya. Strange objects like keys and coins start pelting down from the sky, killing Otis Sr. Where did those objects they come from? Put a pin in that mystery for later, too.

Jumping ahead to the main part of the movie, OJ is trying to instruct a the cast and crew of a commercial shoot how to interact with his horse, but no one listens to him. He needs his sister Emerald (an ebullient Keke Palmer), who arrives tardily, to work the crowd for him. Emerald tells the story of how Great-great-great (etc.) grandfather Haywood was the jockey in the famous running horse animation put together by photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and that her family has had “skin in the game” – as in the Hollywood game – since the movies were invented.

OJ is having trouble keeping the family business afloat, and Emerald’s indifference to her family legacy (she does none of the actual work with the horses, and uses the business as a way to promote her own hustles) angers OJ. The two must unite, though, when something seriously weird starts happening at the ranch.

Something is haunting the skies above the ranch at night, spooking (and disappearing) the horses and causing power outages. OJ and Em quickly figure out that it’s extra-terrestrial, and decide that getting whatever it is on film – the “Oprah shot” – is the way to reverse their fortunes.

To help get the money shot, they ask Angel (Brandon Perea), the most dedicated tech guy Fry’s Electronics has ever hired, to help with video surveillance equipment, and a very strange and unusual director named Antlers Holst (a delightfully weird Michael Wincott) to use his homemade camera rig to help shoot the alien ship. But what exactly are they shooting? And how does their neighbor, a grown-up Jupe, and his gold rush-themed amusement park Jupiter’s Claim figure into the story?

Peele’s story isn’t told linearly, and though he lades a few clues as to what’s going on, this is not a movie you can easily figure out. The lack of a clearly-defined enemy, whose motives are obvious and understandable, combined with the ambiguous goings-on with Jupe – both his history with Gordy and his current exhibition featuring one of OJ’s horses – drives the tension that infuses the story.

The movie makes excellent use of sound, eschewing the cliched and artificial tension building to predictable jump scares engineered by the score, in favor of the absolutely nail-biting use of dead silence to induce dread in the audience. And when the power goes out, as it often does, we feel the music, grinding to a few RPMs, generating its own kind of fear. This may be the most terrifying use of Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” in history.

Nope, while not truly a horror, as Peele’s last movie Us might be classified, is a suspenseful thriller that though it is interspersed with humor and likeable characters, is suffused with tension that builds almost unbearably from scene to scene, and has an almost unguessable finale that weaves together disparate threads from the film that initially seem to have nothing to do with each other. It’s truly an “Oprah shot” for Peele.