We like to gentrify sci-fi a little, suiting the genre up and setting it to work on blueprints for the future, to imagine an alternative into which we can escape. In doing so, we forget the genre’s capacity for derangement.

The monster contains multitudes, but no one referent exhausts it of its capacity to refer to something else, because the core of its being is outside our frames of reference. One of the thrills of Nope, as a work of weird fiction, is wondering just how much of our stories, our world, is similarly beyond our grasp.