It takes a skilled director to make an inherently ridiculous concept scary. Director Jordan Peele arguably accomplished that in his previous feature, “Us,” in which shadowy clones killed people with scissors in hopes of taking their place, and he set out to do it again in “Nope.”

I will spoil the film’s twist concept, but further down in the review. So go watch the movie if you don’t want to get spoiled.

The film follows Emerald (Keke Palmer) and Otis Haywood Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), the new owners of Haywood Hollywood Horses, a company that trains and supplies horses to the film industry, after their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), is killed by a prop that fell out of the sky. The Haywoods are ancestors of the jockey in “Animal Locomotion,” the first motion picture made in 1884 and 1885 (the film takes creative liberty with this; the Haywoods are a fictional family, though “Animal Locomotion” is real). Otis Jr., or O.J. as goes by, steps up to handle the affairs of the Haywood ranch, but he is inherently introverted and struggles to impress clients expecting a bit of a show, which his sister excels at.

However, this tale gets flipped on its head once we meet Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), who is the owner of a nearby horse show and is a former child star of the 1990s sitcom “Gordy’s Home,” which was cancelled after its titular ape attacked and maimed his co-stars (Ricky was unharmed). We see flashbacks of “Gordy’s Home,” that almost do not connect to the film until we meet the antagonist, who is *spoilers*

That was your spoiler warning. Everyone gone who doesn’t want to be spoiled? Good.

It’s a living, organic UFO that sucks people into its maw via some form of a tractor beam, chews them up, then spits out their remains in a blood rain.

Pretty ridiculous for a horror film. But somehow Peele makes it work. I think he’s invented a new fear.

Houses and homes are the monster’s weakness. If you get inside, it can’t suck you up into the air. But it hides in a cloud and can come out at any time. The only way to know that it’s around, other than its large shadow, is the fact that it turns off all electrical devices. Ricky thought he could tame it, like Gordy who left him unharmed despite his violent nature, but he was mistaken.

As such, we take a hard pivot from the story of this generational Black-owned business that has been put into the hands of someone who is not ready for it, to a tale about trying to capture footage of and even take down this menace. O.J. and Em enlist the help of Fry’s Electronics salesman Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) and veteran filmmaker Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), who set up and operate security cameras and provide a non-electrical hand-crank camera respectively.

Antlers has such a small role in the film, but his few scenes are memorable; he’s a grizzled expert looking for the perfect shot, never truly satisfied with anything he makes. Angel functions as a friend to O.J. and Em and as comic relief.

For such an outlandish concept, it’s remarkable what Peele was able to achieve in this film. It pays homage to classic sci-fi horror films of the 1950s through 70s and, in a way, reinvents the genre for modern audiences through its commanding use of sound and cinematography. We spend most of the time on the Haywood ranch, which is ordinarily a very flat and uninteresting setting, but the alien is so massive that it literally can cast a dark cloud at any time over our heroes, providing instant atmospheric lighting.

With that being said, the film is not able to completely overcome the ridiculousness of its concept and the creature itself definitely lacks a scare factor — the less you see it directly, the better. Its final form is also very anticlimactic and definitely made me fear it a lot less.

Still, this is another great entry showcasing Peele’s remarkable talent as a director, though I would implore him to consider the fact that he doesn’t need a gimmick every film. I would love to see him execute a simple, non-convoluted concept like a slasher or thriller — I have no doubt he would pull it off perfectly.

“Nope” gets an 8/10