So the thing about this movie is that if you didn’t know it was a Jordan Peele horror movie, you wouldn’t think it was a horror movie at all. It’s not structured like one, it doesn’t really have the plot of one, and while there are some creepy moments in it, they never actually turn into a horror plot.

Really, those creepy moments are more like… there are jump scares in E.T., you know? Or an action movie like Tremors (which my wife compared this to, extremely accurately) has building tension in creepy ways.

And so while this is a failure as a horror movie, if you look at it through the lens of other genres, it’s… also a failure, tbh.

So one way to see this is as an alien encounter movie, but… it doesn’t work as that, because they make no effort at all to ever try to communicate with the alien or to find out anything about it. It’s just a pure dumb monster that they fight.

So okay, then let’s look at it as a monster movie, like Tremors. I think this is the best way to look at it, but it’s not really great at that, either. Like, one problem is that Kaluuya never really seems that scared of the big bad monster. Whenever he encounters it, he runs into shelter quickly and seems more annoyed than anything else; he’s treating it as the equivalent of a bad rainstorm, not a true disaster. Similarly, their plan isn’t really to kill the thing, it’s just to… photograph it? Okay, cool.

And then there’s all the stuff in the movie that doesn’t have anything to do with the alien — the berserk chimp backstory is played out at length, but doesn’t have any plot integration into the main story. The horse theme that runs through it isn’t really relevant at all.

If you read reviews, what you find out is that the critics who like this movie appreciate it as a movie about cinema itself, thinking about it as a movie about making movies and the metaphysical dangers and challenges of that. Fair enough, I guess, critics will always love movies about movies. And it is definitely a movie that’s made with great skill — its shots are gorgeous, its characters are great, its random and disconnected moments of tension are extremely tense. I just wish it added up to something.