Nocturnal Animals

The second film from Tom Ford (A Simple Man) is a nuanced, stylish, and detailed film that draws inspiration from across the board of great directors. It is as painstakingly well-crafted as Kubrick, as dark and brooding as Cronenberg (post body-horror), and as surreal in places as Lynch. It also reminded me of Nicholas Winding Refn, but whilst both films shine with a self-obsessed gloss, Refn delights in superficiality, and this film has plenty to uncover beneath the surface.

Based on Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan, it is a film within a film. Well, a book within a film, textually speaking, but, y’know, filmed. The story centres on Susan (Amy Adams), an art dealer whose obscenely wealthy environment is mirrored in the opening scene’s graphically grotesque celebration of over indulgence. And I’m not just talking about the obese, naked dancers. Susan’s world may be full of people who decorate their walls with money and their faces with botox, but it’s empty of all the right things. Her husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) is handsome, but non-present, and her marriage is as loveless as a Tinder swipe. In short, her life is a fashionable glass-and-metal catacomb of sleepless superficiality, when she receives a manuscript through the post from her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) – whom she dumped for the well-chinned Hutton, and hasn’t heard from in years. Like the ghost-of-Christmas-past, we flashback with Susan to see her standing up to her materialistic and class-conscious mother(Laura Linney) as she defends the sensitive Edward, and supporting him as he struggles for inspiration with the novel.

Except we know that this doesn’t last, and as we snap back to reality (as it is), we enter a third level of the movie as Susan starts on Edwards Opus Magnum – a novel entitled Nocturnal Animals. The novel is a dark, violent, and bloody tale of revenge revolving around husband and father Tony (Gyllenhaal also), and is a violent parable for the heartache, self-loathing, and self-destructive redemption that Susan has put Edward through all those years ago.

The multi-levelled aspect of the movie works well, and as the parallels become apparent, it’s sometimes unsure which of the realities shown to us are the more absurd – the “real” or the fictional. The more Susan reads, the more she is forced into a journey of self-reflection, and the more her world unravels. It is the world within the novel where most of the action occurs, which leads to a triumvirate of superb, stylistically heavy performances for Gyllenhaal as would-be-avenger Tony, Michael Shannon as no-fuck-giving lawman Bobby, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the vile and anarchic Ray, which contrast perfectly with Adams brilliantly underplayed performance and the adverse tone of the world in which Susan has become so desensitised.