Nocturnal Animals, 2016.
Directed by Tom Ford.
Starring Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Armie Hammer and Laura Linney.
SYNOPSIS:
Rich, glamorous and successful gallery owner Susan (Amy Adams) seems to have it all. But her life is starting to crumble and when her ex-husband sends her the manuscript for his violent thriller, she feels threatened and haunted.
Prepare for an Amy Adams double bill. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is a few weeks away, but Nocturnal Animals, from director Tom Ford, opens at the start of next month. And the lady is most certainly on a roll. Here, she’s the ice cool gallery owner, Susan: on the outside she has the lot, on the inside her second marriage is on the way out and she’s disillusioned with working in the art world, describing her latest exhibition as “junk”.
Then a package arrives. The omens aren’t good when she cuts herself on the brown paper wrapping. That trickle of blood is just the start, because inside is the manuscript of a thriller, written by her first husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). It’s also called Nocturnal Animals and he’s dedicated it to her. The story is compulsive, feeding her insomnia and haunting her to the point where she’s seeing its characters in her mind’s eye at the most unlikely of moments.
The book provides the film’s parallel storyline, a wrong place wrong time story with Tony (Gyllenhaal again), his wife (Isla Fisher, presumably in the role because of her resemblance to Adams) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) having a run-in on a deserted Texas road with a group of thugs, led by Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Distressing and bloody, it ends in tragedy with Tony devoting the next years of his life to tracking down the gang, helped by local cop Bobby (Michael Shannon).
At this point, Susan’s story and Tony’s start to interweave and even overlap. The similarities between him and Edward run deeper than just being played by the same actor. Tony agonises over his inability to defend his own family and Ray tells him to his face that he’s weak. In the flashbacks to Susan and Edward’s romance, her ghastly mother (Laura Linney) warns her against marrying him because he’s weak. The parallels continue, with their eventual marriage starting to unravel and ending with the one act that Susan can never forget, or forgive herself for. And it’s not her affair with Hutton (Armie Hammer), who becomes husband number two.
Two powerful, arresting stories which frequently echo each other – and, as individual films, they’d stand up quite happily on their own. The thriller is unsettling and gritty, the ill-fated romance is absorbing, but put together there’s something incomplete, almost hollow, at the centre. Despite all the references and overlaps, the fit isn’t quite perfect and there are moments which seem to have been included simply for visual effect and nothing more.
Not that the film is all style and no substance. Given Ford’s reputation as a designer, and the director of A Single Man (2009), the art gallery and Susan’s home are as sleek as you would expect. But he also captures the hostility and sweatiness of the Texas badlands with equal skill and the two contrast sharply. Ultimately, it’s down to the cast to hold the whole thing together, led by the ice cool Adams, with her haunted and unfulfilled eyes, Gyllenhaal in his double role and a surprisingly good Aaron Taylor-Johnson, looking at the world with contempt from underneath his shaggy hair. The acting honours, however, go to the granite faced Michael Shannon, as the cop with nothing to lose. He also has the only humorous lines in the film: they are few and as black as night. Nocturnal, even.
Fascinating, unsettling and, just occasionally, baffling, Nocturnal Animals poses questions about guilt, revenge and regret, yet falls short when it comes to answers. But that doesn’t stand in the way of it living up to Ford’s declared aim. “If you spend an hour and a half in a movie theatre, it should challenge you.” It certainly does that, but not always in the way he had in mind.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★/ Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Freda Cooper – Follow me on Twitter, check out my movie blog and listen to my podcast, Talking Pictures.
Originally published October 24, 2016. Updated November 14, 2019.
