Directed by:
Tom FordScreenplay:
Tom FordCinematography:
Seamus McGarveyComposer:
Abel KorzeniowskiCast:
Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber, Armie Hammer, Karl Glusman, Robert Aramayo, Laura Linney (more)VOD (1)
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Susan (Amy Adams) is living through an unfulfilling marriage when she receives a package containing a novel manuscript from her ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). The novel is dedicated to her but its content is violent and devastating. Susan cannot help but reminisce over her past love story with the author. Increasingly she interprets the book as a tale of revenge, a tale that forces her to re-evaluate the choices that she has made, and reawakens a love that she feared was lost. Also starring Armie Hammer and Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals is a thriller of shocking intimacy and gripping tension. (Fabulous Films)
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Reviews (16)
"Enjoy the absurdity of our world. It's a lot less painful. Believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world." This is what Refn tried to do in The Neon Demon and failed. Nocturnal Animals is a powerful story of betrayal and revenge that avoids arousing straightforward emotions in the viewer, yet remains engaging and overwhelming. It is a contrast of the perfect contours of the safe but cool environment of Los Angeles high-society with the whimsicality of the dusty Texas desert full of helplessness. A collision of the emptiness of the consumer world with the most essential values in life. Regretting making the wrong decisions in the past. Will the movie ever show us the character that the story is actually about and we feel so sorry for? That’s the painful question that keeps haunting the viewer until the final scene. American academic art, made livelier by the most pleasurable acting performances. And a soundtrack in the style of Bernard Herrmann.
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A breathtakingly deceiving film, seemingly over-stylised and focused on form and material things, coldly pragmatic and ruthlessly violent. At the same time, it is a subliminally disarming probe into the reality of today's world with a bunch of fundamental life questions in the sense of rightness/wrongness of living contemporary life, dealing with important goals, directions and opinions that influence the future and define the present of man. A film as sophisticated, wise and extremely inaccessible to the audience as Ridley Scott's The Counselor. Script-wise, however, it is even more sophisticated, which is why it has that extra bit in the rating. Again, some users' allusions to snobbery, etc., stem from a misunderstanding of the film and thus a misunderstanding of the ideas and message it conveys.
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Tom Ford is once again dealing with loss. Visually and narratively, he goes one step further than when he introduced us to A Single Man, but this time it is much more unpleasant, although certainly not unfriendly to the viewer. It's just that the Texan noir that the main character reads is so dark, depressing, and hopeless that at times I didn't even want to look at the screen. But that would be a shame because the flood of metaphors, which can drill a decent hole in the viewer's head, is enormous, and the resulting impact is tremendous. The parallels between the book and Susan are incredibly clever, and although the ending itself ruins the enjoyment for some with its antikathartic boldness, it burrowed into me almost painfully.
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If the opening assault on the eyes (especially male eyes) was supposed to capture the female protagonist’s lack of taste and judgment (because we find ourselves in her gallery), it would be possible to understand her subsequent enthusiasm for Edward’s trashy novel built on the most moronic plot twists and populated with caricatures of Southern rednecks, hysterical husbands and indomitable sheriffs. If, however, the film really required us to keep a critical (and cynical) distance from a protagonist who is so unprepared for the real world that she can’t even unwrap a package that she receives (after cutting herself, she leaves the job to an assistant), the melodramatic conclusion, which instead relies on our identification with Susan, would not make any sense. I’m not sure how seriously Ford wants us to take Nocturnal Animals. In any case, it can’t be taken too seriously. The characters are one-dimensional. Instead of impactful statements, we have trite phrases, which the characters use to reveal their emotional state to us (instead of acting it out). In Susan’s world, everyone and everything primarily has to look good, which sometimes applies and sometimes doesn’t in the world of the book Susan is reading. It is thus probably not true (or at least not all the time) that she projects into the novel what she wants to have in it as its plot materialises before our eyes. Or perhaps the fetishes of women from better society include Aaron Taylor-Johnson ostentatiously wiping his ass? I suspect the director himself did not have a clear idea of how (self-)ironic and deliberately campy he wanted the film to be, nor how much he wanted the romantic and spiritual to take precedence over material values. The result is a trio of films – a Southern thriller, a melodrama about class differences and a satire of the world of snobs who judge others based on whether they own the latest iPhone – that are all quite entertaining in places, but most of the time come across as much more serious and self-important than would be fitting, considering their hollowness. 65%
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There’s power in simplicity. I guess that’s how I would evaluate this film after watching it. At the beginning, it offers fairly strange opening credits, through which it tries to create an atmosphere of mysticism and I was a bit worried that what I might be getting was another successor to David Lynch. However, I was quite lucky that this didn’t happen and the slow-paced life of the protagonist, who is portrayed by Amy Adams, began to unravel. But then the story jumps forward and I was watching a whole different story penned by Jake Gyllenhaal. And even though the two stories didn’t actually intertwine, there was such an interesting ending that I actually had to admit that the point couldn’t have been any better. The film looks mysterious but in the end it is a very solid drama. And by the way, Michael Shannon is really good in this one!
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