Nocturnal Animals

Year: 2016
Genre: Drama
Directed: Tom Ford
Stars: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Ellie Bamber, Armie Hammer, Karl Glusman, Robert Aramayo, Laura Linney, Michael Sheen, Andrea Riseborough
Production: Universal Pictures

Nocturnal Animals starts with a tasty little trap during its beginning titles. Sporting hats and party favors, a throng of obese women parade naked across a white background; their raw, scintillating faces mismatched by their girth. It's a bold set of images, which are given with no context forcing the audience to either titter at the grotesqueness or feel unease at the exploitation. Come to find out the women are part of an art installation masterminded by a jaded, down-on-her luck art exhibitor named Susan (Adams). "It was trash," she surmises later. "It's all trash."

The film plays out like a movie within a movie with the outer-shell being occupied almost solely by Susan. She is sent a proof of an upcoming novel written by her estranged ex-husband Edward (Gyllenhaal) and despite trepidation, she decides to read it. The novel then transports her to an isolated area of West Texas where a middle class family is harassed by a group of miscreants on the road, lead by a particularly disgusting Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The trio of thugs brutally rape and kill the mother and daughter (Fisher and Bamber), leaving the family patriarch (also Gyllenhaal)  to pick up the pieces. Somewhere in between Susan reading in the bedroom and reading in the bathroom, a third thread starts where we see the blossoming, stagnation and demise of Edward and Susan's relationship more than twenty years ago.

A proper representation of this movie.

Nocturnal Animals is a meticulously planned film from start to finish. It weaves a complicated web of stories which compliment each other (at least in their blocking) and clutter the mind with gruesome, repulsive imagery. The faux Fellini-esque vibrancy of Susan's world clashes violently with the dynamics of the novel's story which conjure memories of Blue Velvet (1986) and Straw Dogs (1971). Director Tom Ford's lustrous mis en scene in A Single Man (2009) drew comparisons to the works of Douglas Sirk but here the deviant allusions to choice grand manipulators a la Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma are far too pungent to ignore.

I just need people to make decisions for me.

Yet for all its fastidious framing and on-the-nose color symbolism, Nocturnal Animals completely betrays its central message. In an interview with Vox Magazine, Tom Ford stated that the central theme of "Tony and Susan" (the Austin Wright novel with which Nocturnal Animals is based on) is "don't throw people away. When you find people you love, hang on to them." Yet I wonder how calcified that message is in the mind of the audience when we're essentially watching a revenge story from the perspective of the victim. A victim that projects her ex-husband, a man she likely never loved, as the only character in the novel without agency. Are we truly to believe such a hopeful message is being channeled by a woman who doesn't seem to love anyone.

Say, do you like gladiator movies son?

It's easier to assume that Tom Ford took the themes of "Tony and Susan" and inverted them in an attempt to give an already dense story another layer. Not so much keep the ones you love as hurt the ones you hate. Yet even then the three stories, which meshed well in the editing room, counter each other thematically like pieces on a chess board. One minute, we're supposed to eschew practicality for romanticism, then we're supposed to endorse vigilante justice, then we're supposed to quiver when Susan realizes Edward was the most practical choice after all.

The proceedings are all so dour and trifling with so many divergent themes, that at times the movie feels like it's being splattered against a wall. While I'm sure someone out there is liable to get their kicks from Nocturnal Animals, I suspect the movie just wants to revel in its sleazy motifs and make its audience feel guilty for watching despite obvious manipulations. Ultimately in the words of Michael Sheen's character one needs to "Take in and appreciate the absurdity," to really appreciate Nocturnal Animals. Understand that for all it's luridness this movie really isn't a puzzle worth solving.

Final Grade: D-