Film Review: Nocturnal Animals

Tom Ford’s heightened approach to storytelling – which extends to his latest film Nocturnal Animals – may alienate some viewers. But his style isn’t just for show: it embodies how the characters in his films are concealing truths, wearing masks, reciting social scripts. His fascination with the performative comes to a fascinating, melodramatic climax in Nocturnal Animals.

Amy Adams, her natural beauty covered in a cake-like layer of dramatic make-up, plays Susan, a successful gallery owner. Her world is populated by wealthy caricatures – shallow yet pretentious, with a slick coating of privilege covering their humanity. Susan is clearly unhappy with the emptiness of her life, and just as she begins to wonder how she lost her idealism and joy, her past re-emerges to show her, aggressively and violently.

Susan receives a manuscript from her ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), who she emotionally wrecked twice-over – by leaving; and by telling him he couldn’t write. His manuscript is the antithesis of his sweet and sensitive nature. A violent, disturbing tale of a family hunted and torn apart in a desert wasteland, his novel comes to life before our eyes, with Gyllenhaal as the helpless father, and Amy Adams-doppelganagers Isla Fischer and Ellie Bamber as his terrorised wife and daughter.

Shot like a grisly crime film, this story within a story is frightening in its own right; it also delivers an emotional knife-wound to Susan. This is the pain you caused. This is suffering. And this is revenge. Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey captures the ruthless beauty of both these worlds, using overlapping imagery to show their intricate connections. Occasionally shots of beautifully arranged corpses and the exaggerated awfulness of Susan’s world echo both the visual style of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Neon Demon, and that film’s confused message. Can one worship beauty while also despising it?

Step into Ford’s heightened, dramatic, brutally beautiful world, and answer for yourself.