Tom Ford has always been a daring fashion designer for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. He has integrated his confident sense of style into a filmmaking career. His sophomore effort ‘Nocturnal Animals’ is a dark and powerful thriller that makes a bold statement about regret and revenge. It’s essentially a film within a film. It’s a visually stunning movie but is it all style without any substance? That’s up to you to decide. Ford plucked the story from Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan. It’s certainly an ambitious piece of work with luscious cinematography and a top-notch cast but it feels so hollow. The story detours into some dark and grisly places that are difficult to watch. It’s an intriguing story structure that fails to cohesively weave the two movies together. ‘Nocturnal Animals’ is a jumbled arthouse revenge film that leaves you as empty and cold as the lead characters.
While the opening credits are rolling, Ford grabs your attention with a shocking sequence. He shows morbidly obese women dancing in slow motion like they are cheerleaders. It relates to an upscale art show in Los Angeles. Susan (Amy Adams) is the art gallery owner presenting the decadent exhibit. Afterwards, she drives through a shiny steel gate to her modern and sterile home overlooking the L.A. skyline. She is unhappily married to a handsome financier (Armie Hammer) who spends most of his time on business trips to close the next deal. Susan dumped her first husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), an aspiring writer when his career floundered. Nearly 20 years after their divorce, a package arrives at Susan’s door. It is a book manuscript written by Edward and dedicated to her. The story that unfolds in the novel is clearly a metaphor about his lost relationship with her.
Edward’s novel is titled ‘Nocturnal Animals’ and was a nickname he gave Susan for her chronic insomnia. She starts to read his book and we start to see the story unfold. A family is driving on a dark road through the Badlands of West Texas for a vacation. They are harassed and forced off the road by a trio of redneck thugs. Tony (the husband played by Gyllenhaal) and his wife and daughter (Isla Fisher and Ellie Bamber) are terrorized. It’s a tough scene to watch as the villains kidnap Tony’s family and dump him out of the car. Without giving too much away, the violence is gruesome. Tony eventually gets help from a Texas cop named Bobby (Michael Shannon) to track down the hoodlums for justice to be served. When Tony takes a shower, Susan also bathes as if to wipe away the shocking tale. In a sense, Edward’s novel is punishing Susan for leaving him and destroying his life with her.
The cast is first-rate but there are no standout performances. Adams plays the cold woman. Her make-up looks like it was applied by a mortician. If you want to see her shine, check out her superb turn as a linguistic expert in ‘Arrival.’ Gyllenhaal is frustrating to watch as a weak man. You want him to strike back at the villains but in most scenes he cries like a defenseless baby. As the ringleader, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance is over-the-top and almost cartoonish. The only interesting character is Shannon’s grizzled Texas sheriff that is willing to take the law into his own hands. At one point, Susan’s snooty friend (Michael Sheen) tells her, “I thought the work was incredibly strong, with all this junk culture we live in.” She feels junk is still junk.
What starts as a thriller turns into a revenge film. The book ‘Nocturnal Animals’ Edward sends to Susan is a form of disguised revenge. It’s frustrating trying to make correlations between Susan and Edward’s relationship. Ford uses flashbacks to reveal their doomed marriage. The endings of both Edward’s fictional book and the ending in the movie are confusing. Is Ford making a statement between life and art? What the heck is going on here? Susan’s life is aesthetically beautiful but lacks substance. The same can be said of Ford’s work. He is criticizing the same world that made him a rich fashion icon. ‘Nocturnal Animals’ looks great but it will leave you feeling cold and unfulfilled.
