Given that it was written, produced, and directed by Tom Ford, it’s no surprise that Nocturnal Animals is, in the main, breathtakingly beautiful. Ford’s signature high style abounds here, juxtaposed with a dusty and mean and bloody tale of loss and pain and revenge. The result is a mesmerizing and hauntingly gorgeous film noir that, while not especially complex, takes hold of something visceral and holds tight well after the lights come up.
The story centers on Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), an LA gallerista who inhabits an impossibly luxurious, crisp, and beautiful world. Her modern house is gorgeous, perfectly lit, and sleek; her early-aughts Bentley Continental coupe is a sculpted lump of magnificence; her hair, face, and clothes are stark and perfect and still.
Not even Tom Ford can permit such perfection to gild the lily of a gratifying life — so Susan is hollow and lonely and a cynic, her perfect husband (Armie Hammer) is almost certainly sleeping around, and her superficial cocktail parties and art openings do little to fill her where it counts. She’s forgotten how it feels to be who she was.
A package arrives, a manuscript from Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), Susan’s long-lost short-term ex-husband of two decades prior. He’s written another novel, we learn, but this one’s different, and he’d like her to read it.
As she does, the story of Edward’s manuscript, the tale within a tale, unfolds on screen. This sub-story chiefly stars Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (who I admit I didn’t recognize at all, despite having seen Kick Ass easily sixty times). It’s a cruel and often cringeworthy tale of weakness, power, heartbreak, suffering, and revenge. Ford expertly fashions deep unease in the audience here and then dwells in it mercilessly, minute after long minute — and this leitmotif is no less powerful for its simplicity.
Ford cuts back and forth between the story of the novel and Susan’s reaction to it, then layers the latter with flashback cuts to her own history with Edward. The more we learn about their past, the more the meaning of his novel takes shape.
Gyllenhaal delivers a powerful performance here: He’s crippled with emotion and driven to deep self-loathing, and super buff to boot. (Neither is lost on Ford.) Amy Adams is predictably fabulous, though she’s denied Gyllenhaal’s Oscar-bait wails and traffics instead in subtlety, to good effect. Shannon serves up the steel-eyed grit his role demands, and Taylor-Johnson is frankly fantastic. Isla Fisher and Michael Sheen also pass through, both memorably.
Ford adapted his screenplay from the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright, tweaking it for maximum stylistic effect (Maine, for instance, is replaced with West Texas in the film, with all its attendant cowboy hats and dust and Real Men).
I can’t say what it does in the book, but here Susan’s shell story does double duty. It serves not only to contextualize and interpret the Texas tale, but also to pound home the idea that art can shock and wound as easily as it can soothe or thrill. (Edward’s novel, of course, is just another such work.) From the film’s gleefully unsettling opening montage to the various distressing artworks that crop up throughout Susan’s world, Ford rubs our noses in this again and again — while at the same time offering clean, crisp glamour with a side plate of some real raw stuff.
It’s terrific.
Haus Verdict: A tad dark and arty for date night, Nocturnal Animals is a disquieting but ultimately sublime experience that, if you’re up for it, hits hard and should not be missed.
Nocturnal Animals opens Friday, November 18.
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