Intoxicating and provocatively delicious
Nocturnal Animals Cert TBC, 115 min
Dir Tom Ford Starring Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Armie Hammer, Laura Linney
Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is the owner of a modern art gallery in Los Angeles who lives in a precisely furnished Beverly Hills mansion, and is married to an immaculately dressed millionaire toyboy played by Armie Hammer. In short, life’s a parade of misery. Susan is the lead character in
Nocturnal Animals, the elegantly ludicrous – and ludicrously enjoyable – new film from Tom Ford. Or at least, Susan is the lead character of half of it. Ford’s film boxes one story inside another initially unrelated-looking one, then lets the latter ooze out and engulf its frame, like a painting that won’t stay put on its canvas.
One morning, she receives a parcel from her ex, Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal). It’s the manuscript of the novel he’d always wanted to write, which Susan takes to bed for the weekend while her husband is attending to “urgent business” in New York, which entails an extra-marital affair.
Ford knows that having us sympathise with his heroine is a big ask: “What right do I have to be unhappy?” Susan quizzes a friend. “Well, it’s all relative,” she responds with a shrug, though in fact it’s all relatives, plural – and as she scans the pages of her ex-husband’s autobiographical novel, morsels of Susan’s familial troubles swish past: a scoop of domineering mother here, a soupçon of marital betrayal there.
Tony’s novel plays out as a film within a film, with Gyllenhaal as a man who takes his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) on a road trip, during which they’re tormented by three beered-up redneck sadists. Later on, Michael Shannon arrives as detective Bobby Andes, a man who “looks into things around here”, as he puts it – and he and Tony do indeed look into a horrific case together, the emotional DNA of which turns out to be intertwined with the seemingly-worlds-away precision of Susan’s gilded LA existence.
In regular exquisite close-ups – often when Susan is doing nothing more than reacting to the manuscript – we watch contradictory feelings washing across her face before Adams brings them snapping to a focal point, landing on the exact essence of the moment. There’s no question the Gyllenhaal and Shannon sections feel like “the fun bits” as you watch, but it’s the Adams framing story that gives Ford’s film its swoony grandeur. Everything that works in
Nocturnal Animals is intoxicating, provocative, delicious – and happily, so is everything that doesn’t.