NOCTURNAL ANIMALS (R)
Released By Focus Features
Review By Dan Bringhurst
NOCTURNAL ANIMALS, written and directed by Tom Ford (A SINGLE MAN) is a brutal, grind house of a story within a story, both halves set against themselves like two gladiators, and what’s even stranger is that it works almost paradoxically. Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is desperately unhappy. Life is complicated, she has all the things a happy person should have, but what’s missing is the man she abandoned twenty years earlier.
Her mother had encouraged her to leave him for a more successful man, for someone more grounded, because all that Tony Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal) wanted to do was write novels, and where’s the money in that? But twenty years after their divorce she receives a manuscript in the mail, his latest novel, and on the first page we read “For Susan.”
The book breathes into film as she turns the next page and suddenly there are two movies happening at once, always interchangeable, even confusingly at times. It’s a story that seemingly has nothing to do with the movie’s plot up until now, but instantly we give it our full attention.
We’ll forget about Susan crying, staring into the mirror miserably, and instead we’ll give ourselves to this new thing that’s happening. A man drives down an old Texas road with his wife and teenage daughter, soon stuck behind two vehicles driving parallel to each other, keeping him from passing.
This turns into what will be one of the most memorable things I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure if I moved at all for the next fifteen minutes, as I watched the cars and the men in them, harass the family to the point of ramming them off the road. The wife and daughter scream as they’re hauled off into the bushes and the father is too cowardly to do what needs to be done.
He says the right stuff, keeping his cool, but at the point that the men lay their hands on the women? He fails miserably as a man and permits them to be taken in one vehicle while he himself is forced into another. They’re separated over night as he’s dumped in the desert and in the morning he finds a local cop named Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon) who wants to help retrieve his family.
But when his wife and daughter are found broken, raped and dead, the movie becomes something else entirely, and in this regard the film is a noir-drama, a horror, and a revenge story. Up until this point it has been a gross, painful, gut wrenching experience, driven by anger and fear, at both the men who took the women and the father who was too weak to stop it. And in this respect, I hated the film. Just as I hated WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, because it made me feel things I didn’t want to feel. But as a story that set out to do just this, it succeeds wonderfully.
The cop doesn’t have much time. His lung cancer will see him dead in a year, and it’s with this knowledge that he decides there’s no time to let the justice system screw up his last case. He’ll see it done right, and what’s the harm of repercussions if he’s dead in twelve month anyway?
This is a pretty dark movie, with nothing uplifting or harrowing to be said about it at all. It’s not funny, it’s scattershot, it’s brutal, sad and with regard to the first forty-five minutes, it’s the most mesmerizing and terrifying thing I’ve seen in a decade.
I really liked this movie, and I’m excited to see what Tom Ford does next. His direction reminds me of David Fincher, and I’m pleased as punch to have a new director to look forward to.
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