05. Nocturnal Animals

05. NOCTURNAL ANIMALS

Director: Tom Ford

Release date: November 11, 2016

Fashion designer Tom Ford’s second foray into feature filmmaking opens with skin – a large, naked woman hypnotically jumping up and down in slow motion – and then proceeds to burrow deeper into the subconscious.

A story within a story, Nocturnal Animals finds the prolific Amy Adams as Susan Morrow, a Los Angeles art gallery owner adrift in a period of existential dissonance – she’s questioning her career, lives in a soulless, austere mansion and is in a loveless marriage with Hutton (Armie Hammer). When the manuscript for the debut novel by her estranged ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), arrives, Susan uses her incessant insomnia to stay up on a series of nights and immerse herself in the book.

Susan is shocked by the novel – titled Nocturnal Animals – which is a cold and violent tale of rape, murder and revenge. Through the book’s brutality, Susan is forced to come to terms with the pain she inflicted on Edward through their break-up. The novel’s narrative plays out as Susan reads it alone in her bed.

Tom Ford’s film packs a series of double punches, as the “real” and “fictional” stories unfold, one a pulpy noir, the other a domestic psychological thriller. The novel within the film is played out with shocking realism, its cast including Gyllenhaal, the always brilliant Michael Shannon and Isla Fisher. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the novel’s chief antagonist and has never been better – this evil performance might win him an Oscar nomination.

With two stories intertwined, the onus is on Ford to deliver two impressive endings and the source material doesn’t let him or the audience down. Nocturnal Animals is bleak but not distancing. It’s filled with a mesmerising and intensely cinematic atmosphere. Ford’s screenplay, based on the novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright, is ultimately a rumination on the craft of writing, how an author’s real pain is filtered and mutated before it bleeds on to the page.