Review: Nocturnal Animals

As fantastic as it is to see Arrival gaining so much traction, I do hope that Amy Adams’ other big release, Nocturnal Animals, still gets enough attention. Tom Ford’s second feature, after A Single Man (2009), sees Adams playing an equally sleep deprived but much less scholarly professional at the peak of her career. Susan Morrow is the jaded owner of a glitzy contemporary art gallery, a realist in a world that is anything but reality.

She first entered the creative world when she wanted to a bohemian herself, back when she was engaged to Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal). Edward was just the kind of carefree romantic that her mother, Anne (Laura Linney), had always hated, and Susan has always hated her mother. She only has one scene, naturally the one where Susan announces her engagement, but that’s all we really need of her. She's the classic classist, conservative parent that any protagonist would want to rebel against, especially by running off with someone she looks down upon.

Being married to Edward was supposed to stop Susan turning out anything like her, but, just as Anne warned her she would, she soon finds that he isn’t enough for her. The last thing she tells Susan, before they basically never see each other again, is that no matter what they do, everyone eventually turns into their mother.

All of this is told through flashbacks. The present-day Susan is married to the much more ambitious and money-minded Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer). They’re the kind of business couple who spend more nights away from each other in hotel rooms than they do at home. The world of the gallery where Susan works is an eerie mix of avant-garde artistry and sterile opulence. Funnily enough, it’s very reminiscent of the modelling universe of The Neon Demon, especially since Jena Malone and Karl Glusman are in the cast of this film as well.

That said, most of the film takes place away from this narrative anchor, as it were. Ford is well aware that those tumultuous years with Edward are much more interesting than Susan’s current life with Hutton, even if the divorce is foreshadowed a bit too overtly. Many more years pass until she hears from him again, with the delivery of his latest manuscript for a novel entitled "Nocturnal Animals" that is dedicated to her. He used to call her a nocturnal animal when they were together, since even then she was a night owl.

The book is a shockingly violent thriller about a family that go out on a camping trip in the middle of nowhere. After they've driven outside of any phone coverage, they are stalked, run off the road and harassed by a local gang. The dad tries to outplay them and get his wife and daughter to safety, but their assailants end up holding him down, forcing the two women into one of their cars and taking them far away, leaving him behind feeling useless and powerless.

This is definitely the most intense, drawn-out and harrowing scene that this film delivers. Understandably, there were quite a few walkouts when it reached its darkest point. Most films only hint at or threaten to show these kinds of horrific occurrences, but this one goes much further with it than anyone was hoping. Still, it's integral to setting up the gruelling revenge story of Tony Hastings, the survivor of the attack, whose wife and daughter were both beaten, raped and murdered, leaving him with nothing but the raging need to find the men who did this to them.

Often when films contain stories within stories they end up feeling quite trite and idle. They're usually told with wall-to-wall narration, an overdone fairytale aesthetic and double-casting that makes for some very overwrought allegory. Sometimes, funnily enough, it's very hard to be invested in a story that you know is fictional inside the world of the main story, even though the whole film is fictional anyway. However, the story of the novel inside this film adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel, Tony and Susan, is definitely not your average meta-narrative. It’s told so straightforwardly and given so much screen time that it almost makes you forget about the central story. In fact, this could have easily been just a single narrative film about Tony, although that would have been incredibly depressing. If nothing else, it's a relief when Susan puts the book down and returns to her unsatisfying but much less traumatic life. Compared with Edward’s novel and the romantic flashbacks, the main plot is pretty stagnant, with a much greater focus on characters than events. It certainly needs the two side plots to give it momentum, but equally both of the side plots rely on the central story to give them a more complex purpose.

There is still a striking resemblance between Edward and Tony, not least because Gyllenhaal plays both of them, but even so their connection is much subtler than you’d expect. In one of the flashbacks, Edward defends himself against a bad review by saying that all authors write about themselves. Indeed, both him and Tony have been called weak by people with varying definitions of weakness, and strength. Eventually, both men decide that people see strength as cruelty, and they are done with being weak.

By the same token, Tony’s wife, Laura, is basically Susan, although this connection is slightly veiled. Laura isn’t played by Adams, but, in a very inspired casting choice, she's portrayed by her startling lookalike, Isla Fisher.

The allegory is there but it isn't being forced under a spotlight. It doesn’t have to match the main story beat for beat to make itself known. This is what makes Nocturnal Animals both a fascinating film to pick apart and a totally engrossing one to lose yourself in.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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