Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals is a gripping, cruel thriller with an excellent cast. The links between its stories grow too insistent, but the fear and the hurt are difficult to shake.
Tom Ford sets himself a difficult task in Nocturnal Animals: making us care about a woman reading and the people inside her book at the same time. The novel is by Susan Morrow’s former husband, so each turn of the page also returns her attention to their relationship. We recommend it as a thriller, with reservations about how firmly it tells us what to make of these people. Its nastiness is effective, and sometimes rather pleased with itself.
The Texas story supplies the fear, with Jake Gyllenhaal playing Tony Hastings and Aaron Taylor-Johnson making Ray Marcus an appallingly convincing threat. We were frightened by the road encounter because Ray’s presence makes even an ordinary exchange feel as though it could turn ugly without warning. Jake Gyllenhaal gives Tony’s vulnerability enough weight to keep the sequence from becoming a mere exercise in prolonging discomfort. Aaron Taylor-Johnson deserves particular credit for making the danger feel personal, even within the broad strokes of this violent tale.
Amy Adams has the harder job as Susan Morrow, whose reading must hold our attention alongside events with much more immediate force. Her performance makes room for uncertainty that the screenplay, also by Tom Ford, does not always allow. The scenes in Los Angeles work when we are watching her reckon with her past; the art-world satire is thinner, too quick to establish that the people around her are empty. That leaves her carrying emotional weight which the surrounding characters ought to share.
Seamus McGarvey’s photography gives Los Angeles and Texas enough distinction that moving between them is never confusing. Joan Sobel’s editing makes those passages feel natural, keeping Susan’s reading active rather than leaving it as an interruption to the Texas story. We become alert to correspondences between the strands without needing to stop and sort out where we are. The trouble comes when the connections grow so emphatic that there is little left for us to discover.
Shane Valentino’s production design helps make Susan’s art-world surroundings feel stifling, but the contempt for that life becomes too easy. The film gives us limited reason to value what she has, which weakens the interest in how she came to have it. Abel Korzeniowski’s music suits the scale of the melodrama, although its insistence can make the private unhappiness feel over-explained. The actors are persuasive enough to need less encouragement from everything around them.
Michael Shannon, as Bobby Andes, gives the Texas material a welcome firmness, and the film benefits from a supporting performance that can stand alongside its leads. This is recognisably pulp noir, and there is pleasure in its willingness to be lurid and unreasonable. The difficulty is the weight it asks that violence to carry when it connects it to Susan’s relationship with Edward Sheffield. The suggestion that a violent novel might change how someone thinks about a failed marriage is compelling; the film pushes it until the characters have little room to surprise us.
There is no need to solve every correspondence between Susan and the novel to get something from this film. We would let the actors complicate what the screenplay keeps trying to settle, and accept that some of its cruelties are more interesting than its explanations. Choose it for the suspense, provided everyone watching has an appetite for cruelty.
