As a wealthy Hollywood art gallery owner plagued by questionable choices of men in her life, Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) floats through Nocturnal Animals like a woman full of doubts and uncertainty. When her ex husband, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal) sends her a manuscript of a novel he's recently completed, Susan is instantly moved by the gripping story of a man whose wife and daughter are terrorized by a group of villainous punks, who come across as homicidal maniac rejects from movies such as Funny Games and Deliverance (eventually the movie turns into a poor man's Death Wish). Part fiction, part literary fiction-within-fiction, director Tom Ford's second feature (after 2009's A Single Man) is an abstract thriller where the true protagonist remains vague, and where losing a wife to a divorce and an unborn baby due to her abortion is equated to them being raped and murdered. The turmoil and pain that Gyllenhaal's Sheffield goes through are, sadly, never truly externalized the way I had expected them to be (and just how he meets his final demise is, at best, laughable). Ultimately, the movie is a darker version of Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, infused with plenty of film noir elements, and possessing an atmosphere and tone worthy of David Lynch's most head-scratching work. The enigmatic and open ended final shot will make the audiences wonder whether the 115 minutes that preceded it were just a figment of Susan's imagination. Or their own, for that matter.
B-
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