![]() The film stars Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Armie Hammer, Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough, and Michael Sheen. Underpinning it all is Abel Korzeniowski’s gorgeous Herrmann-esque score, which harks back to the psychodramas of the 40s and 50s, a gripping blend of romance, mystery and discordant horror.Nocturnal Animals is a 2016 American neo-noir psychological thriller film written, produced, and directed by Tom Ford in his second feature, based on the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. Gradually, these disparate worlds seep into one another, whether through talismanic items (a red sofa, a green sports car, a crucifix pendant) that cross the boundaries of fact and fiction, or through carefully choreographed cuts that find bodies similarly arrayed in the lands of the living and the dead. Seamus McGarvey’s widescreen cinematography perfectly captures the contrasting environments of the film’s sinewy, intertwined settings – from the reflective surfaces of Susan’s LA life, to the more human hues of her past with Edward, and the cruel vistas of his own neo-noir narrative. Tom Ford on Nocturnal Animals: ‘I’m conflicted about what I do’ GuardianĮxpanding confidently from the chamber piece confines of 2009’s A Single Man, Ford makes an impressive fist of mimicking the mood of Hitchcock, the skewed reality of Lynch, the grit of the Coen brothers, and the obsessive attention to detail of Kubrick. ![]() ![]() Meanwhile, flashbacks of Susan and Edward’s former life (a third story strand) find Laura Linney nearly stealing the show as the conservative mother from hell who taunts Susan about how alike they are, and who prophetically insists that “the things you love about now are the things you’ll hate in a few years…” Soon, this fictional world becomes more real than Susan’s waking-dream existence, with Michael Shannon breathing tangible, rasping life into Detective Andes, an end-of-the-line chain-smoker with a hacking cough and little patience for the niceties of law enforcement. ![]() And as Susan reads, Ford visualises – conjuring a dramatised version of the novel in which Gyllenhaal doubles as self-loathing husband and father, Tony Hastings, while Isla Fisher (whom audiences have long confused with Adams) is very smartly cast as Susan’s barely disguised stand-in, Laura Hastings. Having been captivated by Adams’s mesmerising performance in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, Ford here makes the most of that extraordinarily expressive face, focusing tightly on her all-but-still visage as she reads Edward’s increasingly harrowing work. Now that sobriquet has become the title of his as-yet-unpublished novel, which he has dedicated to her: a visceral, anguished tale (“it’s violent and it’s sad”) of brutal assault and ugly revenge in which a family are run off the road by rednecks in rural west Texas, with horrifying results. A sensitive soul whom Susan apparently abandoned in “horrible” circumstances, Edward used to call his wife a “nocturnal animal”. Out of the blue, Susan receives a package – a manuscript from her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), which promptly gives her a paper cut, significantly drawing blood. Financially, the couple are faltering emotionally, they are falling apart. After a notoriously jarring opening sequence (a slo-mo carnival of fleshy Americana), we meet Amy Adams’s pinched Susan Morrow, a disillusioned art dealer living in a glass-cage modernist LA house with her handsome creep husband, Hutton (Armie Hammer).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |