Critics reviews

The murky fascination of Nocturnal Animals lies in the film's inability to follow its own advice. Boundaries become blurred with regard to any number of Ford's central themes and preoccupations... Ford's movie doesn't manage fully coherent or convincing answers... But in so visibly trying and failing to do so, Nocturnal Animals also suggests its director's desire to push himself significantly further and harder than was the case with the chamber piece confines of A Single Man (2009).

The first truly Trumpist film of its era, this disgusting and absurd neo-noir, by the fashion designer Tom Ford, flaunts its malice and misogyny, presenting them as criticism of the art world and its hangers-on. Ford cribs from David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Sam Peckinpah as if no one has ever seen films by any of them before and he's doing the audience a favor.

I've not met many people who love this movie as much as I do, but I think Tom Ford managed a difficult feat -- crafting a nerve-racking thriller but a _ridiculous_ nerve-racking thriller that _has_ to know how absurd it is. It just has to. And if it doesn't, I don't care because the picture works -- both as an unreliable narrator story, telling of grief and revenge, and a look at an empty art world where we have no idea if anyone is as talented as they think they are.

Ford's sophomore effort, a sardonic essay on the patron class's obsession with poor-white-trash gothic, is a heady, disturbing, sometimes unpleasant affair. It's an unsparing watch that is rendered both an intellectual and a sensual delight by its directorial refinement and tact.

The great joke is that it's this center-most fantasy that Ford stages with the conventionally straight face, suggesting that our deepest desires amount to recycled bits of kitsch that we've cumulatively digested. This lurid road thriller takes on a life of its own, though, particularly when a cop played by Michael Shannon arrives on the scene, unforgettably eaten up by disease and self-loathing.

Gyllenhaal's half of the movie is far more compelling for its own sake than is Adams' half, which involves a whole lot of glamorous moping. It's the way the two halves intersect, however, that truly resonates, provocatively suggesting that creativity often functions as an upscale, passive-aggressive act of revenge. Ford isn't yet as accomplished a film director as he is a fashion designer, but he's getting there.

Tom Ford puts a microscope to the moneyed Los Angeles art world and once more goes to the core of human existence. You can actually feel the chill come over his heroine's soul. The film cross cuts her journey with the fictional novel her husband has written. This requires Mr. Ford to simultaneously deliver a violent genre thriller, which, in his hands becomes an instant noir classic.

The story-within-the-story is troubling, yes, but it almost feels like a parody of southern sleaze... The art world is depicted with similar reliance on cliché—everyone is pretty but vapid, and all the art is cringingly obvious, from images of overweight dancing nude women that adorn the film's opening credits to a huge painting that just says "REVENGE." Nocturnal Animals wants to be provocative but its scattered parts all add up to something a bit silly.

The meta-plot can afford to go beyond the bounds of what is strictly plausible, because within the world of the film it is a fiction. This could have ended up being a weakness of the film's structure; in theory it should limit our investment in the plot of the meta-narrative. However, both the quality of the acting within the novel sections of the film and the appeal of the conceit itself are so high that the gamble pays off.

Combining elements of Hitchcockian noir, Sirkian melodrama, and Coen-esque neo-western, the film dovetails three story lines... Ford and ace cinematographer Seamus McGarvey strikingly render each thread, but the transitions can be awkward (Adams's character takes a shower at the same time that Gyllenhaal's takes a bath, etc).

This may or may not be one of the best films of 2016, but it's absolutely one of the most interesting. Or maybe I should say least boring. If I sound puzzled, it's because I am. Sort of... "Nocturnal Animals" is a work of exceptional, undeniable craft, but it's also a movie that's meant to stick to you a little bit. Indeed, so vehement is Ford in articulating his vision at times that you think he'd be disappointed by a viewer that wasn't at least a little bit angry with him over the movie.

In the end, Nocturnal Animals barely feels like a film made by a human being. You could just dub it a "stylish exercise" and call it a day. But I just can't shake the fact that Ford somehow wants it to be more. The movie feels glazed and remote, a surface with all the identifying fingerprints polished off. What would it look like if Ford had left them on?