Nocturnal Animals

With some of the rave reviews about Nocturnal Animals setting up possibly too-high expectations, it's best to go in with a wait and see attitude rather than anticipating being blown away. Sure, it's good and pretty clever, but not that clever, as some critics would have us believe. Based on the novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright, filmmaker and fashion designer Tom Ford (who also wrote the screenplay) offers up a starkly different work from his modest but probably superior debut, A Single Man. 

There's no denying that Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams are extremely watchable whatever they're in and their performances here are amazing. Gyllenhaal plays writer Edward, who sends ex-wife, Susan (Adams), his soon-to-be-published debut novel, titled Nocturnal Animals, to read. 

A bored art gallery curator whose husband is clearly being unfaithful to her on his trip out of town, Susan starts reading the book. We then go into the book for the harrowing and violent story about a man named Tony - also played by Gyllenhaal - who along with his wife (Isla Fisher) and teenage daughter are caught up in a nightmarish scenario when some erratic, drug-fuelled thugs terrorise them. These scenes are incredibly tense and confronting, but we're meant to pay attention to them as the writings of a guy who was cruelly rejected by Susan years ago. 

At the film's conclusion, we realise what's been going on in Edward's book but it's not all that difficult to work out and many viewers will be on top of it long before the supposed 'a-ha' moment. Still, it's nice to see an intelligent film with two charismatic leads, even though it jars with some strange and hard-to-fathom choices.