Their connection is often oblique to us - Susan's world has the cold, symmetrical perfection of her art galleries, where the world of Edward's novel is grimy, sun-soaked, flesh and blood.
The two stories - Edward’s novel and Susan’s memories - brush up against each other via certain visual grace notes. Woven improbably but deftly between the two time periods is a vivid presentation of Edward’s novel, in which a man named Tony (also played by Gyllenhaal), traveling with his wife (Isla Fisher, whose uncanny resemblance to Adams is put to canny use here by Ford) and daughter (Ellie Bamber), encounters a group of dangerous criminals on a deserted Texas highway. As she sits down to read this tale, Ford embraces the time-hopping of his previous film (2009's A Single Man) to bring Susan’s past and present to life. Inside that blood-drawing parcel is the manuscript of her ex-husband’s novel - a dark, deeply upsetting tale of violence, murder and revenge - and it’s dedicated to Susan. Not subtle! But writer/director Ford wields both subtlety and the broader gestures with equal skill, and he makes it work. Susan opens a package sent by her first husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), and immediately gets a paper cut. That all these things come with their own troubles - her gallery is struggling, her husband (Armie Hammer) is cheating - is not lost on her, but she seems resigned to her path. A woman who once loved someone deeply, and destroyed it for a chance at prosperity.
A woman who once burned with passion, who has now “become her mother” (her phrase), putting away the creative ideals of her youth and embracing respectability. Art gallery owner Susan Morrow (Adams) is a walking stereotype of compromise - a woman who once had artistic aspirations, but eventually went for the financial stability of exhibiting other people’s efforts. Parsing those concerns is at times a bit of a challenge - partially because of just how harrowing that second story is - but it's a seductive and worthwhile one.Īfter a title sequence which in the near future will be giphy’d to the ends of the earth - morbidly obese, naked women adorned in American flag iconography gyrate in hypnotic slow-motion - we meet the woman presenting this trashy spectacle. The nightmare story-within-the-story of Nocturnal Animals - a fictional thriller Amy Adams’ character is reading, written by her estranged ex-husband - is so legitimately gripping and terrifying that it often completely overshadows its own framing story, which is where Ford’s real thematic concerns lie. It is a horrifying situation which is to lead to a confrontation with a classic, laconic, Stetson-wearing Texas lawman, terrifically played by Michael Shannon.Heaven help us if Tom Ford ever decides to make a horror film. Because this is no feathery literary confection: it is a brutal west Texas crime thriller about a married man – Susan imagines Tony, that is, Jake Gyllenhaal in the role, who takes his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and his daughter Helen (Ellie Bamber) on a road trip on vacation across the remote desert, where they are terrorised by a wild gang of good ol’ boys led by the brutish Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The clash between supercool LA and this couldn’t be more jarring. While Walker is out of town for the weekend, Susan begins to read and Ford dramatises the novel in front of us. There is also another terrible issue in their pasts. Then she is astonished to receive, out of the blue, the manuscript of an unpublished novel from her first husband, Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal), a sweet, sensitive boy and wannabe writer from her Texas hometown whose heart she broke twice over: by leaving him for Walker, and by declaring he didn’t have the right stuff to be an author – that he was insecure and weak. Susan is successful, but her personal wealth derives chiefly from the business activities of her smoothie husband, Walker (Armie Hammer), with whom she is deeply unhappy. I concede there is an interesting visual echo in a later bar scene. That is misjudged, I think – a quasi-Lynchian freakout which doesn’t quite gel with the mood which is being set up.
Nocturnal animals ending explained movie#
The scene is Los Angeles where Susan (Amy Adams) is a successful gallery owner who appears to specialise in shocking and provocative conceptual pieces – and if I have a quarrel with the movie (a quarrel I’m setting aside because of how much pleasure the film gave me) it is that this world is a bit too parodically and grotesquely represented, especially in the bizarre sequence over the opening credits.
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