(USA, 117 min.)
Written and directed by Dan Gilroy
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Bill
Pullman
“How much do you want it,” asks Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal)
to Nina (Rene Russo) during a tense encounter in which the slimy freelance
videographer negotiates with the TV news producer over a particularly
titillating piece of footage. Lou, a petty thief and lowlife who catches a bug
for capturing sensational news stories after stumbling upon a fiery car wreck,
graduates to the league of news agents known as nightcrawlers who chase
ambulances and feed producers like Nina who live by the motto, “If it bleeds,
it leads.” Nina, actually, lives by the sensationalist FOX News-era philosophy
that pushes hard news to the point of fiction. Her idea of news, she says, is a
white woman running and screaming with blood spurting out of a gouge in her
throat. Nightcrawler knows how much
audiences have a taste for the rough stuff, and it gives them exactly what they
want.
This contemporary film noir from writer/director Dan Gilroy, making his directorial debut after penning flicks like Reel Steel and The Bourne Legacy, is an intense and electrifying ride into the night. Lou, wound-up and over-eager, seems ready to explode as he puts his pedal to the metal and drives from one horror show to the next. He goes around applying for jobs with breathless zeal and he rambles empty motivational rhetoric—the kind of vacant nonsense used by start-ups and by self-described ninjas on LinkedIn—as he searches for any means of employment in the empty LA-wasteland. His eagerness to excel in the job is plainly evident in the lines he’s willing to cross to get first-rate footage. Lou not only steps beyond the yellow tape, he gets right in the face of cops, witnesses, and victims—even dead ones—as he invades the privacy of others like a cockroach scurrying through refuse to feed its own appetite.
Lou’s appetite is the audience’s own appetite, though, for
the gruesome imagery of Nightcrawler
strips back sensationalism and offers something new. The metaphor of slowing
down as one approaches a car accident, feeling a mix or horror and perverse excitement,
is overused to point of cliché in writing, yet Nightcrawler truly conveys the perverse pleasure in getting an
upfront glimpse at gruesome carnage and of feeling so repulsed that one cannot
look away. The seediness of Lou’s ambition as palpable, but it’s impossible to
avert one’s eyes from a single frame of the film.
Gyllenhaal offers an impressive physical transformation,
looking gaunt and sickly, as his formerly robust physique is whittled down to
an anemic skeletal frame hidden underneath drab ill-fitting clothes. His
performance itself has the wired mania of an over-caffeinated insomniac made
edgy by a lack of sleep and too much sugar. Gyllenhaal gives one of the
weirdest, strangest, craziest, and strongest performances of the year and he
owns every frame of the film as the bug-eyed nightcrawler.
Gilroy matches Gyllenhaal’s maniacal performance with a sinister
style. Nightcrawler is almost
entirely nocturnal, as the few films that take place in the daytime mostly play
out in Lou’s dark rat-hole of an apartment. Outside, however, Gilroy takes a
cue from Michael Mann’s Collateral
and shoots the streets of LA with a cool grittiness. Cinematographer Robert Elswit
shoots a world that exists in the shadows, a hidden nightlife that pulses only
with gaudy fluorescents and assaultive flashes made for advertising. The slick,
if sickly, nightvision of Nightcrawler
accentuates the bravura zaniness of Gyllenhaal’s performance by making his
eyes, especially his pupils, look extra crazy as Gilroy and Elswit frequently
reflect sharp bullets of light off Gyllenhaal’s wide eyes. He looks like rat,
or even a bloodshot vampire.
Lou’s after blood and there’s no doubt about it as he
consumes the system that feeds off his perverse video footage. He takes a
homeless, jobless upstart named Rick (Riz Ahmed) to accompany him as he chases
the police banner in search of the next story. Rick, like Lou, is another
product of a system that is thirsty for opportunity, as Lou’s hilarious job
pitch/interview, which feels aberrantly realistic in the age of unpaid
internships and sketchy start-ups, makes unhealthy demands and turns the needy
into pawns. Lou says he wouldn’t ask any of his underlings to do something that
he himself would not, but as Nightcrawler
cuts into the underbelly of LA in a digital media age, the line between what is
ethical and what is not becomes as fine as the border between two pixels.
Feeding Lou’s appetite, and eventually falling victim to it,
is the aggressive headline hungry Nina. Russo is terrific as the desperate
producer in a welcome and feisty comeback. There’s a delicious hint of Faye
Dunaway in Russo’s performance as the demands of the job become fanatical and
Nina experiences a high like a shark sniffing blood. Nightcrawler feels like the Network
of the digital age in which moral codes and privacy lines are virtually
obsolete. Anyone can film a murder and upload it to the Internet these days and
contemporary history, like the case of Luka Magnotta, shows that current
audiences will consume the most depraved footage available. The ugliness of Nightcrawler’s satire is revoltingly
real.
This devilish contemporary noir, saturated in media and verbosely in your face, is an intense
and atmospheric thriller. The film lets Gyllenhaal come out of hiding in one of
his best performances yet. The dark, gripping Nightcrawler is one of 2014’s best: You’ll want it, and you’ll want
it bad!
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Nightcrawler is now in theatres from Elevation Pictures.
