"Nocturnal Animals" is the second directorial work of well-known designer Tom Ford, full of cold heterochromatic beauty, but at the end, it makes people feel that some old scar is stinging again, and the warm blood is dripping out.
Susan (Amy Adams) and her husband Horton (Amy Hammer) seem to be living a good life, but they face financial and marital crises.
At this moment, Edward (Jack Gyllenhaal), susan's ex-husband, who has not been in touch for a long time, sends Susan a final version of his new novel, hoping that she will find time to read it.
The novel features a couple (Jack Gyllenhaal and Ella Fischer) and their daughter who, while driving at night, encounter a few hooligans on a sparsely populated Texas highway and begin a nightmare experience. In the process of reading, Susan constantly recalls the past and life choices.
The title of the novel is "Nocturnal Animals", and the content of the book is presented in the film as an image, like a play within a play. "Nocturnal Animals" is both the name of Edward's new book and his past nickname for Susan.
The theme of the novel is how a man faces the pain of the spine and how to take revenge. Susan must have known in her heart that the story was extremely relevant to her, so in Susan's imagination, the protagonist of the novel, Tony, is Edward, and the protagonist's wife and daughter are like Susan and her daughter, with red hair (Amy Adams/Ella Fischer's casting is really a stroke of genius).
Through the interlacing of the novel's content and Susan's memories, the audience can examine their past through the perspective of Edward and Susan, and also string together the emotions of the two who have not seen each other in 19 years.
The tones and scenes are designed to reflect the mood of the characters, such as the yellow sand in the plot of the novel, the iron gray tones of Susan's Los Angeles residence, and the hazy atmosphere of Susan's retrospective of Edward's old days.
The main axis of several plots is an out-of-control life - Edward can't make Susan happy, Tony can't protect his wife and children, susan's indifference to her husband and the helplessness of the affair.
From Susan's point of view, after all these years, her heart has gradually come to a bottom of her own problems - what she wants is actually conflicting, which almost makes her doomed to be unhappy and dissatisfied forever.
Even if you get the marriage and work achievements you want, you lose interest and enthusiasm for them when you get them; even if you know that you are better off than many people in the world, you still can't feel happy.
Therefore, in the face of her husband's infidelity and financial crisis, Susan, although sad, is extremely calm, and seems to be very prepared to accept all this and does not want to struggle.
I think Susan understood what kind of fate her character determined, and knew that her mother was right and that she could do nothing about it.
From the first act, "Nocturnal Animals" directly gives the audience a horse, four fat naked female dancers, although the extra flesh on their bodies has been loose and sagging, but they are very happy to hold the national flag and scratch their heads and dance.
I will be so shocked not just a visual impact, but so blunt and targeted irony, the current "beauty" is just blindly pursuing to bone, to be thin, for the fat posture only disgust and rejection, and the first act of the movie is directly inserted into the core ills, bloody point out this social pathology.
The film begins with a staggering exhibition by Susan, showing that she has become extremely bored in this "perfect" world, and can no longer stand the emptiness and contrivance behind beauty. So her emotional pendulum began to drift away from her husband, who was like a male model in a suit, and swung back to Edward.
From Edward's point of view, it was another tragedy. His ex-wife used to believe that he had a "weak" personality, which became the main axis of his novels, and the male protagonist Tony's life was destroyed because of "weakness".
In the early part of the film, when the plot of the novel is just unfolding, in the audience's intuition, the wife of the protagonist played by Ella Fischer represents Susan.
But after watching and thinking, you will understand that the so-called "nocturnal animals" in the book refer to the cruel hooligans, and "nocturnal animals" is also the nickname that Edward used to give Susan (because she does not sleep at night), which is equivalent to in Edward's mind, the person who killed his wife and daughter is Susan.
Susan aborted And beat Edward's children, abandoned Edward and married Horton, killing his chances of having a happy family. The rapist in the novel says to Tony, "I fucked your wife and you were too weak to do anything about it.", as Edward imagined Horton would say to him.
After these injuries, when Edward finally "hardened", edward, who had always been weak in the past, died and was reborn as another nocturnal animal, lonely, strong, self-interested, and ruthless. Therefore, Edward finally kills the protagonist Tony in the story, metaphorically saying that he is no longer that kind of person. The dinner appointment at the end of the movie emphasizes this point even more.
At the end of the day, life made a big joke for Susan. She thought that Edward was weak and could not give her a happy married life, so she chose the standard "alpha man", always busy with work and business trips with Horton looking for prey.
More than a decade later, Horton found other emotional comforts, their marriage faltering, and Susan looked back to find that perhaps Edward was the right fit for her. However, Edward, who had been badly injured by her, could now be strong enough not to want her.
In the film, every scene after Susan leaves Edward is full of "armed", makeup, costumes, and manners are exquisite and perfect, so that Susan can hide behind her back, and the only scene where the audience sees her slightly want to withdraw her defense is when she forcefully erases lipstick in the mirror before going to Edward's appointment at the end of the film. It's a pity it's too late.
Nocturnal Animals also seems to be a slap in the face of traditional gender expectations. Society always expects men to be tough, to be "alpha men", to be aggressive; women to be thin, beautiful, and to find strong male protection.
Tom Ford, as a comrade who spent his childhood in Texas, USA, and a Democratic supporter who opposed the UNITED States to invade Iraq, he is probably no stranger to the expectation that "men should be strong", and you can imagine his boredom, so the beginning of the film first uses a female body that is completely opposite to the traditional aesthetics, shocking the audience's vision fiercely, and then using the "weakness" questions that Edward has encountered several times to force the audience to think about whether such narrow and single social expectations are justified.
Director Tom Ford's first work is "Single Man", exquisite scene arrangement, atmosphere creation, sad story, wonderful acting skills, let people shine on the film talent of this well-known designer, and "Nocturnal Animals" establishes him as a director worth looking forward to.
From the cinematography, soundtrack, scenes, costumes, performances (Michael Shannon, Laura Linni and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are especially wonderful), editing, screenwriting (Tom Ford concurrently), etc., you can see his care and high mastery, and I hope that he will continue to take time out to make movies in the future in addition to running the brand empire.