Nocturnal animals cast1/28/2024 ![]() There is an unwholesome kind of toxic deliciousness in this film: a vodka kick of pure malice. What an audacious, uninhibited performance from Tom Ford, and such great work from Adams, Gyllenhaal, and Shannon and Linney. And there is a glorious scene with Susan and her reactionary, Martini-sipping mamma, wonderfully played by Laura Linney. There are tremendous flashbacks, triggered incongruously by the grisly crime-genre shocks, that carry Susan back to the decisions she made and unmade in her youth. The film stars Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher, Armie Hammer, Laura Linney, Andrea. Now Playing: Nocturnal Animals Now Playing: Nocturnal Animals Focus Features Release Date: November 18, Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Amy Adams. The younger person, reaching out maliciously from the past, mocks this bland victory with memories of the idealism you have abandoned, the youthful beauty and hope you have lost and the sickening inevitability of becoming like the older generation you once despised. Nocturnal Animals is a 2016 American neo-noir psychological thriller 5 6 film written, produced, and directed by Tom Ford in his second feature, based on the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. As an older person, you avenge the slights and reversals of struggling youth by getting rich and successful. Nocturnal Animals is also about the revenge of the past on the present and present on the past. It is Edward’s furious way of making her feel something, anything, about him. ![]() The book is about revenge and it is revenge: a cherry bomb of rage and malice lobbed into Susan’s perfect little life. Here is what happens when the weak guy decides to get tough. Of course, the theme of revenge begins, inexorably, to emerge. It also reminded me somewhat of the truly horrible climax of Bruno Dumont’s movie Twentynine Palms. Susan Morrow receives a book manuscript from her ex-husband a man she left 20 years earlier asking for her opinion of his writing. Edward is putting his ex-wife and us through an unspeakable ordeal, a little bit like Spielberg’s Duel, but perhaps closer to a European nightmare, like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games – which incidentally came out after Wright’s novel. Susan is horrified, and we feel her horror. It is a nightmarish situation that leads to a confrontation with a classic, laconic, stetson-wearing Texas lawman, tremendously played by Michael Shannon. Director Tom Ford and cast members Aaron Taylor Johnson, Michael Shannon. ![]() This is no feathery literary confection: it is a brutal west Texas crime thriller like something Jim Thompson could have written, about a family man called Tony – Susan imagines Edward, that is, Jake Gyllenhaal in the role – who takes his wife Laura ( Isla Fisher) and his daughter Helen (Ellie Bamber) on a road trip vacation across the remote desert, where they are terrorised by a feral gang led by the brutish Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Find Nocturnal Animals Film stock photos and editorial news pictures from Getty. Susan begins to read and Ford dramatises his manuscript right in front of us. (In Wright’s novel she is a college professor, not an art dealer, so the literary judgment was perhaps more cutting.) There is another terrible issue in their pasts, invented here by Ford. But the scalpel-steel chill that left some of A Single Man's critics cold, works with, rather than against, the material.She is astonished to receive, out of the blue, the manuscript of an unpublished novel from her first husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), whom she hasn’t heard from in nearly 20 years: a sweet, sensitive boy from her Texas hometown whose heart she broke twice over: by leaving him for her wealthy second husband, and by declaring he didn’t have the right stuff to be an author – that he was insecure and weak. It's impossible not to notice that the cast are all a bit too prepossessing or that the film is overly aestheticised (victims of gruesome sexual crimes have seldom looked so pretty). A clatter of engaging subplots and briefly glimpsed characters – meet Laura Linney’s dowager or Andrea Riseborough’s dismissive socialite in a hideous muumuu – might all be worked into spin-off films. What can it all mean?Įditor Joan Sobel’s Hitchcockian sense of timing ensures that transitions between the competing strands are smooth. She begins to replay scenes from their courtship and clipped marriage. Tony survives the ordeal (though seems to wish he hadn’t) and teams up with a cowboy cop (Michael Shannon, in tremendous form) to track down the perpetrators.īack in Los Angeles, Susan, pacing elegantly and fretfully against her full-wall windows, is both enthralled and increasingly discombobulated by her ex-husband’s novel. Despite his pretty-boy features, their brutish leader, Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), wastes no time in kidnapping the women.
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