In Tom Ford’s latest movie Nocturnal Animals, which was released in French theatres on the 4th of January 2017, Amy Adams plays a woman who reads a manuscript written by her ex-husband. But, very soon, fiction and reality intertwine in this fast-paced and fearsome thriller which depicts literature as an extremely dangerous weapon.
© Focus Features
Seven years after he directed his first feature film A Single Man; this year, Tom Ford got back behind the camera and produced Nocturnal Animals, an innovative and fascinating psychological thriller. In this new movie, the American fashion designer and director plunges the spectators in a deeply disturbing love story. Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, a high-society art gallery owner who lives in a beautiful district and goes to fashionable parties but who seems to be fed up with her perfect life as well as with her marriage with a very busy entrepreneur. One day, she starts reading a manuscript entitled Nocturnal Animals which was sent to her by her ex-husband Edward Sheffield (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who writes detective novels.
Yet, throughout the movie, we keep thinking that she should never – ever – have opened this book. In fact, at the second she starts reading, she gets trapped in a compelling and ultraviolent narrative that brings back the memories of the life she used to live and leads to question the choices she made. So, this book reads like a sort of revenge. Moreover, as the double story unfolds, Tom Ford plunges us in a riveting but frightening atmosphere and manages to create and maintain a thrilling suspense which essentially rests on the great work of Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal who is as brilliant and convincing as he was in Demolition.
Nevertheless, even if the movie is really enjoyable, from the very beginning, the spectators feel as lost and bad as Susan does and they keep wondering what is truth and what is fiction. So, after we watched Nocturnal Animals, we concluded that, for the sake of one’s mental sanity, one should not, under any circumstances, read a manuscript written by someone one used to be in a relationship with. Of course, this implies having an ex who writes books and this is rather rare. Yet, you should keep this piece of advice in the back of your minds… After all, who knows what can happen.
Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford, USA, 2016, 1h56, released in the United Kingdom on the 4th of November 2016, in the United States of America on the 1st of December 2016, in Lebanon on the 9th of December 2016 and in France on the 4th of January 2017.