Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Directed by Tom Ford
Susan Morrow receives a book manuscript from her ex-husband – a man she left 20 years earlier – asking for her opinion of his writing. As she reads, she is drawn into the fictional life of Tony Hastings, a mathematics professor whose family vacation turns violent.
42 connections found
View:
42 films that influenced Nocturnal Animals
What critics say influenced Nocturnal Animals
Which is interesting, because his novel is such a hokey, basic cable-ready Deliverance plot that you almost wonder if it’s meant as a commentary on her terrible taste (poor Michael Shannon plays a great character trapped inside this meta-turd).
And in the pages of the book, she imagines Edward as its antagonist, Tony Hastings, a man whose equally red-headed wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) are taken from him in a road confrontation with West Texas deplorables straight out of “Breakdown” or “Deliverance.”
In a sequence that combines the horrors of Duel (1971) and Deliverance (1972), Tony and his family are victimized on the isolated rural highway by a car of leering rednecks—Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Lou (Karl Glusman), and Turk (Robert Aramayo)—who eventually cause their cars to bump into each other and force Tony off the road.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson lends a couple of new shadings to Deliverance menace.
The storytelling is both more refined and more brutishly personal, and the film strikes a balance between inscrutability and accessibility, between Lynch-ian art horror and Deliverance-like exploitation.
He and his wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) are driving in the scrubs of West Texas when a group of hillbillies, led by a psycho named Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, playing the role as if someone told him about “Deliverance” but he never actually saw the movie), force them off the road.
The granddaddy of them all is “Blue Velvet,” the great postmodern Hitchcockian noir that turned pulp sensation into a surrealist high.
Clearly borrowing from Dennis Hopper’s performance as Frank Booth in Lynch’s Blue Velvet , Taylor-Johnson nevertheless crafts one of the year’s most frightening villains.
The whole sequence plays like one of those superior yuppie-in-peril movies from the early 1980s, Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, say, or David Lynch’s Blue Velvet .
Try to imagine what it must have been like for Alma Reville to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s creepy obsessions play out in Vertigo and you might have some idea of what’s in store for you in Nocturnal Animals.
At times it has the desperate power of “Vertigo”; in moments it echoes David Lynch.
In a sequence that combines the horrors of Duel (1971) and Deliverance (1972), Tony and his family are victimized on the isolated rural highway by a car of leering rednecks—Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Lou (Karl Glusman), and Turk (Robert Aramayo)—who eventually cause their cars to bump into each other and force Tony off the road.
Advertisement
At times the score is reminiscent of something out of a Hitchcock movie; at other times it reminded me of “Basic Instinct” and other such trash.
Some close-ups have a megawatt gleam redolent of Douglas Sirk circa Magnificent Obsession (1954).
This melodramatic yet nihilistic thriller unfolds in two distinct yet connected locations and mindsets, like a collision between Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind and David Lynch’s Lost Highway.
The whole sequence plays like one of those superior yuppie-in-peril movies from the early 1980s, Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, say, or David Lynch’s Blue Velvet .
Advertisement
Equivalent to the intimate sweep and subtly rattling emotional power of Michelangelo Antonioni's towering "L'Avventura," "Nocturnal Animals" is bold and breathtaking, a profound human tragedy with a devil's wink.
Without giving it away, an incident that begins on an open highway in the middle of the night evokes the same everyday terror as Michael Haneke's Funny Games.