Film Review | Nightcrawler

The film of the hour is doubtlessly Nightcrawler – a sharp and uncompromising satire about tabloid journalism starring Jake Gyllenhall that delves into a dark, thematically mature underbelly untouched by the myriad superhero adaptations and big-name reboots currently cluttering up our screens.

In a perfect world this film – topical but never preachy, intelligent but always entertaining – will be mowing down box office records. But as the film itself will harrowingly suggest, the world we live in is far from perfect – not least because it allows the likes of Lou Bloom (Gyllenhall) to exist and thrive in our midst.

For all intents and purposes, Bloom is a blank slate. A precarious worker willing to go to the extra mile, both in terms of labour and ethical make-up, Bloom sniffs an opportunity for his dogged skills in the morally murky world of Los Angeles crime journalism. Picking up a few tricks of the trade while looking over the shoulder of veteran journo Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) – who regales him with the immortal journalistic cliché, “if it bleeds it leads” – Bloom begins to carve a niche for himself as an amateur videographer.

Bloom’s enthusiasm wins him the interest of a morning news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo), though she’s initially sceptical about how much of a long-term investment he could be. Determined to climb to the top of his grisly profession, Bloom continues to up the stakes for himself by pursuing increasingly bloodier and more dangerous stories, eventually stringing along a desperate former junkie Rick Carey (Riz Ahmed) as his worryingly stupefied unpaid ‘intern’.

Gyllenhall lost a substantial amount of weight to embody the slithery, creepy personage of Lou Bloom, but it’s not just the bravura physical transformation that deserves our attention. Delivering his lines at a machine-like clip and not blinking once, he would have been a cartoon creation in lesser hands. Instead he’s a fascinating creature in the National Geographic sense: alluring and repellent in equal measure, he appears to be governed by an instinct whose brutal clarity can only be described as animal-like.

First time director Dan Gilroy (who is however something of a seasoned screenwriter) shoots the film as if it were one of the rough diamonds of 1970s American cinema. Its shady anti-hero instantly evokes the memory of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, and its almost exclusively nocturnal setting – dotted by oily, futile hints of neon – brings to mind the urban hellholes that are a cornerstone of this kind of crime drama.

Much like Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) came with no ‘origin story’ attached, so Lou’s opaque biography only helps to cement him as a creature removed from the rest of humanity, his ultimate ‘dark design’ unnervingly elusive. Which also means we’re free to interpret his motivations in a myriad ways.

Is he just another unfortunate by-product of the post-recession era, using his sociopathic tendencies to secure employment that is initially precarious but ultimately lucrative? And is his self-schooling over the internet (which he freely admits to Nina at one point) also a telling sign of the times?

The fact that Gilroy – who also wrote the film – never quite explains things away in these terms is what elevates the film above the kind of middlebrow fare you see paraded around during Oscar season.

And while Gilroy never masks his distaste for Bloom and co’s particular brand of journalism, his protagonist has the floor at all times: Gyllenhall is left to unspool Bloom at leisure, layer by appalling layer – performing the character, but never analysing him.

Sometimes, a monster is just a monster. But what a monster.