Movie Review: Nocturnal Animals (English)

Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford's sophomore outing as a director, is a stylish, meticulously detailed affair. He is after all a very well-known fashion designer, isn't he? Still I bet you would be hard pressed to find a movie as handsome and glacial as this. Not even The Revenant, with all its breathtaking, icy natural pulchritude. Every frame is exquisite, almost painterly, at the same time extravagant, sleek and ultra-modern, nary a thing out of place. Except for the lives of Tony and Susan. An art dealer in Los Angeles, Susan's anything but the glossy picture-perfect world she inhabits. Her marriage to Hutton is in shambles as is her profession, going through the motions despite knowing she doesn't have what it takes to be an artist and disillusioned with leading a lie of a life.

But all of it changes when she receives a manuscript of an yet-to-be-published novel from her ex-husband Edward - titled Nocturnal Animals, so named after her nickname. Faced with a sudden prospect of seeing him after years, she settles in to read, and it's at this point a parallel narrative emerges, that of a Texan family's road trip gone awry, and Susan becomes so consumed by the dark, visceral tale of murder and revenge, she finds her real and fictional worlds collide (through subtle use of iconography and the character of Tony, the husband of the family in the novel, who later is revealed to be her own Edward), even as she wonders why he chose to dedicate this book to her. That is, until she realises it's his way of exacting revenge on her for deserting him and slighting his literary aspirations during their early years as a married couple in New York City. Combining elements of intrigue and neo-noir, Tom Ford weaves a chilling psychodrama that gets fantastic purchase from its ensemble cast and Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski, who mesmerises with a hypnotic musical score.