L.A. gallery owner Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is a beautifully dressed, existentially hollow woman whose past comes back to haunt her in the form of a manuscript by spurned ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). Though the trailers make "Nocturnal Animals" look like some kind of thriller, it's about as thrilling as my left foot.
Writer-director Tom Ford brings a lot of style and not much else. The movie moves at a lackadaisical pace, the action primarily happening in the novel Susan reads, which is basically a "Death Wish" ripoff about a husband seeking revenge over the rape and murder of his wife and daughter. Gyllenhaal also plays the protagonist in the story-within-a-story. Occasional flashes into the "real world" include Susan reading the book in various parts of her house, thinking about how it was her mistakes (infidelity and a secret abortion) that ended her marriage. The line between what happened in the past and what Edward writes about in his novel is not hard to see. There's a reason he sent her this particular story, and that reason is revenge.
Taken at face value, "Animals" just comes across as profoundly goofy. It is so unimaginably pretentious, so bleak and nasty and without any depth. The movie is about an angry artistic guy getting revenge on his ex-wife by writing a mean story about her? It's like a Twitter neckbeard's fantasy glamoured up and made into an "art film." Haven't they taken enough from us this year?
You divorced me! You were mean! I'm going to stab you with this clumsy metaphor! Rape!
Anyway ...
During a discussion with my wife Aly about the movie, I was surprised to find that she actually found a lot more merit in the film than I did. If you take the movie as entirely within Susan's perspective, it follows that her reading of the novel, including her Edward as the protagonist, reflects her own guilt more than his anger. She's going through a second divorce at the start of the movie, or about to; her hot new husband, Hutton (Armie Hammer), is clearly cheating on her, as she did on Edward. So with that in mind, it makes the two narratives blend in a way that feels much more intimately about Susan and her newfound understanding of the pain she put Edward through so many years before.
I think that reading has merit and actually makes "Nocturnal Animals" an interesting, provocative thriller. But I'm not sure that's how the movie is going to play to every audience, and it's not how it played to me the first time I watched it. Don't be fooled; unless you're willing to give this movie a big benefit of the doubt and contribute more effort than Ford or his crew did, you're likely to be disappointed.