While I wish I was reviewing a movie about the X-Men character of the same name, 2014's Nightcrawler is in fact a much more disturbing tale than that of my favorite teleporting blue mutant. Nightcrawler has us following Louis Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, as he navigates and rises through the ranks of news journalism. Specifically, Bloom wants to take on the task of a "Nightcrawler", someone who rolls around town late at night with a video camera, waiting for some sort of event to come through on the police scanner to video tape it, and then sells it to a news station for use in their broadcast. This can include car accidents, fires, murder and various other crimes.
Describing the tone of this movie is hard to exactly nail. I catch myself calling it something like charmingly disturbing. Nightcrawler is an excellent foray into the genre of thrillers, something writer/director Dan Gilroy is pretty well-versed in, having helped make two of my favorite recent thrillers, as his brother writer/director Tony Gilroy made Michael Clayton and Duplicity, and wrote the Bourne series. This family knows the thriller genre, and it shows. What we get here in Nightcrawler is an excellent turn from Jake Gyllenhaal as this...oddly likable sociopath who's goal is to start at the bottom rung and efficiently work his way to the top.
This movie lives and dies on Gyllenhaal's performance. He is in every scene of this movie, and he makes this character come alive. Someone less skillful would have teetered the movie to either too dramatic or too funny, but Gyllenhaal does an amazing job making Bloom a character who's not only amiable, but also downright terrifying. I keep stating that Bloom is charming and that he could be played too funny, and the truth is that Bloom as a character is absolutely terrifying, he's a sociopathic monster who we watch slide into increasingly dark pathways throughout the run time of this movie.
However, Bloom as a character is written in this odd, stilted way. He's this guy who presents himself as a super personable dude to the outside world, someone who is non-stop goal oriented and who endears himself to "business-like" codes of conduct in everything he says and believes. It's humorous to watch the way he talks. It comes across as incredibly uncomfortable and awkward, but the performance is so earnest, you have a hard time not believing that he believes what he says to be true. And that I think is the key to Gyllenhaal's performance. He plays Bloom so earnestly that you have a hard time not liking him on some level for being so dead-on goal oriented. Knowing exactly what he wants and figuring out exactly how to get it.
As uncomfortable and horrifying it is to see Bloom do these increasingly worse things in order to be the best Nightcrawler in town, it's also on some level hard not to respect that each calculated move he makes indeed rises him up the ladder of success to exactly where he wants to be. It seems that he learns something in every scene, and he's applying it to the next scene. It's utterly fascinating to watch. I absolutely love this movie. It's excellently shot and composed, the entire cast does a great job and the story is entirely watchable. Much like any good thriller, it's a slow burn, but at no point in time did I ever feel like turning it off, it had me hooked from the beginning with it's interesting subject matter, and watching our main character delve deeper into that world was enough to keep me on the line for the just under two hour run time.
If you like thrillers or movies that get under your skin, check out Nightcrawler.
