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Nightcrawler Movie Review

Nightcrawler is a 2014 neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Dan Gilroy and starring Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s one of the best crime movies of all time.

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“Why you pursue something is as

important as what you pursue“

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Louis Bloom, a petty thief, realizes that he can make money by capturing photographs of crime scenes and starts resorting to extreme tactics to get them. 2014 was an incredible year, one of the best of all time, but even that doesn’t justify the Academy’s almost total exclusion of Nightcrawler. The one nomination that it did receive was the most important one at least, which is the one for the screenplay.

This is one of the best screenplays of this decade. Many analysts debated the genre of this film. The drama and comedy elements are debatable, but for me this is a crime film with some strong thriller elements, especially near the end. Regardless of the genre, all of the elements worked and the themes resonate even more now than they did back in 2014.

It’s all about the thirsty news agencies who will stop at nothing to expand their viewership. What Lou did here was at first borderline, then truly criminal, yet he got away with it as these people working in these agencies have no morality and no shame. The shady practices were probably a bit exaggerated here, but still the film is a cautionary tale, so it works.

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It also counters racism in one excellent point about the death of rich white people driving more traffic, but above all else the film deals with sensationalism of these media and how they will do every single immoral, over-the-top detail necessary to drive traffic. Even more important is the film’s point that it’s the viewers’ fault for yearning for this type of morbid content. It’s easy to point blame to the people in power, but it’s crucial that regular people don’t crave and support this content, and then the media wouldn’t have the need to create it.

It is a foregone conclusion by now that Jake Gyllenhaal’s exclusion from the Best Actor race this year was one of the biggest snubs in Oscar history. He deserved to win, not just get nominated, so this constitutes a major snub. In what just might be his career-best work, Gyllenhaal played one of the worst human beings ever put on screen. Menacing, heartless and genuinely disturbing, Lou shows no remorse and no humanity. The film cleverly depicts a monstrous man as being extremely smart, conniving and competent while also being a sickeningly sweet talker. Jake made all of his scenes count as he was magnetic throughout.

Riz Ahmed is also terrific in one of his earlier roles and what happened to his character was simply incredibly tragic to witness. That scene was surely horrifying as it was the one moment where the antagonist turned into a true murderer. The shootout and car chase were so thrilling, but the ending was haunting because it let him off the hook. Rene Russo is also terrific as another highly unlikable, genuinely terrible human being whose obsession with viewership makes her brush aside the morality of all the footage.

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Nightcrawler should have developed its two supporting characters more and the first half is definitely slower in pace. The humor that is there is very good, but it was so sparse that its inclusion felt odd and inconsistent with the rest of the picture. Still, the editing, direction from Gilroy, storytelling and emotional and thematic resonance were all masterful here while the dark cinematography was fitting for the material, though admittedly not appealing for the eye.