Director Dan Gilroy’s debut film Nightcrawler has all the trappings of a straightforward modern thriller—a metropolis filmed largely at nighttime, an inexhaustible bank of criminals ready to shoot n’ loot for the camera, a sociopathic lead played with goggle-eyed precision by Jake Gyllenhaal. But the film has more to give than just a generous dose of adrenaline, as it also examines society’s addiction to gruesome video journalism. Gilroy’s vision of modern America gets a kick out of witnessing atrocity—ideally first-hand, but also on newsreels consumed daily like cereal over breakfast. While the film is relentlessly pessimistic in its estimations of human value, it never becomes preachy but remains both entertaining and self-consciously voyeuristic throughout.
The movie begins with Lou Bloom (Gyllenhaal) escaping a brush with a policeman and driving past a car crash where two more officers are pulling a woman from the wreckage. Entranced, Bloom stares as a team of cackling cameramen pull up to film the rescue, planting the seeds for his career change from petty thief to “nightcrawler,” a type of freelance video journalist who operates only at night. He buys some equipment and gets to work, twiddling his thumbs in his car with a hired sidekick (Riz Ahmed) until they intercept radio intel about an emergency grisly enough to interest local news broadcasters. The duo flits from disaster to disaster, filming as much gore as they can. Their manifesto of “if it bleeds, it leads” highlights the hysterical sensationalism of modern TV stations, competing for viewership by means of the most lurid footage imaginable.
The film rests heavily on the scrawny shoulders of Gyllenhaal, who lost weight for the role. His character’s diminutive size, concave cheeks and bulging eyes are key visual indicators of his psychosis, which gradually reveals itself as the film unfolds. Gyllenhaal’s performance is an ornate choreography of tics, smirks, and sudden eye-glints. His lines, however, are often eerily comical, delivered in a robotic litany, and knowingly littered with the clichés he has picked up from online self-help guides. Told that he doesn’t “get” people, Bloom replies quietly that he understands them just fine, but just doesn’t “like them” very much.
The film’s portrayal of human depravity is unremitting, almost to the point of exhaustion. But Nightcrawler is also a beautiful film, shot in a sultry, sulky Los Angeles whose color palette frequently evokes that of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Even if you don’t buy into Nightcrawler‘s darker observations on human nature, the film is worth seeing merely for the bewitching way in which it captures the loneliness of the modern metropolis.