Nightcrawler, the astonishingly deft and confident debut feature from director Dan Gilroy, is a discomfiting film about a vile individual. Unctuous opportunist Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is not a roguish antihero, anguished wrongdoer, or even a charming, villainous bastard. He’s more like an amphibious alien wearing a human skin. Unemployed in part due to his off-putting demeanor, Lou stumbles quite by accident into the world of Los Angeles freelance crime journalism (a.k.a. “nightcrawling”). Arming himself with a cheap camcorder and police scanner, he prowls the nocturnal streets in search of violent crime and gruesome accidents. Soon he’s peddling footage to a desperate local news director (Rene Russo) and hiring an equally desperate street hustler (Riz Ahmed) as an assistant. Neither seems aware of just how prepared Lou is to stride over ethical and legal boundaries with aplomb.
Viewers who need to root for a noble figure will likely find Nightcrawler repellent, but for others the film will captivate. This is in no small part due to the startling Gyllenhaal, who is having a banner acting year between this film and his fantastic dual roles in Enemy. He and Gilroy, who also penned Nightcrawler’s screenplay, create something at once repulsive and enthralling, a pitch-black work balanced on a razor’s edge between thriller and satire. The film owes a debt to Ace in the Hole’s cynicism and Taxi Driver’s nihilism, but Nightcrawler’s overall tone most readily evokes Brian De Palma’s filmography, especially his early 1980s features, with all the tawdriness and dizzying tension that entails. What most distinguishes Gilroy’s film from De Palma’s works is the absence of a resolute detective figure or naïve damsel. In an awful city full of awful people, protagonist Lou is the most awful of all, a soulless assemblage of slimy smiles, self-help pabulum, and deadly ambition.
Nightcrawler opens Friday, October 31 in wide release.
