Review of Nightcrawler (2014) by Heatherm — 26 Feb 2015

Nightcrawler is the compelling and disturbing story of a sociopath gradually getting better at manipulating those around him. Jake Gyllenhaal was incredible--I was shocked by how completely unattractive he made himself for this movie, adopting the role of the extremely creepy, sociopathic protagonist, constantly spouting off tired motivational business truisms in the most off-putting way imaginable (not to mention the way he abused and exploited his single employee and coerced Nina into having sex with him). Other user reviews have noted that you need to suspend a little disbelief for this movie, and I think that's true--in particular, the quick scenes where Gyllenhaal's character suddenly achieves success and all his equipment is enormously updated was too sudden to be financially credible, even accounting for the sparseness with which he lives his life otherwise.

I think what made this movie such a refreshing watch for me was the difficulty I had predicting what the final outcome was going to be, as well as what I wanted it to be. I spent a lot of the movie wondering how this was going to end, in that I could clearly envision an ending where something backfires, and he's killed or injured while trying to fix a shot. However, that end goes instead to Bill Paxton's character partway through the movie, while Gyllenhaal gets away with everything. In a weird way, I found this much more satisfying than for him to get his demise. Sometimes it's nice to see someone completely awful achieve success in what he sets out to do. It also allowed the movie to end on that darkly humourous note of, "I won't ask you to do anything I wouldn't do.