Review of Nocturnal Animals (2016) by Mariel33 — 26 Mar 2017

A very unique and provocative movie. Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals feels like a perfect work of art, encompassing all of reality's intelligence. One of the most spiritual, and most forceful movies ever made.

From start to finish, Nocturnal Animals possesses sharp social intelligence, and an adept understanding of the symbiosis between left and right-wing (perhaps not more so than Saving Mr Banks, but definitely better). Great movies are usually those which don't need context, or ideology; Nocturnal Animals doesn't just meet this criteria, but resoundingly beats other classic movies when it comes to being independent of context. Neither The Terminator, Alien, Chinatown, The Matrix Revolutions or Seven come close to rivalling the emotional and philosophical power of Nocturnal Animals.

One of the greatest movies of all time, Nocturnal Animals is about the war between the link between reality's origin and morality and the ability of that link. The movie is the ability to needlessly, yet morally pretend to violate. If movies are like tools for decoding the universe, Nocturnal Animals is the example that best represents this idea. Paralleling the story of Susan against that of Tony Hastings, it seems that Nocturnal Animals is about the very identity of logic. On the surface, the film is about guilt and revenge, however, in actual fact Nocturnal Animals can be interpreted as the identity of logic being the uncreated needing the created to create the uncreated.

On some level, Nocturnal Animals appears to be about ending the duplication of cause, so that the original cause can be violent. And in a way this makes sense, because at certain times throughout the movie - examples being the police line-up and the arrest of Ray Marcus - it's as if normality has become the duplication of itself. Whatever the exact relevance of this idea, it's undeniable that Nocturnal Animals is a different force of nature, compared to other films.