Tom Ford’s second feature, Nocturnal Animals, opens on a gallery show that tells you what kind of film you are in for: obese majorettes dancing vigorously while naked, and an audience of Los Angeles patrons deciding whether to be shocked. Susan Morrow owns that gallery. She has money, a marriage that is falling apart, and an ex-husband, Edward Sheffield, who has sent her a manuscript after nearly twenty years of silence. The novel is dedicated to her. It is called Nocturnal Animals, which was Edward’s nickname for her.
Trailer, via Focus Features.
Amy Adams Reads a Manuscript
Susan’s current husband, Hutton, is a businessman who is unfaithful. The manuscript arrives into that mess, and she reads it in one sitting. What she finds is a story about Tony Hastings, a mathematics professor on a road trip through West Texas with his wife, Laura, and their daughter, India. Three local troublemakers — Ray Marcus, Lou and Turk — force the family off the road.
What follows is the film’s hardest stretch. Ray and Turk kidnap Laura and India. Lou makes Tony drive Ray’s car to the end of a road and abandons him there. Tony evades Ray and Lou when they come back for him, reaches a farmhouse, and calls the police. Detective Roberto “Bobby” Andes takes the case. Together they find Laura and India near an abandoned shack, naked, raped and murdered. Tony is left with the guilt of a man who did nothing.
Michael Shannon as Bobby Andes
A year later, Andes calls Tony back. Lou has been caught in a botched robbery and charged as an accomplice in the murders. Turk was fatally shot in the same robbery. That leaves Ray. Andes arrests Ray, but the case against him is only circumstantial, and Ray is released. The film does not say what becomes of the charge, and neither will this review. What matters is that Andes, by then being pushed out of the job and diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, tells Tony he has little to lose and asks whether Tony is willing to skirt procedure to see justice done.
Shannon plays that scene with a flatness that makes it land. He is the best thing in the film, and the Academy agreed: he earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 89th Academy Awards. Aaron Taylor-Johnson won Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes for Ray Marcus, a performance that is all menace and no interior. Both are doing the same job from opposite ends.
The Two Movies Inside One
Nocturnal Animals is based on Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan, and Ford wrote, produced and directed the adaptation. The film cuts between Susan’s Los Angeles — cold, expensive, full of art that costs more than it means — and Tony’s West Texas, which is brown, hot and violent. The two halves are meant to rhyme. Edward wrote a story about a man who could not protect his family, and he mailed it to the woman who left him.
The rhyme is the whole idea, and it is also where the film strains. Susan’s world is thin. The gallery show, the unfaithful husband, the dinner with Anne Sutton — they exist to give the manuscript a reader, not to stand on their own. Ford is a better image-maker than he is a writer of women. Adams does what she can with a role that mostly requires her to look troubled over a book.
A Revenge Story Wearing an Art Film
The film premiered in main competition at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival on September 2, 2016, and won the Grand Jury Prize. Focus Features released it in North America on November 18, 2016. It grossed over $32 million worldwide and drew positive reviews, plus Golden Globe nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay. The British Academy also gave it nine nominations, which is a measure of how much craft the industry saw in it, not a measure of how well the story holds together.
That reception is generous. Nocturnal Animals is a revenge story wearing an art film’s clothes, and the clothes are very good. Ford’s compositions are precise, the West Texas sequences are genuinely frightening, and the tagline — “When you love someone you can’t just throw it away” — is the thesis stated plainly. But the film never earns the connection it insists on between Susan’s guilt and Tony’s failure. Edward’s novel is a threat dressed as a gift, and the movie knows it, but it does not know what to do with that knowledge except end.
What the Ending Does
The final scene is the film’s best argument for itself. Susan waits at a restaurant for Edward. He does not come. That is the answer to the manuscript, and it is cruel in a way the rest of the film only gestures at. Whether it lands depends on whether you bought Susan’s side of the story, and the film has not given you much to buy.
The Numbers Behind the Film
- Release: November 18, 2016, North America, Focus Features
- Runtime: 116 minutes
- Premiere: 73rd Venice International Film Festival, September 2, 2016 — Grand Jury Prize
- Worldwide gross: over $32 million
- Oscars: Michael Shannon, Best Supporting Actor nomination (89th Academy Awards)
- BAFTA: nine nominations
- Golden Globes: Best Director and Best Screenplay nominations; Aaron Taylor-Johnson won Best Supporting Actor
- Source novel: Tony and Susan by Austin Wright (1993)
How It Stacks Up
| Nocturnal Animals (2016) | The source novel | |
|---|---|---|
| Released | 2016 | 1993 |
| Title | Nocturnal Animals | Tony and Susan |
| Author / director | Tom Ford | Austin Wright |
| Central figure | Susan Morrow, gallery owner | Susan, the reader |
| Manuscript within | Nocturnal Animals, by Edward Sheffield | Tony and Susan, by Edward |
The comparison matters because Ford kept the structure and changed the surface. Wright’s book is about a woman reading; Ford’s film is about a woman being read. That shift is the director’s whole contribution, and it is a real one.
Nocturnal Animals is worth seeing for Shannon, for the West Texas stretch, and for a final scene that understands what the rest of the film only says. It is not worth seeing for Susan, who never becomes a person. Ford can build a frame. He has not yet built a woman to put in it.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
