Fashion designer Tom Ford’s second film, Nocturnal Animals, is fine.
It is a semi-convincing gothic about modern America — urban but fatally tied to a rural past, prosperous but insecure, intellectual but campy and incredibly violent. It uses the grotesquery of vintage Southern gothic literature, remixed with Sex and the City platitudes about love and ambition, to make a weird, hyper-specific portrait of what Amy Adams’ character Susan refers to as a culture of “all junk.”
(Here’s your SPOILER warning.)
It is also, unfortunately, full of nauseating aesthetic choices such as the totally superfluous recurring image of a raped and murdered woman’s naked butt and legs arranged artfully on a red velvet sofa. (The sofa is in a pit next to an abandoned mobile home in the middle of rural Texas, where one generally keeps very expensive furniture.) This does not make the movie garbage, but it does remind me that it might behoove Hollywood to start letting women direct movies at some kind of substantial proportion.
It is not of crucial importance to me that you see it, unless you don’t currently believe that Jake Gyllenhaal is the best actor alive. In that case, you must.