Nightcrawler (2014) Review: If It Bleeds, It Leads

Is Nightcrawler worth watching?

Yes. Nightcrawler is a sleek, deeply unnerving thriller about ambition without a conscience, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as its hero is among the most memorable of his career. Dan Gilroy turns nocturnal Los Angeles into a hunting ground and the local news business into its willing customer. The reservation is that its satire of television news is blunt: the film makes its point early and repeats it loudly, even as the tension keeps rising.

What is Nightcrawler about?

Nightcrawler follows Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a jobless, fiercely self-taught hustler scraping a living from petty theft on the margins of Los Angeles. One night he stumbles on a highway accident and watches freelance cameramen racing to film it, then sell the footage to local TV stations. Lou sees his calling.

Armed with a cheap camcorder and a police-radio scanner, he starts chasing crashes, fires and crime scenes across the city after dark. He hires a desperate young assistant, Rick (Riz Ahmed), and begins selling his footage to Nina (Rene Russo), a veteran news director at a struggling station who needs ratings as badly as he needs work. Bill Paxton plays a rival cameraman who has been in the game much longer.

Gilroy, a veteran screenwriter making his debut as director, wrote the film, which earned an Academy Award nomination for its original screenplay. It is an American production in English and runs 118 minutes.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s hollow-eyed hustler

The film belongs to Gyllenhaal. Gaunt, wide-eyed and unblinking, his Lou speaks in a relentless stream of self-help slogans and business jargon, as if he learned to be human from online courses. The effect is both funny and chilling. He is polite, patient and utterly without empathy, and Gyllenhaal never winks at the audience or signals that Lou knows how strange he is.

That commitment makes the film’s dark comedy work. Lou’s job interviews, negotiations and pep talks to Rick play like parodies of corporate motivation, and the gap between his cheerful vocabulary and his behaviour is the film’s sharpest joke. Riz Ahmed is excellent as Rick, whose nervous decency makes him the closest thing the film has to a moral centre, and Rene Russo gives Nina a brittle desperation that makes her far more than a willing accomplice.

Los Angeles after dark

Visually, Nightcrawler is superb. Robert Elswit’s photography turns the city into a sodium-lit maze of freeways, empty boulevards and glowing suburbs, beautiful and predatory at once. The film’s driving sequences have a real sense of speed and danger, and the night-time setting gives even quiet scenes an edge of menace.

James Newton Howard’s score takes an unusual approach, often swelling with uplifting, almost inspirational themes just as Lou does something troubling. The ironic effect underlines the film’s central idea: that Lou is living out a twisted version of the American success story.

Where the satire hits too hard

For all its craft, the film’s critique of television news is not subtle. Nina’s newsroom scenes spell out the business logic of fear-driven reporting in plain terms, and the characters who object to Lou’s methods can feel like mouthpieces. The thesis is clear within the first half-hour, and the rest of the film is more about escalation than discovery. What keeps it compelling is the suspense and Gyllenhaal’s performance rather than any new insight.

Who should watch Nightcrawler?

It is a strong choice for fans of dark, character-driven thrillers, neo-noir set in Los Angeles, and satire about media and ambition. It contains graphic crime-scene imagery, violence and a pervasive sense of menace, and is best suited to adults. At just under two hours it moves quickly.

If you like it, try these next:

• Collateral, Michael Mann’s night-time Los Angeles thriller, for another sleek ride through the city after dark.
• Good Time, a frantic, neon-soaked crime story following a desperate man over one long night.
• Uncut Gems, for another nerve-shredding portrait of a hustler who cannot stop.

The verdict

Nightcrawler is a gripping, stylish and genuinely disturbing thriller built around one of the great modern screen sociopaths. Its satire can be heavy-handed, but Gyllenhaal’s performance and Gilroy’s control of mood make it a modern cult classic well worth your time.

Rating: 4/5