Nocturnal Animals Tuesday 28th February 2017 Director: Tom Ford installations featuring morbidly obese female nudes dancing USA 2016 / 116 mins / Cert 15 (hello, David Lynch). Susan's success is superficial: She hates Starring: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal her job, hates that she's a manager and not an artist, and hates that her husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) is cheating on her. Stories of revenge from both past and present Into Susan's life comes an advance copy of a book. It's from intertwine with fictional horrors in this stylish Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), the starter husband she dumped psychological thriller and forgot nearly two decades ago, with encouragement from her rich, hard-drinking harridan of a mother (Laura Tom Ford is drunk on movies. Like the fashion icon he is, Linney, so good you want to kill her). The novel is dedicated the director brings a keen eye for style, texture and design to to Susan. Sweet – only it isn't. The tome tells the story of the images he creates. But bruised humanity and the emotions Tony (Gyllenhaal again), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and their roiling underneath elegant surfaces – those are his true teen daughter India (Ellie Bamber) on a nightmare road trip. subjects as a filmmaker. A Single Man (2009) was a masterful Forced off a West Texas freeway by Ray (Aaron Taylor- debut with Colin Firth giving a career-best performance as a Johnson) and two other hoods, Tony must stand by gay professor feeling suicidal over the death of his lover. Ford helplessly while the boys have their way – and worse – with hits it out of the park again in Nocturnal Animals, a stunning film his wife and daughter. noir that resonates with ghostly, poetic terror. WTF! The sequence is as terrifying as any chainsaw massacre Amy Adams stars as Susan Morrow, a sleek, lacquered Los or a Jim Thompson crime novel, showing Ford's unexpected Angeles gallery owner without a hair out of place. The mess, flair for shuddering unease and grisly, galvanizing action. Tony however, is all inside. The film opens with one of her art teams up with a Texas cop Bobby Andes, played with animal Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 Nocturnal Animals continued... vibrancy by Michael Shannon, to bring these thugs to justice. But is he man enough? That's the vengeful heart of the matter as Susan rightly interprets the book as retribution for the sins she committed against Edward. What's happening here is that Ford has taken on the impossible task of filming an unfilmable novel, Austin Wright's 1993 Tony and Susan. There is some strain when the real world and Edward's revenge fiction bump heads. But the impossible has brought out the visionary best in the director, who holds course as the ground keeps shifting. As a screenwriter, he added the satirical jibes at the L.A art world that aren't in Wright’s novel. Otherwise, he sticks to the criss- crossing themes running through this parallel universe. Cheers to cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, composer Abel Korzeniowski and especially editor Joan Sobel who help Ford weave multiple stories into one darkly funny, visually dazzling piece. The actors could not be better. Gyllenhaal, in two roles, dives Credits from Sight & Sound, November 2016 deep into the wells of perceived masculine weakness. And Adams takes Susan from dewy college girl to hardened ice queen without missing a stop or a nuance in between. She's spectacular. Nocturnal Animals can throw you with its shifts in tone, its merging of past and present, but don't overthink what Jake Gyllenhaal plays Susan’s ex Tony, and Edward, Ford has so cunningly crafted. Surrender to it. the father in the novel-within-the-film Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, 15th November 2016 Stafford Film Theatre at the Gatehouse www.filmsinstafford.com Spring 2017 .