Review: Imagery in ‘Animals’ is striking but suffocating

In “Nocturnal Animals,” revenge is a dish best served in manuscript form. One ordinary day in her unhappy marriage, cash-strapped Los Angeles art gallery owner Susan, played by Amy Adams, receives a plain brown envelope. Inside is the new novel written by her ex-husband, portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, titled “Nocturnal Animals,” with a note attached suggesting they reunite sometime soon.

Intrigued, Susan dives into the novel while her philandering husband (Armie Hammer) is away in New York on alleged business. Adapter-director Tom Ford, in his second feature, sets up three distinct narratives. Susan’s life in the present interweaves with grad-school flashbacks depicting her time with the promising, dreamy novelist, the one Susan’s status-conscious mother (Laura Linney, fiercely good in a single scene) sees as the biggest loser of all time.

Then there’s the story of the novel itself, which plays out in “Nocturnal Animals” as a movie within a movie. It’s pure revenge pulp, violent and vindictive, in the “Straw Dogs” vein. Gyllenhaal and Isla Fisher are the city couple, traveling by car with their teenage daughter (Ellie Bamber) one dark West Texas night. They’re terrorized by a group of thugs led by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Rape, murder and retribution all get their due in this nightmare yarn, which has the primary benefit of giving Michael Shannon, in one of his very best performances, the role of a laconic police detective who, as he says, “looks into things around here.”

But where is “here,” exactly? None of the stories feels quite like real life. That’s deliberate, I think. In director Ford’s hands, the L.A. sequences present Susan’s life as a series of arch and bizarrely comic vignettes, as if Weimar-era Berlin had somehow landed in the Hollywood Hills. Susan despairs that her career, along with her marriage, is built on shiny surfaces that amount to, in her words, “total junk.”

As “Nocturnal Animals,” the novel, unfolds in Susan’s imagination, it becomes clear that her ex never got over her lack of faith in his work.

Ford’s critique of this world is dicey; as a director, coming out of his career as a fashion designer and high-gloss, sexually provocative advertising force, he’s a bit of a hypocrite, damning the tragic glamour even as he’s drooling over it. His imagery is striking, certainly, and “Nocturnal Animals” is never dull, thanks to the careful manipulation of light and space, in collaboration with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey. But the prettiness of it all can be suffocating.