Thriller Thursdays: Nightcrawler - a modern tale of an amoral profession

Intro: In our new weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we’ll recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom is cutting a chain-link fence in the first scene, for the metal which he then goes out to sell to make a quick buck. But more than a mere small-time thief, he is born of the night — his eyes manic, haunted, and purposeful, perenially hunting for a shade of black that he can claim as his own. He asks the purchaser for a job, selling his strengths vigorously, but he dismisses him, saying, “I’m not hiring a fucking thief.” Jack accepts this feedback with a nod, appreciatively, almost as if he expected the response and goes out into the night again, searching for a more appropriate shade of black.

A nightcrawler is “an earthworm that comes to the surface at night (Oxford Dictionary). And Lou Bloom is just that, hunting the night to earn a livelihood that he can adopt as his own. And one night, he encounters an accident and sees how some stringer videographers scoop down like vultures and film the gory scene of a bleeding woman and the footage is then sold to the highest bidder amongst sensational new-hungry local tv channels. And as it turns out, he’s found his calling.

Acquiring a cheap camcorder and a police scanner, by bumming off a stolen bicycle, he tunes into police despatches to trace accidents, holdups, and robberies and arrives at the location to film them. He soon realises that the gorier the footage, the more the demand for it. He sells his footage to Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a morning news producer, who’s desperate to increase her TV channel’s ratings. And she is thrilled to bits to acquire the sensational pieces of footage that Lou is able to find. She is a kindred soul and tells Lou, “Think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” It’s an aphorism that Lou not only understands but also appreciates.

He hires an assistant in Rick (Riz Ahmed) and tells him to play on FEAR, which is an acronym for False Evidence Appearing Real. In an attempt to secure such graphic footage, the duo end up messing around with crime scenes, even altering the position of a car accident victim for cinematic liberty. When he happens to be the only witness to a triple homicide and also films the murders commit he acts and escapes, he decides to manipulate the footage to turn the narrative in an attempt to fabricate a more compelling story.

The film assimilates the morally ambiguous Lou who almost seems like a sociopath, as director Don Gilroy underscores the venality and unscrupulous nature of the media and how the game for ratings overrides everything else – and the tale moves towards its devastating conclusion.

In 1976, Sidney Lumet's fabulous film Network had examined the same complete abnegation of ethics and morality, for the sake of ratings. Nightcrawler extends the commentary into the larger question of its infection, and how such a vulgar display of amorality could be rationalised as a means to an end.

Gyllenhaal is in virtually every frame of the film and carves his Lou effectively as a manic-obsessed individual who is essentially emotionless. In his character’s purposed action, all that counts is success, and the drastic means to secure can be largely immaterial.

The permanent question remains, unanswered, to date. It is whether the media proactively dishes out sensationalism as the purveyor of the worst kind of human behaviour or is just catering to the demands of viewers who lap it up. Gyllenhaal is fantastic as the cold calculating and manipulative Lou, whose obsessive nature seems like a condition that doesn’t have a cure. Rene as the TV producer obsessed with sensationalism is on point and elevates the film with a strong supporting turn. Her character’s final exhortation to her colleagues is, “I think Lou is inspiring all of us to reach a little higher.”

Shot in 27 days in Los Angeles, Nightcrawler is Dan Gilroy’s first film (he later went on to make Velvet Buzzsaw and wrote Real Steel and Kong: Skull Island) and he expertly defines darkness as not something bereft of light but as something which is the area just below the light. In its haunting and powerful themes and its calamitous denouement, he elevates Nightcrawler from a mere thriller into one that questions our morals and how, as purveyors, we often engender the worst of man’s instincts and proclivities.

Trivia

1. While rehearsing for the character, Gilroy mentioned how he saw Lou as a coyote, a nocturnal predator who is driven by its never-ending hunger. Gyllenhaal took this comment literally and lost nearly thirty pounds by eating nothing but kale salads and chewing gum and running fifteen miles every day.
2. To promote Nightcrawler, Open Road Films used viral marketing strategies, including a fictional video résumé on Craigslist and fake social media profiles for Lou.
3. Lou’s backstory was purposefully left out of the script, as Gilroy felt that without one, the audience would create their own backstories for Lou, and become more engaged with the character.

Watch Nightcrawler here .

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)