Nocturnal Animals is a disconcerting, enigmatic movie, or at least tries to be one. It’s all about perturbing, unsettling, intriguing as much as it can. Its director, Tom Ford, knows what he wants, and goes straight to it. From the opening credits. Suddenly we are facing muted images of obese women, dancing naked, in slow motion, across the full extension of the screen. There are pompoms, hats, lit sparklers, the whole cheerleading act, big smiles and choreographed moves, but all we see are misshapen, incomprehensible bodies. We soon discover they are part of an art exhibit  organized by Susan (Amy Adams), a successful gallery owner who also happens to be beautiful, svelte and sophisticated. Perhaps the clue to understanding this opening sequence lies in the contrast between Susan and the overweighted cheerleaders. But in the end, that doesn’t really matter. What counts is the uneasiness, the confusion. Later on, in retrospective, we might begin to understand Susan’s reasons to exhibit models that shock the good manners and her penchant for little rebellions. At some point we might ask ourselves the question about the frontier between reality and art. In the meantime we will follow a narrative that sticks all along the film to the tone of these opening scenes, always looking for perplexity, but only rarely managing to provoke it.  

There are three story-lines that intersect and overlap, sometimes quite abruptly, to symbolic effects : Susan’s present, her past and her imagination. The present is the time of success, loneliness and disenchantment, a broken mariage and a distant husband who has his own life, Hutton (Armie Hammer). The past brings idealism and dreams, planning life in couple with a young, sweet writer named Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal). Above all, the past is about not becoming a new version of a superficial, haughty mother. Finally, imagination is where Susan recreates the fiction of a novel written by Tom, absent from her life since their divorce, twenty years ago. The novel has come by surprise in the mail. Its title : « Nocturnal Animals ». This is how Tony and Susan use to call each other when they were together. The movie will unfold from the reading of the manuscript, in which Tony has transposed, metaphorically and in the form of a thriller, the events that shaped his relationship with Susan. Little by little, closely following the emotional crescendo of the main character, the loose pieces of the past, the present and the fiction start falling into place to give us the psychological puzzle, often predictable, of a woman saddened by the direction she once gave to her life.