Originally written November 1, 2014.
There is this deadly air to “Nightcrawler”, an unsettling bang. This may be the scariest movie to come out during Halloween because, like all good horror, it takes something in your everyday life and makes you fear it because you realize that things like this happen every day and that you buy into it without even looking. It latches onto you and makes you open your eyes.
Lou Bloom is our man, a seemingly normal, everyday man. He even cracks some jokes from time to time. “Nightcrawler” does a wonderful job at illustrating how appearance are not always reality, and how easily you can be fooled. Lou gets into the business of filming crime scenes, anything from car crashes to stabbings to home invasions, as long as “it bleeds, it leads”. Lou films them up close and personal, doing whatever it takes to get that shot of blood and tragedy. Sometimes he even arrives at a crime scene before the cops get there, and holds the camera above his own head filming the abyss below. There is nothing he wouldn’t do.
He then sells this footage to Nina, the director of the lowest rated local news company KWLA. Nina is coming to the end of her contract and she needs to boost her ratings if she plans to keep the job, she’s desperate and she knows that “Bad news sells best. Cause good news is no news”. So when Lou turns up with his camera full of all the bad things he could find, Nina is ecstatic and watches the filmed crime video with gold pouring out of her eyes. It’s a sick relationship.
Soon Lou hires an assistant, Rick, who tells him that Lou “… doesn’t understand people.” Lou responds, “What if my problem is not that I don’t understand people but that I don’t like them?”. Here is a man who would trample over a million dreams to get to his own.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays the part of Lou, bringing a hauntingly bony persona to Lou that makes him seem like a skeleton who’s being risen from the dead, behind the cascade of a sunset and the retro-pop fueled blare of Newton’s score. Everyone does such a fantastic role with their job that it comes to the point where these characters don’t really seem like characters at all but rather like people who I could imagine crawling among us. This is the cold-fact that the film makes clear.
Lou Bloom, throughout the film, never really has an arc. The only thing that changes is our perspective of him as the story goes along as we get to see who this man really is. That’s why “Nightcrawler” is so scary because it takes something cute and innocent and gives it poisonous fangs.
