More Exploratory Than Thriller, Nocturnal Animals Is A Unique Roller Coaster

In a crowded movie schedule barreling towards the end of the year (and some of the bigger releases still to come), it is good to slip in a big-name movie that goes left from the typical formulas that holiday movies typically fall into. Nocturnal Animals comes with a big name cast (in only a few active roles) and an innovative-if-not-tangled narrative that will give you plenty to talk about and interpret after you view it. Is it a good movie though? Yeah, I don’t know about that. There are elements where the movie works and the experimentation is a welcome sight, but it doesn’t always work at the very thing it’s trying to do. The Tom Ford-written and -directed film seems to want to blur the lines between genres, but it only becomes a master of none in that fashion. The nature of uprooting from convention that the script does leaves it somewhat weightless and not grounded to anything.

Despite what you may have picked up from the trailers (as they don’t inform the movie at all), the story centers on Amy Adam’s character Susan Marrow. She’s a successful curator at a museum of art, living with her impossibly good looking husband in a cradle of luxury. Their house is huge and staffed with assistants. They attend the most upscale and exclusive parties. But as you might have guessed, their marriage is an actual mess, Susan feels unsupported and invisible in her own home with her husband hardly ever present and even their enduring wealth may be a facade. The plot actually begins in …