(Credit: Netflix)

Nocturnal Animals is Tom Ford’s second feature film, which he scripted courtesy of Austin Wright’s dark anti-romance novel Tony and Susan. Ford was soon able to get Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams in on the act, to give neo-noir cinema a go. And together they created a film as brash and slick as you’d expect from the former creative director of Gucci.

The movie’s narrative is mostly presented in the form of flashbacks and imaginary visualisations of the story in the book manuscript its protagonist Susan, played by Adams, is reading. The manuscript is for a novel written by Susan’s ex-husband, Edward, who was an aspiring writer when the two were together. In a flashback sequence that proves central to the film’s plot, Susan tells Edward that their relationship only works in his idealised version of the world. “I live in the real world,” she says. “I want to be the person that you want me to be, but I just can’t.”

The movie blurs this boundary between what’s real and what’s an idealised fiction throughout its two-hour runtime, as it cuts as seamlessly as possible between three different plots. Too seamlessly, a lot of the time, for us to tell whether we’re watching Susan’s past or a projection of the novel she’s reading. But then, Ford would tell us, that’s the whole point.

In the “real world”, Susan ends up leaving Edward because the two of them want to lead very different lives. “I mean, you’re gonna work at a bookstore and just write a novel?” she asks him patronisingly in another flashback. “Like, that’s what you wanna do with your life?” She, on the other hand, has greater ambitions for her life. “You sound like your mother,” Edward retorts, deeply hurt. Susan soon finds herself falling for another man, and then has the child she and Edward would have had together aborted without telling him. Only for him to find out when he saw her outside the abortion clinic with her new boyfriend.

But what’s this got to do with the novel?

Edward’s novel is dedicated to Susan, and its title is based on his pet name for her. “My ex-husband used to call me a nocturnal animal,” she tells one of her subordinates, in reference to her tendency towards late nights. At first, the relevance of the manuscript’s extremely violent and upsetting storyline to Susan isn’t clear. That is, until we see the flashbacks of how her relationship with Edward ended.

In the plot of his novel, its protagonist Tony is held up by a group of armed kidnappers while driving at night with his wife, played by the doppelganger of Adams, Isla Fisher, and his teenage daughter. The kidnappers take Tony’s family away from him, rape and murder them. He later confronts one of the killers about what he did to his wife and daughter, in response to which the killer calls Tony “weak”.

Likewise, Edward’s own weakness is a running theme in Susan’s flashbacks to their relationship. Her domineering, conservative mother calls him “weak” in an early scene, and in the key argument which leads to their breakup Edward refers to an earlier conversation in which Susan apparently also used the word about him. It’s this sense of his own fragility and so-called weakness that bothers Edward more than anything else. And when we see it referenced in his novel, the pieces of the jigsaw fit together and we see that his story’s plot is in fact an attempted parable about what Susan has done to him.

The man she leaves him is represented by the kidnappers in the story, who take his wife away from him and kill their child, just as it appeared to him in real life outside the abortion clinic. This man’s actions emasculated him beyond repair, his novel implies, given that it ends with the killer blinding Tony with a fire poker, leading him to shoot himself.

In the final scene of the movie, Edward gets his own when Susan asks to meet him, having finished reading his manuscript for “Nocturnal Animals”. As she waits for him in a restaurant until it closes, we’re reminded of something he said during their break-up argument above love. “You have to be careful with it. You might never get it again.” He might have a point, but it was hardly worth tormenting Susan with a psychologically disturbing novel dedicated to her and then standing her up on a date to make that point.

This ending isn’t an especially satisfying or clever one since Edward clearly has issues to sort out within himself, and even from the sparse flashback scenes, it’s clear that Susan has a point about them not being a good fit. And yet we never get the sense, either through the story-within-a-story or the movie itself, that Edward becomes aware of his issues and grows as a person. He’s simply there to punish Susan for her flaws. And in the most sadistic terms that a writer could imagine.