Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler highlights the exact character we all didn’t know we instinctually would find extremely unsettling. When we first come across Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), we see him as a thief and an obvious sociopath trying to find a job. He attempts to sell himself to people wide-eyed, in a spiel radiating with self-obsession and entitlement.
After Lou witnesses a bad car wreck and a cameraman filming it, he audaciously asks about what the man does and how much he makes. The man says he’s a freelancer and listens to police scanners to find fires, wrecks and homicides to film and sell to the highest bidding news station.
Intrigued by the idea, Lou steals a bicycle to pawn in the easy route to kicking off his new self-proclaimed career. We get another glimpse into the mind of our sociopath as he compulsively lies to the pawnshop owner, rambling confidently about how he won the Tour de Mexico on the bike. He thinks he deserves a certain amount of money for a bike that wasn’t even his to sell but ultimately makes a trade for a police scanner and a camera.
It is his first project in freelance filming (a man killed in a parking lot) that leads him to pay a visit to the Cruella de Vil of the media world, Nina Romina (Rene Russo). Her news station is last in the rankings and she’s desperate for viewers. She obviously senses the creepy eagerness in Lou from the start but knows he might be able to help her save her job, dangling by a thread. Nina tells him to avoid chasing down crime in poor non-white neighborhoods because nobody cares; the most provocative are those that involve well-off white folks. (If that’s not a shot at TV news I don’t know what is). She describes the goal as “a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.”
From the first few crime scenes, Lou tracks down and we again see those wide, frankly a little terrifying, eyes looking into the camera with a feverish desire to get something good. We see unethical boundaries being crossed when Lou enters the home of a victim (and scene of the crime) to get some good shots on the other side of the yellow tape, and when he rearranges the body of a dead man extricated from his vehicle to appear more dramatic in the video. Ah – it’s what I’ve been learning not to do in all my journalism courses! I knew they’d taught me something.
As his videos get increasingly better and in saying that I inherently mean bloodier and more graphic, his loyalty comes with a price. As if we weren’t put off by Lou’s character enough, he finalizes our disgust with a disturbing stereotype of entitlement in demanding Nina have sex with him if she wants to continue doing business. He gives this ultimatum while they share dinner, in a manner so casual you would think it was a normal business transaction and not the complete exploitation of a desperate woman.
The whole “if it bleeds, it leads” principle of it got me thinking about human nature’s craving for tragedy. I mean the warning of “these are extremely graphic images” is basically a teaser by today’s standards. This film does a good job of not trying too hard to make us see some kind of hidden message or stir up controversy – but instead showcase a fascinating kind of “seemingly ordinary” person and what he is capable of.
Lou’s evil personality transcends on the people he manipulates and that includes Nina – who was a weak target to begin with. He reflects in the final moments saying, “What if my problem was not that I don’t understand people, but that I don’t like them?” Ultimately, Lou isn’t afraid to dispose of people for his own benefit and give himself an infinitely superior self-worth. I’ve never left a movie more psychologically intrigued and disturbed by a character than I did exiting Nightcrawler. Throw in moments of incredible filming, excellent writing and the fact that even when he plays a psycho, Jake Gyllenhall isn’t bad to look at, and this became one of my favorite films of the year.
Follow Sydney Zuelke on Twitter @SydCaroline