MOVIE REVIEW - Nightcrawler

The new scary thriller Nightcrawler is out this weekend with an amazing performance from Jake Gyllenhaal as one creepy dude.

This is a movie that deals with the media, the new media, big business, and masterful manipulation that could possibly stir up some trust issues you may have.  You may also take a second look at your privacy settings as well, as some of this is very invasive and disturbing.  Most are things we already know, but it's another thing altogether to watch it play out on screen.

Meet Lou Bloom (Gyllenhaal).   He is young weird, and frankly sick loner of a young guy who lives in Los Angeles.  He has no real direction in life. But one late night he witnesses a TV news crew filming a horrible car crash and he decides that he wants to begin a career as TV cameraman. Rushing to new crime scenes, filming, and selling the films to local TV stations.  So he begins modestly.  He is a big time liar, user of people a seeks out the most vulnerable to interact with, and do business with.

Then after reaching some level of success, Lou decides that it's not enough to simply film the news, but it is more exciting and profitable to manipulate crime scenes for better filming.  And he goes so far to actually stage scenes, and manipulate the possible outcome all for greed and money.  And of course he is sick, and cares not of who he hurts, or even kills.   In short, Lou is a sick monster and super creepy.

This is a pretty darn good movie for the most part.  This is scary stuff at times, as Lou constantly manipulates the weak, and exploits their frailties.   Lou is a master of the Internet and constantly invades privacy issues, that can make anyone watching this feel a bit uneasy.  As opposed to tons of other potentially scary movies, this one is far closer to he bone than ghosts, and phony gore.  This, although fiction is a bit eyebrow raising.

Gyllenhaal is great as the horrid Lou.  You may barely recognize him, as he dropped 25 pounds for this role.  Hollywood always likes when actors do feats like that preparing for a big role, so remember this performance come Oscar time.  The movie is dark and very well filmed as most of our story line takes place in the middle of the desert night.  A terrific pounding musical soundtrack does add immensely to this well written script.  Rene Russo leads a nice supporting cast, but make no mistake, this is basically a one man show. And that's Jake.

One point I felt disappointing was that this is set up for a sequel  and beyond and I'm not so sure that's wise.  This is a nice idea and this is captured very well here.  But I'm not so sure that the same lightning could be caught in the bottle again. Being honest the ending did leave me a bit empty.

Nightcrawler.  A perfect name for a creepy movie done well.  Certainly worth a ticket, just be prepared to not trust anyone for a while.