That a film can age well, like a good wine or cheese, is well documented. But does that only hold true after a movie’s premiere? Nightcrawler, an eerie, funny, crass, genre-busting thriller, comedy, social reality film, and psychological study, lay in director and writer Dan Gilroy’s desk for almost three decades. It is a film primarily about a sociopathic, mysterious genius/whacko (Jake Gyllenhaal) who gets into the stringing game with cold zeal, treading on everybody in his way and sacrificing close relationships (he has no friends) for his obsession of selling ever more drastic material of the night before’s murders, crashes, and catastrophes to voyeuristic news stations. The movie is also an oversubscription of US news channels, where gore and private suffering are the hottest commodities – an exaggeration because the action, like Gyllenhaal’s character, zooms in at the most precarious crime scenes in a toxic environment it, generally, portrays accurately. But it is Nightcrawler’s feel that makes it a film worth watching, a feel for atmosphere and setting (and, to a lesser extent, its actors’ performances) that might well have profited from ripening in its author’s mind for 29 years.
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