The Nightcrawler – Review by Swea

Nightcrawler Review

Dan Gilroy’s 2014 movie Nightcrawler follows Lou Bloom through the night-clad streets of Los Angeles as he makes his way into the ethical edges of the stringer business. Lou stumbles into this career verging between freelance journalism and bystander by coincidence. As he watches ambulances and police taking care of a car accident, a guy with a camera runs past him to film not only the crash site but the victims as well. This quick explanation is enough to hook Lou: He provides film material for the highest bidding news station. Lou jumps right into the business with a cheap camera and an intern hired with little white lies. His talent for stretching the truth does not only lead him straight to success, together with his sort of detached ruthlessness it gets him into more than questionable moral territory.

            Soon, Lou not only gets real up close into bleeding victims’ faces. He rearranges evidence on crime scenes and even a body on a crash sites to get better filming material, which again will sell better. There is no arguing that your typical hero would never do this. The lack of moral in the media and especially the stringer business does not concern Lou, neither does he feel the need to change anything.

Compared to the usual anti-hero, there isn’t even anything questionably likeable about Lou, except maybe his weird loyalty to the plant he owns and determinedly keeps healthy. He makes use of the terms presented to him, all to gain altitude on his final road to success. In a twisted version of the American Dream, he moves from the lowest of income to successful businessman. Embodied in his character, the viewer is treated to a complete submission to capitalism. Money is the ultimate goal for all characters, not a single one of them portrayed as the idealist journalist on his courageous path to reveal the truth.

That Lou succeeds on this path paints the sensationalist consumer-media relationship in dark light, something Nightcrawler stresses with predominately night scenes with noir-like streetlights and car lamps as its only companion. It’s all about money and ratings. Blood sells, drastically shocking pictures of crime and family tragedies draw the audience in, and of course the news station here caters to every stereotype of racism. In the best case, the victims are white, middle or upper class, and the criminals poor minorities.

These archetypes are played for laughs in darkly comedic ways. It’s funny, because it’s ridiculous how laughably clear Lou’s objectives are presented to him by local morning news director Nina. We want violence and race issues. And that is the critique a viewer must take home with him. How ridiculous is it that an audience grows with the violence, blood and fear? Then, Nightcrawler seems to be as much a critique of sensationalist journalism, as it is a critique of the audience.

This support of unethical practises in this kind of journalism is spun further by the relationship between Lou and Nina. Nina, whose job and career is tied largely to the ratings of the morning news, caters exactly to this cliché of journalist that does everything for a good story. When she enters a sexual relationship with Lou that wagers between blackmail and mutual profit gaining, there isn’t much hesitation there. Neither is this explored or exploited beyond showing them on an uncomfortable date in a restaurant. The focus stays on their working relationship.

The same goes for the police that enters the focus later on in the story. Lou tinkers with one too many incidents, and despite or maybe because of carefully woven stories to cloak his involvement, the police knows he is hiding something. But that’s it. They know that their suspect sits right in front of them, yet they are unable to do anything about it. Interestingly, the police does stick to their usually expected ethics and morals. They could surely forge evidence to get Lou behind bars, but they don’t go that far. Compared to usual portrayals of corrupt police forces in movies and even in news, in Nightcrawler this shows us the other side of the coin. Yet, when flipped, the coin lands with the police side down and Lou’s face up.

The anti-hero gets a happy ending. His business is flourishing, he got the woman he was after, revenge on the villain of his own story, and he kept his plant alive and green throughout. The ending is everything we would want for the hero of the story. Yet, in Nightcrawler this story of success leaves the viewer with a bitter taste in their mouths. It’s that guy, that immoral, manipulative, plotting puppet master that becomes so successful. On his way, he leaves a bloody trail of criminals and naïve interns without even so much as a flickering consciousness.

The character of Lou could easily drift into territory of psychopath with his sunken eyes and penetrating gaze, yet Jake Gyllenhaal keeps the character in the lines of eerie and creepily charismatic. His huge, owl-like eyes even emphasise the almost childlike curiosity with which he looks onto his newly chosen work and into the immoral depths of this business. Not often gets a character like that a success story, even less often does it work well. We might not enjoy it, but in the end we watch intrigued how Lou Bloom crawls into the night like vermin.