Nocturnal Animals Review

The opening titles are naked older women dancing in slow motion under strobe lights, and Tom Ford means them as an assault on exactly the gallery audience he belongs to, which tells you how much of this is built to sting rather than to move. What follows works best when it stops being clever. The Texas roadside sequence, in which Aaron Taylor-Johnson circles a stranded family with unhurried menace and perfect politeness, is genuinely frightening, and Michael Shannon walks in afterward as a lawman with nothing left to lose and hands the picture a pulse it never finds in the present day scenes.

Seamus McGarvey shoots the frame story in cold grey and glass so that Amy Adams looks embalmed in her own success, which is the point and also the limit of it. Adams is asked to react to a manuscript for two hours and locates more shading than the part has any right to hold. The trouble is that the revenge novel carries the only real feeling here, and the art world material around it is thin contempt dressed as critique. Ford holds the final scene at the restaurant far longer than most directors would dare.