Dark, eerie, enthralling and astonishing.

Rating: 10/10 (29 November 2014)

Telling the tale of an internet-educated entrepreneur looking to crack into the sordid business of late-night crime reporting, you've probably never seen anything like Nightcrawler before. Tackling both writing and directorial duties, Dan Gilroy constructs a world that is eerie yet exhilarating, seedy but tempting; presenting a side of Los Angeles rarely captured on celluloid. From the opening shot it's clear that formula and convention has been thrown out the window, Gilroy preferring to subvert expectation with morally dubious characters and an unsettling progression of events that is creepily plausible. When you think it will zig, it zags, and when you think it will zag, it throws up a middle finger to predictability with any number of gasp-inducing plot developments, leaving you clenching your armrest for majority of the runtime. Its success is also attributable to the astonishing central performance from Jake Gyllenhaal, who lost weight and changed the sound of his voice for the role. Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom is an utterly enthralling character who teeters on a knife-edge of sanity; his all-smiles and wide-eyed disposition making the rage bubbling underneath the surface that much more unnerving. This is Gyllenhaal's show without question, however he's given solid support by Rene Russo and Riz Ahmed as a ferocious but failing station chief and Bloom's gentle- natured sidekick respectively. Mix in Robert Elswit's tremendously atmospheric night-time cinematography and James Newton Howard's pulsing score and you have one of the best motion pictures of 2014.