Unique Thriller - One of the Year's Best

Rating: 8/10 (11 January 2015)

Lou Bloom is a loner in L.A. who is searching for a career opportunity. One day that opportunity arrives in the form of a burning car and a badly injured woman on the side of the highway. Taken in by the scene, Lou feels compelled to observe the incident and pulls over. This is when he notices a freelance TV crew attempting to get a shot of the tangled mess. Lou is intrigued by the notion that you can make a living filming the atrocities across L.A. Shortly after Lou takes up the career of investigative journalism, but starts to blur the line between filming crimes and starting them.
Lou is a sociopath, unable to make a genuine human connection. Jake Gyllenhaal does a more than convincing job of playing the character with a dark, twisted view on reality. Lou sits in his house all day reading teach-yourself courses on his computer and ironing his various shirts. He is detached from the world around him and instead absorbs as much information he can find from self-help programs on the internet. Once he takes up the role of investigative journalism Lou will do anything to get a shot, including home invasion and evading ethical morals. Gyllenhaal is fantastic in showing that Lou is out to help only one person, and that is Lou. He does some of the most despicable things to further his career including manipulating a young homeless man, played by Riz Ahmed, as his new employee. Yet at the end of the day Gyllenhaal gives Lou so much charisma and passion that we still find the character likable.
The story uses the despicable acts of Lou to take stabs at the decaying genre that is crime-investigative journalism. It shows the dark and twisted mentality that news rooms are only can concerned about two things: how violent the act is, and how well the neighborhood is that it took place in. As aging producer Nina (played perfectly by Rene Russo) tells Lou, the more suburban and bloodier the footage, the better. Lou is consumed by the need to excel in the field. He starts to do anything in his power to get the most gruesome footage and will stop at nothing to make sure it gets tacked onto the six o'clock news.
Director Dan Gilroy, who is also the writer here, paints a bleak and gritty take on after-hours L.A. The cinematography is striking, moving from twisted bodies in car wrecks to grisly triple homicides. He presents the film as a character study on the surreal world of Louis Bloom. While the film draws heavily from different inspirations, most notably the parallels between Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Gilroy draws on enough creative differences that he creates an original film to stand apart from his predecessors. Nightcrawler offers the viewer a look into the shallow and messed up world of investigative journalism, and is one of the year's best films thanks to Gyllenhaal's twisted performance.