It Crawls Into Your Skin and Through Your Thoughts

Rating: 8/10 (10 November 2014)

Attempting to gather my thoughts during the last few seconds of Nightcrawler was an entirely mind-boggling experience. The film is saturated with different moods and commentaries that letting it settle felt almost uneasy. It is, without a doubt, a hauntingly provocative film. Every layer of the film slowly unfolds with ominous and grippingly dark events, and it is a spectacle to watch. Nightcrawler is a success as a dark tale of greed, psychological disconnection, and the morally questionable state of our television news. Furthermore, it is masterfully filmed in the dark and foreboding Los Angeles nightlife, adding to the film's corrupt but honest themes.
Nightcrawler follows the pale, long-haired Louis Bloom, played with chilling exquisiteness by Jake Gyllenhaal, as he struggles to live without a stable job. He is a highly intelligent yet morally depraved man, who can sell his positive demeanor along with the best business plans to anyone in under five minutes but could care less about anything but his own interests.
We begin Nightcrawler by learning that Louis has been getting by as a thief, stealing and selling to make a living. One night, he happens upon a car crash, where he discovers a camera crew headed straight toward the accident to retrieve footage of the burning car and a severely injured individual. Louis is immediately drawn to this prospect, and after a brief discussion with a video journalist, Louis learns he can sell footage to the news—something he sees could potentially solve his monetary issues. He soon gets a hold of a camcorder and a police radio scanner (through theft, of course) and begins his journey into "nightcrawling," the act of catching the best and most gruesome footage of the nighttime for the local morning news channels.
Louis evolves from an amateur to a professional videographer before our eyes, always doing his work with precision and never hesitating to air his sour yet intellectual thoughts. He hires an assistant, Rick, to aid him with navigation and additional camera footage. Louis becomes cocky and highly manipulative as he becomes the best in the business. He commits entirely immoral acts to further his career, and yet, everything he does is so expertly presented that it is impossible to look away. He represents a part of the social scale where dollar signs mean more than friendships and graphic deaths equate the value of television ratings.
Nightcrawler is a film that feels as though it should not sit well with audiences, yet reviews have been raving, and with good reason. It is a film that forces one to contemplate the boundaries of morality, social media, and the fine line between sociability and manipulation. Jake Gyllenhaal is transcendental in his role as the keen and sociopathic Louis, who will overstep every boundary and break every law to further his own self-worth. Ultimately, Nightcrawler is a film that stays seeded in your thoughts long after it is over, which has been rare for films to accomplish as of late.
(for more of my film rants, follow me on twitter @calcium_waste)