Film: Nightcrawler

I was lucky enough to watch Nightcrawler almost two weeks before its general release thanks to ODEON's latest cinema experience, Screen Unseen - a new series of specially-priced advance screenings. ODEON promises to show film lovers the best new releases but with just one catch: you don't know what film you're watching until the movie starts. This really appealed to me as I love good films, and am always excited to try something a little bit different. I am usually awful with trying to find spoilers though, but managed to refrain from ruining the surprise this time. We were ushered into the cinema and waited expectantly for the normal adverts and trailers that accompany cinema releases. Instead the film just started and it wasn't until the opening credits betrayed the title of the film that we realised what we were going to be watching.

Nightcrawler is a film about Louis Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Louis, Lou, is an out-of-work and pretty desperate guy. He spends the night looking for things to steal and sell, he's an opportunist and always ready to make a quick buck. His criminal lifestyle seems pretty at odds with the young, and fairly naive, man who spends his days ironing his shirts, watering his plant, and watching old movies in his small apartment. He seems to spend little time with other people, and confesses to not liking other humans very much.

Lou's big break comes one night when he stumbles upon a serious car crash on a highway and is introduced to a freelance TV crew, who will seemingly go to any length to get a good shot of the carnage played out in the cold and the rain. Sensing an opportunity, Lou pawns a bike in exchange for some camera equipment and decides to set up his own business finding and shooting the most sensational films of real life tragedy. He starts patrolling the night, listening to police broadcasts, on the lookout for crimes, crashes and cataclysm. He is a nightcrawler.

Nightcrawler is a film that is both darkly humorous and shocking. It portrays the modern media in a pretty harsh light, as a black hole devouring the misery of others and regurgitating it as entertainment. From the start of the film, and Lou's humble beginnings as a sort of human magpie, it seems obvious that the character really has very little conscience. And Lou's lack of humanity was the thing that perhaps shocked me most. It was also the thing that made him so perfect for 'video journalism'. There is one moment of possible redemption in the film, when, at the scene of a car crash, you think he may be darting forward to offer support or assistance to an unconscious man in the road, but then he simply moves the body into better light for that perfect shot. This scene is harrowing, and really marks Lou's detachment from the rest of us. He truly becomes inhuman.

Gyllenhaal was superb in Nightcrawler. Lou was someone who seemed fake. He spouts pages from self-help books, and quotes text from online research. He is manipulative and unkind. He is simple but incredibly complex.Gyllenhaal played this multifaceted, incomprehensible character with believability and depth. Lou was often wooden and emotionless, but Gyllenhaal never was. And as much as I disliked Lou, I found him intriguing too.

This film will definitely make you question the modern media and the way news is procured. It will make you feel just a little bit guilty for every sensationalist news story you've followed with baited breath and it'll probably be the first time you see a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and not fancy him, even the tiniest bit.

I won't give anything else about the plot away because I think that you should all immediately go and see it when it's released on October 31st. Definitely worth the price of a cinema ticket. My first ODEON Screen Unseen experience was great, and allowed me to watch something that I might have otherwise overlooked. I can't wait to discover another new film.

Would you go to see a mystery film? Do you think you'll watch Nightcrawler?