Nightcrawler: Gyllenhaal, the Camera, and the Ghoul of Los Angeles

Some films arrive already knowing what they are. Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s 2014 directorial debut, opens on a man stealing chain-link fencing and manhole covers under a freeway overpass, and by the time he has talked his way out of an encounter with a security guard, you understand the entire moral universe of the picture. Louis Bloom is a thief who reads business-seminar jargon the way other men read scripture. He is looking for a career. Los Angeles, filmed as a smear of sodium light and empty boulevards, is about to hand him one.

Gilroy had spent two decades as a screenwriter before this, and the film has the confidence of a man who finally got to shoot his own script. It cost around eight million dollars, made back many times that, earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay, and left Jake Gyllenhaal off the acting shortlist in a snub that critics still bring up as evidence of the Academy’s squeamishness. The film is a satire of local television news. It is also, and more durably, a horror film about the American dream told from inside the monster.

The role, and the body that carries it

Gyllenhaal lost roughly thirty pounds to play Lou, and the weight loss is not vanity. It gives him the look of a coyote that wandered down out of the hills — the same coyotes the film keeps cutting to, trotting across intersections at three in the morning. The eyes are too big for the gaunt face; the smile arrives on a delay, learned rather than felt. Lou has clearly studied how humans behave and reverse-engineered a version he can deploy. When he negotiates, he recites motivational aphorisms about hard work and self-belief that sound plausible for exactly as long as you do not examine them.

What Gyllenhaal understands, and what makes the performance frightening, is that Lou is never pretending to be normal. He genuinely believes the self-help scripts. He is a sincere sociopath, a man who has absorbed the language of ambition so completely that he cannot tell the difference between a business plan and a threat. The craft trick is that the film never lets you see him drop a mask, because there is no mask to drop. That is a harder thing to play than a villain who winks.

Lou’s chosen trade is “nightcrawling” — freelance stringers who race police scanners to accidents and crime scenes, shoot the carnage, and sell the footage to morning news programmes hungry for it before dawn. He buys a camcorder and a scanner, hires a desperate homeless kid named Rick (Riz Ahmed) as his navigator for almost nothing, and discovers he has a gift. He has no squeamishness to overcome, which turns out to be the only qualification the job requires.

Why the LA works

Robert Elswit, who shot most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, photographs Los Angeles at night as a place that looks best when it is empty and lit from below. The city becomes a stage set with the actors sent home: glowing office towers with nobody in them, freeway ramps curving off into orange haze, strip malls throwing hard fluorescent light onto asphalt. Elswit and Gilroy shot on the real streets, at the real hours, and the result is one of the most convincing nocturnal Los Angeleses ever committed to film. The city is complicit. It rewards Lou because it is built for a man like him.

James Newton Howard’s score is the film’s second sly joke. Where the images show us squalor and predation, the music swells into the kind of triumphant, synth-brushed uplift you would expect from a montage about a young entrepreneur making good. The soundtrack believes in Lou. It is scoring the success story he thinks he is living, and the gap between that music and what we are watching is where the satire lives. You could cut a genuinely inspiring advert out of this footage if you muted the context.

The engine of the plot is Nina, played by Rene Russo — a news director at a fourth-place station whose ratings depend on exactly the sort of footage Lou is willing to get. Russo, who is married to Gilroy, gives Nina a hunted quality; she is a middle-aged woman in an industry that discards them, and she knows the deal she is making. Their scenes together are the film’s spine. Lou grasps quickly that Nina needs him more than he needs her, and he presses that advantage with a coldness the film refuses to look away from.

The satire and its target

Nightcrawler is often described as a takedown of “if it bleeds, it leads” local news, and it is, though the target is broader than a newsroom. The film is about a market that has decided fear is the product and affluent suburban anxiety is the customer. Nina spells out the formula: the ideal story is urban crime creeping into wealthy white neighbourhoods, framed to keep the audience scared enough to watch the ad breaks. Lou does not corrupt this system. He simply reads its incentives correctly and supplies exactly what they demand, faster and with fewer scruples than his competitors.

The collector’s cross-reference here runs straight back to two films Gilroy clearly absorbed. One is Billy Wilder’s 1951 Ace in the Hole, in which Kirk Douglas’s reporter prolongs a man’s entrapment underground to keep his scoop alive; Lou is that reporter’s grandchild, stripped of the guilt Wilder still granted his cynic. The other is Sidney Lumet’s Network, whose prophecy about television turning outrage into ratings Nightcrawler simply relocates to the freelance gig economy. If Lou fascinates you, those are your homework, and both are better than most of what the streaming carousels will offer you tonight.

Closer to home, Nightcrawler belongs to a small run of modern Los Angeles crime films that treat the city as a character with a moral weather system. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive shares its neon-and-shadow palette and its interest in a quiet man who turns out to be capable of anything; watch them together and you have two 2010s portraits of LA-as-dreamscape, one romantic and one clinical. And the film’s study of a man consumed by a compulsion he mistakes for purpose rhymes with David Fincher’s Zodiac, though Fincher’s obsessives are chasing a killer and Gilroy’s is becoming one.

The verdict, above the line

Nightcrawler is a nearly perfect small film, and its perfection is a matter of tone control. Gilroy keeps it balanced on a wire between black comedy and genuine dread for the whole running time, never tipping into camp, never softening Lou into someone we are allowed to forgive. It is the rare debut that arrives fully formed, with a lead performance that reorganised how audiences saw its star. If you have avoided it because “satire of the news business” sounds like homework, understand that this thing moves like a thriller and bites like a horror film.

I want to argue the ending properly, and to do that I have to spoil the machine of the last act. Everything above is safe to read before you watch. Below the line I will show you how the film closes its trap.

Spoilers below

The turn that seals the film comes when Lou stops waiting for stories and starts arranging them. He arrives at a triple homicide in an affluent home before the police, films the fleeing killers and their number plate, and then withholds that evidence, having realised he can farm the situation for himself. He wants the shooters left free so he can film the eventual confrontation. The footage he already has is valuable; the footage he can manufacture by manipulating events is worth more.

This is where Gilroy reveals what the film has really been about. Lou has grasped that in a media economy built on fear, the person who controls the supply of horror controls the price, and the cheapest way to guarantee supply is to make the horror happen. He stages the climactic shoot-out in a busy restaurant by tipping the police to the killers’ location at the moment most likely to produce carnage on camera, and he positions himself and Rick to film it. His assistant dies in the chaos, and Lou films that too, murmuring encouragement to a young man he has just knowingly sent to be killed.

The cruellest beat is not the death; it is Nina’s response. Lou brings her the footage of Rick’s shooting, and the newsroom’s only hesitation is whether it can legally be aired. The system Lou serves is not appalled by him. It has been waiting for him. He has simply supplied, at last, exactly what the market told everyone it wanted.

The final scene is the film’s coldest joke. Lou, cleared by the police because his manipulations are impossible to prove, now runs a real company — Video Production News — with a fleet of cars and a fresh crop of eager young stringers receiving the same motivational speeches he once recited to a mirror. He has been rewarded. He has scaled. The self-help language that sounded delusional in the opening scenes turns out to have been accurate all along, because the world he lives in genuinely does reward the man willing to feel nothing. Gilroy ends on promotion rather than punishment, which is the most damning thing the film could possibly do.

My verdict: Nightcrawler is one of the essential Los Angeles films of its century and the clearest thing Gyllenhaal has ever done — a satire that works because it never once flinches into moralising, and a character study that leaves you unable to unsee the incentives running underneath your own evening news. Watch it, then chase it with Wilder’s Ace in the Hole and Refn’s Drive, and notice how much older and colder Gilroy’s ghoul is than either of his ancestors. The city always had room for him. It just needed someone to buy the footage.