Nocturnal Animals review: a masterclass in style and substance

In the fashion world, designer Tom Ford is not the go-to fellow for outrageous catwalk experiments or this season’s rah-rah skirt. He is the chap you buy a timeless suit from, or, if you’re Michelle Obama, the dress you wear to Buckingham Palace. Everything – excepting his bizarrely horrid range of fragrances – that bears his tasteful logo is classy and fad-resistant.

Why would his films be any different? Nocturnal Animals is his second foray into feature film-making and, in common with his slick freshman effort, A Single Man, it drips with opulence and "nice things".

Irish director of photography Seamus McGarvey also ensures that the night sky has never looked darker or sleeker.

A superb Amy Adams heads up an ornately styled cast, as Susan, an art gallery owner in a lonely marriage to the frequently absent Walker (Armie Hammer). The superficially wealthy couple’s finances are similarly dysfunctional.

When Susan receives a manuscript for a novel from her first husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), she is quickly hooked. A violent thriller called Nocturnal Animals, its drama, as visualised by Susan with Edward as the tragic protagonist, unfolds with heart-pounding and sickening effect.

Thus, Tony (also Jake Gyllenhaal) is taking his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and teenage daughter Helen (Ellie Bamber) on a road trip that brings them through west Texas, when they are run off the road – with a nod to Duel – by a gang of thugs.

Engaging subplots

Despite his pretty-boy features, their brutish leader, Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), wastes no time in kidnapping the women. Tony survives the ordeal (though seems to wish he hadn’t) and teams up with a cowboy cop (Michael Shannon, in tremendous form) to track down the perpetrators.

Back in Los Angeles, Susan, pacing elegantly and fretfully against her full-wall windows, is both enthralled and increasingly discombobulated by her ex-husband’s novel. She begins to replay scenes from their courtship and clipped marriage. What can it all mean?

Editor Joan Sobel’s Hitchcockian sense of timing ensures that transitions between the competing strands are smooth. A clatter of engaging subplots and briefly glimpsed characters – meet Laura Linney’s dowager or Andrea Riseborough’s dismissive socialite in a hideous muumuu – might all be worked into spin-off films.

It's impossible not to notice that the cast are all a bit too prepossessing or that the film is overly aestheticised (victims of gruesome sexual crimes have seldom looked so pretty). But the scalpel-steel chill that left some of A Single Man's critics cold, works with, rather than against, the material.