Movie Review: Love’s a bitch (and then hopefully you die) in Tom Ford’s cool, cruel “Nocturnal Animals”.

Spoilers ahead. Tread carefully.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the opening scene of fashion heavyweight Tom Ford’s second feature film, a moody, menacing meta-noir called “Nocturnal Animals”. It’s a kind of free-associative Lynchian freakout that almost seems to exist outside of the chilly exterior of the film itself… until, of course, it doesn’t. In the movie’s opening frames, morbidly obese naked women dance in front of the camera, all in agonizing slow-motion, as glitter rains down from the ceiling and Abel Korzeniowski’s haunting score — which sounds a sonic marriage of Bernard Hermann with Angelo Badalamenti– reaches feverish levels of hysteria and panic. It’s a series of sustained images that are so memorably grotesque that I venture even Federico Fellini would have kicked himself for not dreaming them up first.

What does this bizarre, incongruous opening have to do with the rest of “Nocturnal Animals?” Nothing, initially. At first, it appears to be little more than a spectacularly gaudy fake-out, orchestrated by a showman who knows he’s in control of his story. After the post-credits rollout, we learn that this parade of overweight, fleshy bodies is actually part of a literal exhibit — an art exhibit, one hosted by the venerable Susan Morrow (Amy Adams, giving her second excellent performance of the year after “Arrival”), a titan of the Los Angeles fringe/elite art scene. Susan is an icy, withdrawn creature: she’s one of those high-maintenance socialites who has a Jeff Koons balloon statue in her backyard, and her house is one of those glass-and-metal-encased fortresses that sits in the hilltops of L.A. (all the better from which to peer down upon the metropolis’s puny mortal inhabitants).

Susan’s latest exhibition may seem like little more than a pretentious art world put-on at first: the kind of thing Kanye West might attempt had he not just cancelled all his remaining tour dates. And for the first ten minutes, maybe “Nocturnal Animals” seems like that too. And yet, this blunt visual metaphor ultimately touches upon the dichotomy that is central to the resounding success of Ford’s film. Ford’s second effort as a director effortlessly merges high art with low, love with hate, intellectual introspection with blood and guts, brittle melodrama with pedal-to-the-metal pulp. It’s a high-wire act of a movie that is at once deviously entertaining and also disturbing in what it ultimately says about the morally murky grey area where authorship and personal experience intersect. It also feels like an uncommonly personal film for its creator, in spite of taking the shape of a hard-boiled piece of mainstream genre cinema, which is only one of the things that makes it so riotously enjoyable.

Ford’s first film was 2009’s spectacular “A Single Man,” which contains the single greatest performance Colin Firth has ever given. That film was a steely, bittersweet reverie about a homosexual professor living with the weight of his late lover’s suicide, and Ford somehow pushed Firth past his natural proclivity to make the obvious choice as a performer and into a dark, engrossing territory that the British actor had never quite occupied before. While Ford’s first film and his second don’t seem to have much in common on the surface — “Single Man” is a polished, mannered period piece, punch-drunk in love with its 1950’s milieu and awash in existential torment and sexual ambiguities, while “Nocturnal Animals” is a messier, sillier, more ambitious and far nastier film — they are ultimately far more similar than they initially appear.

Firth’s lovelorn academic and Adams’ insomniac fashionista are both revealed to be truly sensitive and lonely characters who escape from the world’s cruelty into a richly realized world of make-believe. In “Single Man,” Ford makes breathtaking use of hyper-vivid flashbacks that trigger memories both good and bad in the psyche of his main character, while “Nocturnal Animals” hinges its second narrative on an increasingly depraved story-within-a-story. And in both films, Ford is pondering how a person processes and deals with true pain: the kind of anguish that there is no denying, ignoring or remedying.

Ford has been lambasted by some critics for what is perceived as an over-reliance on aesthetic fetishization in both his pictures. It was a common critique of “A Single Man,” particularly its opening scene, which announced Ford’s theatrical and artificial ambitions, and I’m sure some have already sharpened their pitchforks over the divisive bit of lunacy that opens “Nocturnal Animals”. And while Ford’s films are undeniably, overwhelmingly stylish — even the rough rural West Texas environs of “Nocturnal Animals’” second and third act have the airbrushed, perfectly-composed look of a GQ shoot — he’s just now begun to develop a real flair for cinematic storytelling. “Nocturnal Animals” is flush with genuinely startling moments as well as inventive odes to the director’s influences, which include everything from the souped-up melodramas of Douglas Sirk to the gut-punch crime literature of Jim Thompson. What’s perhaps most incredible about the whole thing is that Ford somehow manages to wrangle all the movie’s disparate tones and identities into one unreasonably enjoyable whole. “Nocturnal Animals” may leave some viewers feeling rattled and even molested when the credits roll, but something tells me that’s exactly what its director wants. For those who still wish to take the trip, buckle up.

The movie’s opening moments mostly detail Susan’s bloodless, low-risk, high-expense L.A. lifestyle. She spends most days lying around her vast, empty mansion, while her indifferent, handsome husband Hutton — played stupendously by Armie Hammer, who seems to be channeling one of the Trump sons by way of his character’s unchecked, thoroughly toxic white male privilege — sulks around in the background. One day, Susan is roused from her spell of ennui when a fateful package is delivered to her doorstep. It’s a novel, written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gylenhaal), whom Susan abandoned in the most demeaning way possible. Perhaps most surreptitiously, the book, also titled “Nocturnal Animals,” is dedicated to her. When Susan begins to read it, this last fact takes on an alarming new shape.

As it turns out, Edward’s latest tome isn’t a declaration of love — not by a long shot. Instead, it’s a bleak, hellish thriller set in the badlands of Marfa, Texas: one that soon takes an unthinkable turn. At this point, Ford redirects the movie to Edward’s tall tale, which takes on a nail-rattling register of pure dread. The first passage we hear from the book opens with protagonist Tony Hastings — who looks like Edward and is also played by Gylenhaal — driving down a dark, eerily quiet Texas road. All is fine for a while, before a car full of bullying, hateful local sadists — sprung from the darkness as if crawling through the portal of hell itself, and led by a growling devil who calls himself Ray (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) — pull up alongside them and proceed to force them off the road. What happens next is the manifestation of any parent’s worst nightmare: humiliation, assault, rape and murder, in about roughly that order. Tony is then driven to the darkest extremes of what a normal man could be considered capable of, although he gets some invaluable assistance from a local detective named Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon, out-doing even himself) with his own twisted sense of justice.

At this point, and others, Susan puts the book down and Ford transitions seamlessly back to modern-day Los Angeles. Edward’s book has shaken our heroine — and us, too. Ford’s mastery of dueling tones aside, none of this would mean much if the two stories didn’t somehow compliment each other. Not only is the case, but one story is actually essential to the other’s organic development. Edward’s latest novel is no mere slice of high-filigree pulp: it is a scathing fuck-you to his former lover, where every page is dripping with malice and a barely-concealed sense of self-loathing. On more than one occasion, Tony is affronted for his lack of manhood: emasculated, put down and embarrassed, even by the comparatively noble (if that’s the right word for it) Bobby Andes. In flashbacks to Susan and Edward in happier times, we see Gylenhaal’s character struggling with his own virility in a way that suggests “Nocturnal Animals” the book is less about cheap, sleazy thrills and more about Edward working out some of the lacerating wounds from his latest broken relationship. In a flashback that’s ripe with campy black comedy, Susan visits her estranged mother: a simpering, passive-aggressive vision of Old Texas money played with hammy aplomb by Laura Linney, who can do ham like few other actresses can. Susan bristles at her mother, chides her for her insensitivity, but the fact is plain as day: as Linney’s character so ruthlessly states, “sooner or later, we all turn into our mothers”.

Adams and Gylenhaal are both fantastic, though their acting styles couldn’t be more at odds with each other. Adams has become a master of economy, but never at the cost of expression. Unlike her “American Hustle” co-star Jennifer Lawrence, Adams seems averse to overinflated displays of emotion. She channels Susan’s crippling emptiness with just a few pointed stares, though her character is revealed, in flashbacks, to be a happier, seemingly more fulfilled person than the hollowed-out nonentity who we see haunting her own house like a ghost in the present. Gylenhaal has a tougher role. He has to go to some places that most actors (and people, frankly) couldn’t imagine going to. Gylenhaal, unlike Adams, loves oversized displays of emotion — in fact, you could say it’s his bread and butter. And while he goes way too big in a few scenes near the movie’s bloody, bitter end, what’s easy to forget is that Gylenhaal is also one of our best actors. Considering the journey his character is taken on, I’m thoroughly impressed with his work here, and it seems as though Ford has pushed him past the point that many other performers in his age range would have been comfortable with.

As gripping as Adams and Gylenhaal both are in their respective roles, the movie ultimately belongs to two other performers. Michael Shannon is generally the best part of anything he’s in, and the same is true of “Nocturnal Animals”. Here, Shannon gives a frightening, funny, deeply knowing and scary-brutal turn as a man who exists outside well outside the range of what most folks consider normal. When his character’s first statement is “I’m Bobby Andes and I look into things around here,” boy, do you believe it. Attentive viewers should study the terrific scene where Andes gives Tony the nitty-gritty run down of his wife and daughter’s respective deaths. Gylenhaal’s character, understandably, comes completely undone, and why wouldn’t he? He’s hearing the most atrocious, unthinkable shit come out of this lawman’s mouth, and now his family have been reduced to worm food outside an old Texas junkyard. Andes, though, doesn’t blink an eye. This bad shit is all old hat to him. It’s not for lack of compassion either: over the course of the film, Shannon’s character eventually reveals a genuine desire to help Tony track down the cretinous sub-humans who defiled his wife and daughter and took their lives, if only to mete out what he considers to be a kind of Biblical righteousness. The Kentucky-born actor plays Andes with the smoldering fury of a thousand suns, but he’s also responsible for some of the movie’s funniest moments: his first interrogation scene with one of the thugs who terrorized Tony had the theater I saw the movie with howling with laughter.

The real surprise of the movie is Aaron-Taylor Johnson, who plays the nefarious Ray. I’ve always considered Johnson to be a somewhat wooden actor: in movies like Oliver Stone’s “Savages,” the new “Godzilla” and “Kick-Ass,” Johnson was handsome but also deadly-dull, failing to leave an impression almost every time. Well folks, that actor is gone, and in his place is a brilliant, charismatic young character actor with the instincts of a young Joaquin Phoenix. As Ray, Johnson sometimes recalls the giggling venom of “Blue Velvet’s” Frank Booth, but the young British actor eventually reveals Ray to be a more scarily recognizabile kind of psycho. Perhaps the most genuinely upsetting scene in the movie is when Ray finally bares his soul about why he took Tony’s wife and daughter from him. His reasoning seems to be: they were just there. As in there for the taking. And in a world where normal rules don’t apply, why not act in your own self-interest? It’s a troubling question that ultimately ensnares Edward, who turns out to be very much a victim of that same fatalistic philosophy.

I’ve heard some critics complain that “Nocturnal Animals” bites off more than it can chew, that it doesn’t stick the landing, that its marriage of high and low art is unwieldy and shallow. The staggering ambition of “Nocturnal Animals” should not be a reason we criticize it: these kinds of grand, operatic cinematic experiments are to be celebrated, especially when they’re produced and funded by a major studio like Focus Features. What’s even more incredible is that “Nocturnal Animals” does somehow stick the landing, and turns out to be even more wickedly funny, even more diabolical and even more emotionally wrenching than Ford’s already-considerable debut. Sure, the guy could stay in his fashion lane — and he probably will. But on the basis of these first two movies, it appears like he’s going to have one hell of a film career ahead of him. Grade: A-.