Nightcrawler shakes you by the shoulders and forces you to open up your eyes. The movie is obviously an embellished scenario, but the way this raggedy little TV station treats his gruesome clips, and the way that motivates him to take everything further is genuinely scary and it really makes you consider the dynamics of how we consume our news and what we like to learn from our media. For this TV station, the more gory it is, the better. The more gruesome, the better. It's a gross system of audience capture that's cyclical because once you shock people with one thing, you have to beat it the next time by going one step further--and he does.
The main part of this movie that's disturbing is actually Jake Gyllenhaal and the way he portrays this character. You only ever see his character really crack once. He gets angry, but he stays relatively composed, which makes his demeanor that much more intimidating. We see him, once, really loose it in his house and it's terrifying and it's only for a few seconds. I've never been more convinced by a performance. If I meet Jake Gyllenhaal in person I am going to be a little bit trepidatious around him because of this movie. It just wholly convinced me that he has some fraction of that character left in him.
His character is pretty disgusting but also completely fascinating. The way he learns the business and the way he adapts is incredible to watch unfold, and the filmmakers make the progression quick and to the point, but well-paced and with all the necessary milestones. The pacing of this film was some of the best I've seen. We only get enough background to understand his basic character and then they go from there. I almost think the filmmakers take it to far because the boundaries he crosses on the way to getting to being the best in his field of work literally had me squirming.
Nightcrawler does a really good job at making its audience exceptionally uncomfortable. The long looming shots of him doing something you really don't want him to do made my literal heart feel tight with anxiety. The scenes where nothing could happen, but you are expecting something to happen, and so the whole time you're on edge. The way his dialogue is written and then executed is amazing to me considering every other way he could have delivered them, but he does it in the most effective way possible. When someone speaks really fast but collected, knows what they're talking about and what they want, doesn't break eye contact, and is completely composed, it's a terrifying feeling. Add to this that when he would go on these rants it was always in one take. There were essentially no cuts and it's just him building this tension-- it's a visual representation of how the alternate character is held in that situation, has not option to move, leave, or remove themselves, and they are stuck in this vulnerable position with this sociopathic guy.
There is a really interesting aesthetic to this movie being that almost 100% of it takes place at night. If it's not at night it's usually in his dim apartment or in the creepy television station. This movie is wrought with shots of people in a dark environment with some kind of city neon light or electronic light illuminating their face. It really detracts the character from any kind of sympathetic connection with the audience because that way of shooting the movie makes the characters seem so sucked into another world and so engrossed in non-reality that they aren't relatable at all.
The conflict of this movie is him doing things that make the audience say "YOU CAN'T DO THAT", and then he does it anyway and then some. That is what progresses the story so prepare to feel all kinds of uncomfortable because this movie is full of that queasy uneasy feeling. The audience is constantly nervous about what he'll do next because, as we've seen, he pushes everything to the next level. It's so cringe educing watching him do these terrible things just to get a better shot or a better angle with better lighting or weave a more suspenseful narrative.
This movie is pure art. If you want to see a film where every shot is thought out and every element has a purpose-- watch this film. Nightcrawler is meant to make you feel something. It will make you feel something, and probably not something you're completely comfortable with. The strategy involved in making this movie is incredible to me. Everything has a purpose. Jake Gyllenhaal's character could have been this loony bin crazy guy so easily, but instead he has a collected demeanor. He seems put together which is the scariest part; it makes you wonder who else could possibly be as internally crazy as he is in the movie. This movie is not something you walk lightly into. Everyone sitting down to watch this movie needs to take a long, deep breath and prepare for the utter controlled chaos you are about to watch.
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