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Review: 'Nightcrawler' makes comedy creepy

 
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, who blurs ethical lines while filming violence to sell to TV news.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, who blurs ethical lines while filming violence to sell to TV news.
Published Oct. 30, 2014

There's a nightmare glaze to Jake Gyllenhaal's dreamboat eyes in Nightcrawler, a monster movie of a different sort than its title and Halloween release date suggests.

The creature going bump in this night is Louis Bloom (played by Gyllenhaal), a crime scene videographer chasing death for sale to local TV news. If it bleeds, it leads and that pays better. Louis wants a big hunk of that cherry-red pie.

It's a ghoulish profession saying as much about Louis as the viewers breathlessly tuning in. Nightcrawler can be viewed as a twitchy addendum to Network, the 1976 classic that forecast everything wrong with TV news today, except it underestimated the bloodsport potential.

Louis is a go-getter going nowhere when Nightcrawler begins, boosting scrap metal and beating up a security guard. He wants an honest job, knows all the right interview lines about the virtues of hard work but there's something off about Louis. Gyllenhaal plays him as ingratiating to the point of annoyance, someone to be remembered later as a loner but Louis knows he tried.

The videography gig literally comes by accident, with Louis gawking and getting in the way of a veteran splat-shooter (Bill Paxton). Soon he's the proud owner of a pawn shop camcorder and police scanner, memorizing dispatcher codes. Louis is indifferent to boundaries, pressing his lens close enough to see a gunshot victim bleed out. His first sale.

The TV executive buying the gore for broadcast is Nina Romina (Rene Russo), whose Dunaway style is the movie's most direct callback to Network. Nina practically gets misty at the videotaped sight of blood, getting in her anchors' earbuds, coaching them to accentuate the horror, pump up the fear factor to keep viewers coming back for updates. Nearly twice Louis' age, Nina becomes his other obsession, spelled out during a creepy seduction/negotiation.

Nightcrawler is an auspicious directing debut for Dan Gilroy, also handling his usual screenwriting duties. The movie has a caffeinated spirit worthy of its graveyard shift milieu, a darkness artfully breached by cinematographer Robert Elswit, who previously framed L.A.'s unstill life in Magnolia and Boogie Nights.

Gilroy takes a few predictable steps in Louis' decline from merely unethical behavior — what's a little trespassing, anyway? — to actions much more reprehensible, like dragging a corpse closer to a car's headlights for a better view. The question is how far Louis will go, and the answer is disturbing.

Yet there is a playfulness to all this depravity making Nightcrawler dark as comedy gets, an acquired and possibly undesired taste. Certainly the older crowd at Monday's screening left a distinct sense of "huh?" in the air while end credits rolled. Nightcrawler doesn't err cautiously but on the side of discomfort, and you have to admire that.

Contact Steve Persall at spersall@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8365. Follow @StevePersall.