Nightingale

David Oyelowo is electrifying. From the moment the story opens to the inevitable climax you are spellbound. You can't take your eyes off him as his story, his pain, his need spills out all over the screen. The pain is palpable, but not overwhelming or trite. Every moment feels real, there's not one false step. The fact that is basically one large long soliloquy doesn't keep it from being compelling to watch, if nothing else, it compels the fascination.

Peter Snowden is a broken man and his brokenness is palpable, it's a living thing that consumes him and drives his every decision. When the movie ended I said, "Wow, wow" I knew I'd watched something special.

I highly recommend it.

I don't do reviews. Movies are subjective. I felt the need however, with this acting lesson of a film by one man. ONE ACTOR in the entire thing. Not one single dull moment, no over the top or expositional acts to bring us out of this man's world.

I knew David Oyelowo was an excellent actor. I don't believe that description is enough to hint at the magnitude of his talent after watching Nightingale. We have all said such & such does not appear to be acting because they are so natural. Well, add to that being the ONLY PERSON in the film AND an extremely nuanced character - covering most every emotion in the space of ninety minutes and you can begin to see why you must watch this movie!!

I would imagine doing a movie solo is difficult but David Oyelowo carries it off effortlessly.

Never mind Gus Van Sant's ill-advised 1998 remake: here is our ideal 21st century adaptation of Psycho. Instead of custodianship, our contemporary Norman Bates directs his spiteful and playfully sulky jabs to Mother through a video blog while eagerly preparing for guests, yet is shown to be just as fraying in sanity. But there's nothing mad about Nightingale, which ticks along with absorbing insistence, unspooling its familiar narrative of obsession and yearning with deftness and ease.

Any single actor show is always a commitment, but director Elliot Lester keeps the proceedings lively and engaging, with cameras mesmerizingly gliding through every last inch of Peter Snowden's house, while the disjuncture between long, still takes and rapid cutting empathetically mirror his manic shifts in energy, even blurring the frame imperceptibly in solidarity with his drunkenness. Writer Frederick Mensch employs every conceit in the book to stave off stagnation (including a choice HBO gag the film's original viewership must have relished). He motivates Snowden's monologuing and teasing crucial exposition through key props and devices, including his mother's makeup mirror, phone conversations, prayer, and his vlogging interludes, each teasing out distinct strands of personality coalescing into a disturbed but wholly realized individual. Meanwhile, Mark D. Todd's score lends an uneasy serenity to the surroundings, as the film creeps along with a thinly veiled false sense of security.

Story-wise, which enraptures its unravelling protagonist with The Glass Menagerie's anticipation of a gentleman caller of sorts, there are few surprises, but the inevitability with which events transpire is bittersweet in itself. But beyond this cursory human experience, which is affecting enough, there's not much by way of thematic subtext. Childhood trauma and military service are teased, but left as largely self-evident, while it's unclear if the collusion in the character names "Edward" and "Snowden" is meant to imply any sort of commentary (the dichotomy between his isolated loneliness and his consistent filming and publicizing his stream-of-consciousness monologues?), but it's either clumsily implemented or vaguely distractingly gimmicky.

As such, the film is worthwhile primarily as a showcase of its lead, the magnificent David Oyelowo. Nearly unrecognizable from his star-making turn as MLK in Selma, Oyelowo, carrying virtually every frame of the film, is comparably superbly magnetic here. Sashaying through mood swings (and hair styles) encompassing outrageously silly to pouty to vitriolic and destructive, Oyelowo masterfully conjures energy through his constant tension between frenzied movement and stillness, all the while carrying a wealth of achingly sympathetic unspoken backstory in his increasingly bloodshot eyes. It's a spectacular turn, and if, granted, he's the predominant draw and purpose Nightingale, he alone is easily well worth the experience.

-7.5/10

It's not easy to call Nightingale horror. But then again if Nightingale isn't horror, what is? David Oyelowo stars in the 2014 film from Executive Producer Brad Pitt's entertainment company Plan B, helmed by Director Eliot Lester (Selma), as the tormented Peter Snowden, a man who is on the downside of a lifelong battle with mental illness. In this context the film solely relies on one-sided conversations on the telephone along with pitifully accurate vlog entries and their summonsed yet unsolicited comments.

The sparse production and singular location serves as a look into Snowden's lacking support system and also paints a picture of what loneliness truly looks like.

As we follow Snowden's descent into madness Lester feeds us the pieces of Snowden's life we need to begin to understand the psychosis that brings him to this moment in time. In doing so Lester reminds us that mental illness is comprised of two parts; the first being the genetic makeup of an individual which makes it more likely to being susceptible to the illness and the second being the environment a person develops in, which plays a large role in a person's growth-or lack of.

At one time relatable and almost silly David Oyelowo's character work as Peter Snowden is complex; it almost appears too simple until we realize we've been fooled. Why do we question every interaction Snowden has with his acquaintances? Is he even speaking to another person on the other line or is every conversation living only in Snowden's mind? Viewers will know the answer to that question as concretely as Snowden himself knows for certain the difference between reality and psychosis.

All the weight of Nightingale rests on its very conclusion where the very talented David Oyelowo serves a lifetime of pain and then a way out. It's a bleak film, with an even bleaker ending. Then again, how many people do you know who suffer from severe mental disability who actually have their happy ending?