LTSmash14

When I heard this film was getting so much buzz in a year ripe with quality horror, I was more than excited. What a let down. This hacky horror is a collection of the tackiest horror tropes with unsatisfying jump scares and more slow motion than a Zach Snyder movie. What was an interesting concept to twist the genre totally falls flat and into a tired and cringey slap fest. The villain lacks dimension so much so, you wish he was just Jason Voorhees so you could actually enjoy it. There's no one to root for and it's completely unsatisfying. 2016/17 horror really killed it and this film just did not.

Nocturnal animals is three stories woven into one. It's a story about a woman (Amy Adams) living in her upper class LA life with problems in her boring marriage to her gorgeous, rich, husband. She mysteriously receives a manuscript from her ex husband, to whom she hasn't spoken to in 19 years. The manuscript is a terrifying story of a man who's family is attacked on the highway. This story is overlayed with Adam's present, and her past, falling in love with her first husband, Eddie, the author of the manuscript. The tale of the family man on the highway is an excellent story of a man's descent, in the style of great films like Prisoners. The rest feels like an empty attempt to create an art house dichotomy between Adam's character and the man in the novel, with less than subtle "hints" like a red velvet couch appearing in the three stories at a shallow attempt to mirror the feeling in each story. It completely falls flat and serves as a distraction from a good story to focus on an underdeveloped story of a woman in a bad marriage out of love with her career, that we've seen a hundred times. It felt like a narcissistic attempt to be "deep" by mirroring objects at three different points in time and space. The visuals are beautiful and the focus on colour does not go unnoticed. Each actor acted for their lives, and there is certainly some credit due to Tom Ford for seeming to get the best performance out of this brilliant ensemble cast.