Jake Gyllenhaal is one of the most interesting Hollywood performers to me. Aside from some exceptions like Prince of Persia and The Day After Tomorrow, his career is devoid of the stereotypical big but dumb blockbusters. His own acting acumen of course is not in doubt ever since Brokeback Mountain. Nightcrawler is therefore only the latest feather in his cap, being not only an excellent film but also one that brilliantly showcases his diverse skills.

Here Gyllenhaal, slimmed down and with extra-thick eyebrows to accentuate his creepiness, plays Lou Bloom, a petty thief who finds success in being a “nightcrawler”. This entails monitoring the police radio channels for reports of violent crimes and accidents and getting there quickly enough to shoot graphic videos of the scene before it’s cleaned up. The gorier the video, the more viewers it pulls in and the more the news networks are willing to pay for it. As the news director of the local television station, Nina Romina, explains, it’s even better if they’re of crimes committed by minorities against white people living in affluent areas.

It’s an ugly business but it does demand a very specific skillset and Bloom discovers that he excels at it. Part of this is conventional: Bloom is intelligent enough and driven enough to learn all of the knowledge required and reckless enough to take ridiculous risks to achieve the best results. But most of it is because he is a sociopath. He feels no empathy for anyone and is utterly amoral. He barges into houses without regard to the privacy of victims. He coolly rearranges crime scenes to get the best filming angles. Therefore it comes as no great surprise when he crosses the line from covering violence to instigating it himself.

Nightcrawler is also an unusual film in that it is the directorial debut of its maker, Dan Gilroy who both wrote and directed it. Since he was apparently 55 years old when it was released, this also makes it a heartening example of someone realizing his dreams in his later years. Yet Gilroy spent many years before this in Hollywood writing for films and it is his screenplay that makes this such a compelling watch. The visuals are solid and Gyllenhaal plays Bloom to perfection but, really, the material here is so unique that even if the other elements were weaker, this would still be a very special film. It’s a kind of slow-moving horror movie in which the monster is not only plausible in our real world but is allowed to do what he does openly with complete impunity.

Apart from Gyllenhaal, his co-stars deserve special mention too. His relationship with Nina Romina, played by Rene Russo, gives you insight into the dark depths of how his mind works. There’s something unreal in how Bloom constantly resorts to business-speak yet he seems to earnestly believe in it and actually manages to make it work out for him. I love how Russo is creeped out by him at the beginning but by the end her eyes are positively glowing with adoration. Riz Ahmed as his assistant adds a bit of dark humor to the film. He stands in for the audience by being the character who constantly wonders how far Bloom is willing to go and thinking, “Is this guy for real?”

All that said, a subtle film this is not. Its blows against television journalism may well ring true, yet is so heavy-handed that it’s doesn’t feel like serious criticism. Gyllenhaal pulls off a kind of evil charisma amazingly well, yet when we stop and think about it, it’s hard to imagine how he can continue working if the police adopt an explicitly adversarial relationship against him. In fact, it strikes me that such an intelligent and motivated person would likely succeed in many other professions and wouldn’t be a petty thief in the first place.

Still the lack of subtlety only makes it even truer that it’s a film that keeps your eyeballs glued to the screen and hits you straight in the gut. It’s a fascinating, eye-opening watch and certainly one of the best Hollywood films of last year.