Tom Ford is better known as a fashion designer, being at various times the creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, but he seems to be developing a second career as a movie director in his free time. Nocturnal Animals is only the second film that he has made and it’s almost unfair how good it is given how far removed a director’s skills are from that of the fashion industry.

Susan Morrow is the owner of an art gallery who has been growing more distant from her rich businessman husband. One day she receives a manuscript of a novel that is about to be published, written by her first husband Edward Sheffield. She reads the novel over the new few days and becomes absorbed in it. It tells the story of a man with his wife and daughter who are driving at night when they are harassed and forced off the road by three youths. After toying with them for a while they separate the man, Tony, from his family. Tony eventually manages to escape but by the time he finds help and returns to the site with the police, they find only the naked bodies of his wife and daughter. Even as she reads the novel, Susan contemplates the course that her relationship with the writer Edward has taken and feels perhaps some measure of regret for how she has treated him in the past.

This film boasts some seriously heavyweight talent in the form of Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal and they don’t disappoint. The fictional story of the novel proceeds about as you would expect but the execution is impeccable. The sense of dread and terror as you watch Tony’s family being stopped on the highway is so heavy that it’s smothering. You know that such a scenario can only ever go one way yet the film keeps dragging out that last strand of hope that somehow everything will turn out alright and that the youths will be content with some swaggering and bullying. I especially like how gradually the villains ramp up the harassment so that Tony is never quite sure when the point of no return is and he should start fighting all out against them. He subsequently blames himself for not trying hard enough and I like how the police detective even seems somewhat curious about why he didn’t fight back but I just love how the film sets it up such that it’s hard to single out any one moment when he should have given up all hope of a peaceful resolution, grabbed a weapon and started swinging wildly.

Watching Susan’s horrified reactions as she becomes immersed in the story is of course another way to heighten our emotional response to the events, especially as her thoughts about the novel bleed out into her daily life. At the same time, just as she searches the story for references to her relationship with Edward, in particular as the criminals mock Tony for being weak just as she once saw Edward as being weak,so do we. The clever thing about how this is set up is that neither story, the frame story of Susan reading the novel and Tony hunting for justice, is substantial enough to on their own to be worthwhile, but the two combine to form an interesting whole. This still isn’t a film that says anything particularly new or deviates far from the usual tropes but it’s worth appreciating how flawless the execution is.

One minor quibble that I have is that the frame story hews a bit too closely to a standard male wish fulfillment fantasy: girl leaves boy for a richer man but regrets it when the boy achieves success of his own and the richer man cheats on her. The clincher here is that they even drop a hint that the man’s business isn’t doing too well at the moment so she is doubly wrong. That just feels sort of petty and devalues the work. On the whole however I found this to be a solid, entertaining thriller. Just good film-making all around.