NOCTURNAL ANIMALS REVIEW - TOM FORD IS BACK WITH AN ABSURD GRIPPING REVENGE TALE! MUST SEE!

There’s a double-shot of horror and despair in this outrageously gripping and absorbing mystery-thriller from fashion designer turned film director Tom Ford, adapted by him from the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. It’s a movie with an exceptionally clever double-stranded narrative – a story about a fictional story which runs alongside – and it pulls off the considerable trick of making you care about both equally.

Ford has surely raised his game from his faintly wan and over-determined drama A Single Man from 2009. There is something much more uninhibited and even raucous about this picture, which combines melodrama with a kind of teasing sophistication. I mean it's just subliminal.

The scene is Los Angeles where Susan (Amy Adams) is a successful gallery owner who appears to specialise in shocking and provocative kind of cringy pieces – and if I have a quarrel with the movie (a quarrel I’m setting aside because of how much satisfaction the film gave me) it is that this world is a bit too ludicrous and grotesquely represented, especially in the bizarre sequence over the opening credits (Which was exceptionally cringe).

Susan is successful, but her personal wealth derives chiefly from the business activities of her smoothie husband, Walker (Armie Hammer), with whom she is deeply unhappy. Then she is overwhelmed to receive, out of the blue, the manuscript of an unpublished novel from her first husband, Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal), a sweet, sensitive boy and wannabe writer from her Texas hometown whose heart she broke twice over: by leaving him for Walker, and by declaring he didn’t have the right stuff to be an author (Which I'm sure she would take back because damn he can write) – that he was insecure and weak. There is also another terrible issue in their pasts.

While Walker is out of town for the weekend, Susan begins to read and Ford dramatises the novel in front of us. The clash between supercool LA and this couldn’t be more jarring. Because this is no feathery literary confection: it is a brutal west Texas crime thriller about a married man – Susan imagines Tony, that is, Jake Gyllenhaal in the role, who takes his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and his daughter Helen (Ellie Bamber) on a road trip on vacation across the remote desert, where they are terrorised by a wild gang of good ol’ boys led by the brutish disgusting Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). It is a horrifying situation which is to lead to a confrontation with a classic, laconic, Stetson-wearing Texas lawman, terrifically played by none other than Michael Shannon one of my favourite underrated actors.

Susan is horrified – and we feel everything she is feeling and it is horrifying especially how realistic the hole scenario is. But where is this coming from?

Of course, the theme of revenge begins, inexorably, to emerge. The book is entitled Nocturnal Animals, which is what these psychopathic criminals are, but it is also a queasy perversion or deliberate betrayal of an affectionate nickname he once gave Susan, a restless night-owl when they were together. Here is what happens when the weak guy decides to get tough. The book is about revenge and it is revenge – a cherry bomb of rage and malice lobbed into Susan’s perfect little life and it's phenomenal.

But there is more even than this. It is about the revenge of the past on the present and the present on the past (I hope you got that). And he does it in such tremendous fashion but is he turning into the thing he once despised (Susan) by doing as he is doing.

There are tremendous flashbacks, triggered incongruously by the grisly crime-genre shocks, which carry Susan back to the decisions she made and unmade in her youth. And there is a glorious scene with Susan and her reactionary, Martini-sipping mamma, wonderfully played by Laura Linney.

As I say: some of the scenes in the LA art world are a bit broad. But this is a terrifically absorbing thriller with that vodka-kick of pure malice. It is a highly rated film which brought in only a poor 20million at the box office, you definitely have to see this and purchase the DVD.