It is always interesting to me when a movie tries to dig into what is going on in "society" under the immediate surface and exposes the clientel and rusty morality that drives the day.
This is a big part of the story in "Nightcrawler", which portrays a certain kind of news footage hunters, who mostly roam the streets at night to catch footage of traffic accidents and other kind of footage that news networks are willing to pay good money to get a hold of.
Louis Bloom (played by jake Gyllenhaal), a young man on the edge of the law, making his living by stealing and other immoral acts, with a growing incentive to start some sort of decent career, one day finds himself at a traffic accident and is intrigued by an amateur "news" recorder, who records the bloody incident. When he asks if the filmmaker wants an assistent, he is blank rejected.
He then decides to start his own "film company" and gets a hold of a police radio and a small film camera. He gets lucky a few times and is able to sell his footage to a local news channel. This gives him the kick he needs. But we also understand that he does not really have any sympathy for any of the "victims" in his footage and rather they have become a kind of tools of his trade rather than individual human persons.
He is consumed with his own megalomaniacal ideas of his own grandeur and thinks he is some kind of business genius. He does know how to manipulate and if needed threaten people into doing what he wants them to to further his "business".
But the underlying premise for his business is a rejection of human pain and misery to give himself a upper hand. This can not be sustained in the long run and the competition is also driving him into more and more hazardous situations balancing on intrution on private property and rearranging corpses to make them look more "attractive" on the film.
Jake Gyllehaal does a pretty decent job of portraying this asocial character and he looks and feel like a mixture of Bale in The Machinist and De Niro in The King of Comedy. At times he looks quite scary. Particularly check out when he rages against a bathroom mirror. The rage and the psychopathy is right under the surface.
It is decent cinematography and the supporting actors are all pretty good. Even if i personally have a bit of an idiosyncracy again Rene Russo (I am not suree why), I will give her that she fits the bloodhungry news bitch really good.
But I am left a bit unsatisfied in the end. It feels like I know from pretty early on where things will go, and as the lead character is pretty much a sick psychopath, there are not that much of a story in him to lift things to another level. It is one of those kind of movies I cannot really put a specific finger on yet I get the notion I am longing for something extra. maybe it is the undeveloped story of the lead, I am not sure.
I was surely entertained and never bored by it, but there is a certain emptyness to it, that leaves me longing for more. But basically it is a good decent movie that will please most people and it comes with a small recommendation
7/10
