Nightcrawler is an engrossing crime thriller movie to watch on Netflix

One man, armed with a camera, lurks among the bushes in front of a home in Granada Hills. This is where a triple-homicide was committed. After waiting for the culprits to flee, he follows them around. As he wanders the house carrying his camera, he finds a dead man lying in his bloody pool. He faintly gasps to breathe as he walks through it. This man, however, isn’t here to help. He’s here to get footage, and make a quick buck off the carnage.

Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s neo-noir thriller now on Netflix, that man is Louis “Lou” Bloom, the protagonist played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Bloom is a conman who talks fast and boasts about his entrepreneurial skills. He also rattles off anecdotal statistics as well as faux motivational talk points. Lou was inspired by the sight of a camera crew covering a scene from a car accident to be a stringer, and drives around Los Angeles late at night to capture violent crime and accidents, and then sells the footage to local media stations.

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Image

Lou clings to Nina Romina, Rene Russo’s morning news director at the local TV station. He had just sold his first recording of a man in distress. He’s eager to learn and even more eager to please. Nina stresses she’s interested in crime, though not All crime. “We find our viewers are more interested in urban crime creeping into the suburbs,” she says. “What that means is a victim, or victims, preferably well-off and white, injured at the hands of the poor or a minority.” But above all, what Nina wants — and what Lou needs to succeed — are incidents of graphic violence that will shock her station’s audiences, play on their fears, and garner their undivided attention. “The best and clearest way that I can phrase it to you Lou, to capture the spirit of what we air, is think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.”

We see Lou succeed in his new career, amassing an impressive collection of car accidents, murders and other sinister clips, which he proudly categorizes and labels on his laptop. The film makes it abundantly clear that Lou’s success as a so-called “nightcrawler” is not in spite of his sociopathic personality, but rather because of it. Lou is a carrion buzzard who eats death and tragedy like an ant. He drives his Dodge Challenger through Los Angeles’ dark streets, looking for the next prey. There is no low he won’t stoop to to further his own aims, whether it’s aggressively coercing Nina into sleeping with him, lowballing his frazzled assistant Rick (Riz Ahmed), or orchestrating a competitor’s near-fatal car crash and filming his mangled body on a stretcher. When Rick protests, telling him not to film the body because he is “one of them,” Lou counters, “Not anymore, Rick. We’re professionals. He’s a sale.” For Lou, every smile is a show of teeth, every compliment is a veiled threat.

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Image

This would make it wrong to define Nightcrawler as a story of one man’s descent into depravity and horror because in truth, it was never that far a fall for Lou to begin with. If anything it was a positive thing. NightcrawlerIt is both an engaging dark thriller with stunning cinematography in Los Angeles, and an exciting night-time car chase. The film also exposes the perilous impact of modern news media on stories that are not intended to educate or edify but to exploit and dehumanize subjects. It’s a powerful film that never moralizes to its audience, but rather compels them to think about how a system that incentivizes a person like Lou ever came to exist in the first place.