Film Review: Disturbingly stark 'Nightcrawler' tells you what makes men turn into monsters

Film: Nightcrawler
Direction: Dan Gilroy
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Bill Paxton
Rating: ****

What's it about: Louis Bloom (Gyllenhaal) is a nobody who becomes a somebody, just through single-mindedness and a dogged pursuit of whatever he decides to go after. Fed up of stealing for a living, he chances upon a crime scene and feels the adrenaline rush of covering it first-hand and tries to find a way in, but nobody wants to help him. So he finds a way, a camera and teaches himself all he needs to know. He makes a breakthrough, catches his first opening and clenches hard. He convinces a hard-nosed TV news station director Nina (Russo) to play his footage. He gets better and better over time, in due course, dictating demands. But in the pursuit of the next breaking news in crime, how far will one man go?

What's hot: Gyllenhaal deserves a Best Actor nod for this role. He's pure menace in this. Even without dialogues, he manages to put the fear of god into you. Russo provides the perfect foil as someone who will go for the kill despite the apparent lack of ethics. It's a perfect study for students wanting to get into TV journalism. Don't mean to generalise here, but it does give you, on the local level, a good idea of what depths some people will sink to, to get a story.

What's not: Riz Ahmed as the drifter, the perpetually stoned Rick can't be that dumb for that long. Or can he? It's kind of the thing that makes your skin crawl. How easily he's sucked into Bloom's glib talk. How Bloom builds his brand and gets a network to bow to his demands. Nobody should be allowed to get away with this sort of madness. But then, I tell myself it's only a film...

What to do: It's a disturbingly stark and sufficiently suffocating look at the stuff that makes monsters of men. Recommended watching for every student of human nature.