Nightcrawler, 2014
Written and directed by Dan Gilroy
Ok, I’m going out on a limb here and saying this film from 2013 may not be a fucking masterpiece, but it’ll do until one shows up. I just happened on it randomly without having any idea what it was about, and I was left a bit stunned. Yeah, it was that good.
Let’s see, where do I start? It’s a great script of a less than original story, but the story isn’t really the fucking point.
The cinematography, editing, and writing are the fucking point. But the cherry on top is Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it” is usually reserved for the unspeakably bad, but in this case I mean it in the best possible way.
It actually describes his performance, which is quite a trick in 2020. What, you might wonder, haven’t we seen? Well, you haven’t seen this character, I can tell you that.
It’s very cool how virtually no back story is given on the protagonist – we know nothing of his past. In the context of this film, it works because it allows Jake to slowly reveal who he is. All we know of this man is what we we see. And what we see is constantly surprising.