Nocturnal Animals (15)

The Light Between Oceans (12)

ONE wonders why Tom Ford has waited seven years since his auspicious directorial debut, A Single Man, to make another; he may be renowned as a fashion designer, but Ford sits just as comfortably behind the camera. And from the opening scenes of Nocturnal Animals until its enigmatic conclusion, this casts a spell that is the real stuff of cinema.

Whereas the previous film was a character study, this is more embedded in genre, combining the style, mystery and foreboding of film noir, the grit and gut-wrenching violence of a crime thriller and the nuanced emotions of psychological drama – with a sprinkling of social satire thrown in for good measure.

Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) is a successful art curator in Los Angeles, great at her job, married to a handsome businessman and living in a gorgeous modernist home in the hills. But one look at her face tells a different story: hubby is cheating on her, she’s insomniac and deeply unhappy.

Then Susan receives a book, written and sent by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), who she hasn’t seen for 19 years. It is dedicated to her. But as she reads its harrowing account of a family terrorised by Texan rednecks on a deserted country road, she comes to the conclusion that Edward’s fiction is a direct and savage rebuke, to the way she treated him when married and the cruel way in which she left him.

Just as Ford’s source, the novel Tony And Susan, was constructed as a book within a book, so Nocturnal Animals is a film within a film. But there’s a third level: as Susan visualises the book she’s reading (whose husband is also played by Gyllenhaal), she begins to reflect on her and Edward’s life together, these flashbacks raising our understanding of the decisions, guilt and regret that underpin her malaise.

It’s a hugely ambitious piece, intricate and compelling, sensationally shot by cameraman Seamus McGarvey, lushly scored in the manner of a 1940s noir or 1950s melodrama, and uniformly well acted by a cast that includes Laura Linney as Susan’s ghastly mother, Michael Shannon as a characterful Texas detective and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the redneck ringleader.

Family tragedy is also to the fore in The Light Between Oceans, a superior tearjerker that is unlikely to leave a dry eye in the house.

In the aftermath of the First World War, shell-shocked soldier Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) takes a job as a lighthouse keeper on a remote Australian island. While his predecessor succumbed to cabin fever, the reticent, damaged Tom embraces the solitude. But before long the most spirited woman on the mainland, Isobel Graysmark (Alicia Vikander) has proposed to him. And the gorgeous, love-struck couple settle down for a life of bliss in their very own idyll.

Based on ML Stedman’s bestseller, this starts so happily, before going so horribly wrong, the couple’s lives knocked first by a natural setback, then by a tragedy of their own making. In short, if a baby girl washes up, alive, on your beach, you should never claim her as your own.

The film is written and directed by the American Derek Cianfrance, whose previous, very contemporary offerings (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond The Pines) wouldn’t necessarily prepare you for the Mills and Boon overtones of this adaptation. Yet intense relationships and the crosscurrents of fate and bad choices are his bread and butter. He expertly orchestrates the myriad moral dilemmas, while eliciting poignant performances from both his leads and from Rachel Weisz in a pivotal, and inevitable role.