Nocturnal Animals is a story within a story Nocturnal Animals is no Single Man, but it’s definitely all Tom Ford.
At times its self-indulgence borders on self-parody, but it captures the mood of the book while also doing something new with the material.
Watching someone read doesn’t seem like it would work as a movie, but Ford’s reimagining of the novel - which transposes a number of elements to fit his signature aesthetic - does succeed, on balance. It’s kind of a thriller, but the action is all internal: Susan’s thoughts, emotions, and memories, and the words on the page of the manuscript. The text of Edward’s novel-within-the-novel is reproduced in full, so we read it along with Susan, and experience her feelings about it. In the book, Susan receives a manuscript from her ex-husband Edward and reads it. Ford returned this fall with Nocturnal Animals, also based on a novel: Austin Wright’s 1993 thriller Tony and Susan, which does not, upon reading, present itself as a natural candidate for the screen.