They’re positioned to face each other lying on a couch we see the bare backside of one corpse, which in turn hides most of the other. Two women are discovered dead, in the nude. (The videos take up what seems like several minutes of screen time during the opening credits.) Susan is a curator at a trendy Los Angeles gallery, and Nocturnal Animals begins at the opening of one of her exhibits: Videos of obese, naked women wearing band hats play on the gallery walls (we see full-frontal nudity) while their actual nude bodies lay on platforms in the exhibit, as if they were sleeping or dead. And when a bird accidentally kills itself after flying into one of Susan’s windows, she stares at the feathered corpse with sadness and pity. When her board considers firing someone, Susan argues that the woman should stay “Sometimes it’s a good idea not to change things quite so much,” she says. She doesn’t much like what she’s become, and we see some softness creep in around her hard edges.

While reading Nocturnal Animals, Susan takes a hard look at her own life. And while his methods often lack the justice he and Tony seek, his relentless pursuit is nonetheless admirable. He eventually crosses path with Bobby Andes, a police lieutenant who tirelessly works to bring to justice the thugs who attacked Tony and his family. But when he’s confronted by a trio of roughnecks in the wilds of West Texas, he discovers that his inherent goodness isn’t enough to protect him and his family. Tony, his alter ego in the book, is also a good man-a conscientious husband, a devoted father. And when he and Susan teeter on the edge of divorce, Edward pleads with her to work it out, not to leave him.Įdward admits that no writer writes about anything but himself, and so it is with Nocturnal Animals. When Susan complains about her parents as “religious, sexist, racist Republicans,” Edward recalls how much he liked them both-how they helped him through a family crisis, and how kind his mother was to him. The Edward we meet in Susan’s past is a good man. Susan closes the book, paints her lips blood red and walks out to face the day. The harsh California sun rises over the city, exposing the shimmering metropolis for what it is: a jungle of hard glass and concrete, white-hot ambition and cool, clinical betrayal. I wonder why he titled the book that? Susan wonders.īut the night’s over. Is it possible that Edward misses her, too? Could it be that she’s being given a second chance? Is it possible that in the midst of this violent, wrenching thriller he’s written, Edward is longing for her again? She looks at her own life and wonders how she came to this place, to become everything she hated, everything she once rejected. She was right.Įxcept that now as she reads, Susan remembers how wonderful it all was. “The things you love about him now, you’ll hate in a couple of years,” Susan’s mother warned. How they fell in love, how they married against Susan’s parents’ wishes. How they rediscovered each other by chance in New York City one night. How she was his first crush, how he was hers. Finally, he said, he was writing from the heart … thanks to her. They’ve not spoken for 19 years, but now he reaches out. He sent the proof to her, telling her he wanted her to be the first person to read it. There’s nothing new this night, nothing at all.Įdward, Susan’s first husband, wrote it. She’s sleeping alone in their stark, concrete mansion, as she often does. Her husband, Hutton, is gone on business, as he often is. She’s never slept particularly soundly, often taking pills to sleep at all. A man gets out of the attacking car, knocks on Tony’s window. Then sideswipes the car, passengers hollering, pushing Tony’s restored Mercedes off the road. His car comes up behind two others creeping along side by side. His daughter, India, sleeps in the back seat, bored by her bar-less phone.

His wife sits beside him, gently holding his hand. The West Texas night is warm and starless as Tony Hastings drives down a lonely highway, dust and scrub flashing in his brights.

Nocturnal animals streaming