Jake Gyllenhaal lost twenty pounds for the role. The most-disturbing satire of local-television news ever made.
Lou Bloom, an unemployed petty thief, discovers freelance crime-scene videography after seeing two stringers (Bill Paxton's Joe Loder is the model) selling footage to a local Los Angeles TV station at the scene of a freeway accident. He buys a camera. He buys a police scanner. He becomes a stringer. Within months he is the station's most-reliable supplier, and within a year he is staging incidents — moving bodies for a better shot, withholding tips from police until his footage has been sold, eventually orchestrating the deaths of his own competitors.
The film is, in form, a satire of cable news and the freelance journalism economy. In substance, it is a character study of a sociopath whose self-improvement vocabulary — drawn from corporate-training manuals he has read online — has aligned perfectly with a media system that rewards what he is willing to do.
Lou Bloom is the most-precisely-drawn American sociopath of contemporary cinema. Dan Gilroy's screenplay gives him a vocabulary lifted from LinkedIn-style corporate self-help: 'My motto is, if you want to win the lottery, you have to make the money to buy a ticket.' He thanks employees for opportunities to give negative feedback. He gives stretch-goal assignments. He runs a one-person freelance operation with the management vocabulary of a Fortune 500 division.
The film's argument is that the contemporary media-industrial structure does not punish people like Lou Bloom; it promotes them. Rene Russo's Nina Romina, the news director who buys his footage, is shown becoming progressively complicit. The film closes on Lou's freelance operation expanding to multiple cameramen and a fleet of cars. He has, by the film's own moral logic, won.
Gyllenhaal lost approximately twenty pounds for the role. The weight loss was deliberate — Lou Bloom's hollow-cheeked, wide-eyed look reads as both starvation and predator. Gyllenhaal has described the role as the one he most-completely disappeared into; the performance was widely expected to earn him a Best Actor Oscar nomination. He was not nominated. The omission was widely considered one of the most-debated snubs of the 2010s.
What's striking about the performance, on rewatching, is how genuinely funny it is. Lou is, by his own framing, a model employee. He delivers his corporate-speak with a sincerity that is partly the joke and partly the horror. Gyllenhaal plays him without contempt — Lou believes everything he says, and that belief is what makes him terrifying.
Nightcrawler was released in 2014. The local-TV-news economy it satirises was already in decline; the social-media-driven attention economy it implicitly predicted was already in ascent. The film's central insight — that incentive systems can produce monstrous behaviour by people who believe themselves to be high performers — has aged into perhaps the most-accurate American film of the 2010s about the structure of attention capitalism.
It also stands as one of the most-precise Los Angeles night films ever shot. Robert Elswit's cinematography of the city after dark — empty boulevards, helicopter spotlights, the particular sodium-yellow of street lamps — is among the best work of his career.