Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal delivers the performance of his career in this taut, exceptional thriller

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Directed By: Dan Gilroy
Other Notable Films From Gilroy: Two for the Money (writer), Kong: Skull Island (writer), Roman J. Israel, Esq. (writer and director)
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Bill Paxton, Ted Chaough from Mad Men, Brianna Barksdale from The Wire
Screenplay By: Dan Gilroy
Movie Synopsis: A guy who films footage of car accidents and crime scenes begins manipulating car accidents and crime scenes to further his career.
Signature Line: “Not like the last time!”

THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context

When people are discussing the best individual years in Hollywood history, three or four typically get mentioned. There’s 1939, which brought, among others, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, and Stagecoach. There’s 1994, which brought, among others, The Shawshank Redemption, The Lion King, Pulp Fiction, and Forrest Gump. There’s 1999, which brought, among others, The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, and Toy Story 2.¹ And there’s 2007, which brought, among others, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, and Superbad.²

Some other years pop up occasionally, of course—1975 might get mentioned, for example,³ or maybe 1967,⁴ or possibly 1989.⁵ But that’s usually it. Those are the core entries. And I bring this all up to say: 2014 should absolutely be added to the conversation. Because it can stand alongside every one of those. Consider:

In 2014, we got Interstellar, possibly the greatest space movie ever made, and we also got Whiplash, possibly the greatest music movie ever made. There was John Wick, a franchise that officially cemented Keanu Reeves as the greatest action movie star since the Schwarzenegger/Stallone heyday of the genre, and there was Gone Girl, which introduced a terrifying new character into the All-Time Great Movie Villain canon. It also brought us Edge of Tomorrow,⁶ Snowpiercer,⁷ Guardians of the Galaxy,⁸ Captain America: The Winter Soldier,⁹ and The Equalizer.¹⁰

You can even wander further down the list, if you like, and there’s still an abundance of really good stuff (The Lego Movie! Bad Words! Chef! 22 Jump Street! Dawn of the Planet of the Apes! Horrible Bosses 2! Wild! Top Five! Birdman! The Grand Budapest Hotel!). And tucked somewhere in between all those—hiding, waiting, prowling around in the darkness—is Nightcrawler, a nasty little pill of a movie that very well could be the best of the bunch.

In many ways, Nightcrawler is about what it means to watch, and what happens when the distance between spectator and spectacle collapses; a commentary on the public thirst for sensationalized media and the urge by some to profit off it.

I don’t figure there will ever be a point in time when popular consensus lines Nightcrawler up next to the landmark films I mentioned in the opening paragraph.

What the movie suggests, though, is that maybe none of it matters anyway.

THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Nightcrawler

1:09: You know the famous saying, “The two best words in sports: Game 7”? That’s how I feel about “and Bill Paxton.” The three best words in movies: And Bill Paxton.

2:49: Jake Gyllenhaal is here. He plays Louis Bloom, a very creepy unemployed man who eventually hustles his way into prominence as a freelance crime-scene cameraman (a “stringer,” as it were). Gyllenhaal is one of my absolute favorite actors, and this is one of the best performances of his career, and so get ready for me to gush over his work in this movie for the next 5,000 words.

2:50: P.S. Since we’re here, let me say: Gyllenhaal not even getting a Best Actor nomination from the Academy Awards for this movie is fucking outrageous. Imagine watching Giannis hang that 50-14-5 stat line in Game 6 of the 2021 Finals and then being like, “I’ll tell you who’s your Finals MVP: Bobby Portis.” That’s what the Academy did here.

2:51: P.P.S. Gyllenhaal should have no fewer than seven Oscar nominations on his resumé and two Oscar trophies on his mantle. (Nominations: Donnie Darko, Jarhead, Zodiac, End of Watch, Prisoners. Wins: Brokeback Mountain, Nightcrawler.)

4:53: Lou has been on screen for less than three minutes and he’s already (a) assaulted a security guard, (b) stolen his watch, (c) broken into a metal scrap yard, (d) stolen 350 or so pounds of metal, (e) sold the stolen metal to a junkyard operator, and (f) asked for a job from the junkyard operator. In most movies, the main character goes on some sort of emotional arc or journey where they learn something or change in some meaningful way. But that doesn’t happen in Nightcrawler. Louis is a terrible person the moment we meet him, and he stays terrible throughout the movie, and then it’s over. It’s why the movie feels so brutal and so dark.

7:51: Bill Paxton is here. He plays Joe Loder, a veteran stringer who unintentionally inspires Lou to pursue a career in the field. Paxton was such an incredible talent. Just an utterly distinct actor—he was vaguely frantic, strong without ever feeling threatening, and completely charismatic. Scrolling through his filmography is like walking down the GREATEST HITS aisle in a video store (The Terminator, Weird Science, Aliens, Tombstone, True Lies, Apollo 13, Twister, Titanic). He should’ve been here for at least another 25 years. What a loss.

8:46: P.S. A quick interaction to illustrate how driven (or possibly deranged) Lou is: When Loder realizes that Lou is interested in becoming a stringer, Loder warns, “Let me tell you something: It’s a flaming asshole of a job.” Lou, who’s standing just a few feet away from a woman who’s screaming in pain from injuries she’s just suffered in a horrific car crash, hears that description, sees Loder’s generally disheveled appearance, processes all of the horribleness that’s happening around, and immediately responds, “Can I ask you, are you currently hiring?”

8:47: P.P.S. Coincidentally, “a flaming asshole of a job” is how I described the job of editing every essay at GOOD MOVIE to Hannah when I approached her about working with me on this project last year.

12:06: Part of the fun of the Lou Bloom character is how effortlessly and relentlessly he tosses out lies. Right here, for example, he’s trying to pawn a bicycle he just stole so he can buy some equipment to begin his career as a freelance stringer. As he tries to haggle the pawnshop owner to a higher price, Lou rattles off a bunch of lies about the bike, describing it as a “custom racing bicycle” that was “designed for competitive road cycling.” He says it “has a light-weight, space-age carbon frame and handlebars positioned to put the rider in a more aerodynamic posture,” and it “also has micro-shifters, and 37 gears, and weighs under six pounds,” before finishing with the boldest lie of all: “I won the Tour de Mexico on this bike.” It’s a waterfall of deceit that he delivers with the utmost conviction. I do not like talking to liars in real life, but I greatly enjoy watching them in movies.

12:07: P.S. The 21st CENTURY WHITE GUY MOVIE LIAR podium:

• Honorable mention goes to Nick Naylor in Thank You for Smoking.

• The bronze medal position goes to Frank Abagnale Jr. in Catch Me If You Can.

• The silver medal position goes to Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler.

• The gold medal position goes to Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley.¹¹

• And the super gold medal position goes to Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects.

12:36: Lou was able to trade the bicycle for a camcorder and a police scanner. He has officially begun his career as a stringer. It’s kind of wild to think about how four people will die, one person will get critically injured in a car crash, and one woman will get pressured into a sexual relationship all because someone bought a subpar lock for their bike.

14:40: I know that I’m supposed to be put off by Lou. I know that I’m supposed to see his behavior as unacceptable. And, for the most part, I do. I definitely do. But here’s the thing: If I ignore all of the horrible stuff he does—extorting a woman for sex, for example, or arranging for people to die so he can get good footage of their last moments, for another example—if I ignore that stuff and look only at the raw ambition he has… the drive… the willingness to work his way toward something… his capacity to learn new things… I mean…

[imagine me whispering this in the smallest, quietest, most discreet whisper possible]

…I kinda respect it.

14:41: (I wanna believe that the hesitant respect I have for his level of determination is because my brain is capable of stripping away the heinousness of his actions and simply measuring the intensity of his ambition. But part of me fears that actually I feel the way I do about him because I see some stuff in him that I see in myself. And let me tell you: That’s not a very fun thing to think about, my friends. 🫣🫣🫣🫣🫣)

14:41: (A similar thing happens with Patrick Bateman during the morning routine scene in American Psycho. 🫣🫣🫣🫣🫣)

14:42: (And the “I have a competition in me” scene with Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. 🫣🫣🫣🫣🫣)

14:43: (I think I might be a horrible person. 🫣🫣🫣🫣🫣)

17:18: Rene Russo’s here. She plays Nina Romina, the morning news director of a low-level news station (KWLA 6). I’m a big Rene Russo fan. She has a presence about her—a sort of visible intelligence—that gives credence to whatever role she takes on. It doesn’t matter if she’s a clinical psychologist (like she was in Tin Cup), or an insurance investigator (like she was in The Thomas Crown Affair), or even Thor’s mom (Thor), it always feels like, “Yeah, duh, of course she could do that job.”

17:19: P.S. Imagine how durable your uterus has to be to incubate the fucking god of thunder. That shit’s gotta be as strong as a bank vault.

19:00: Ted Chaough from Mad Men is here. (His real name is Kevin Rahm, but he’ll only ever be “Ted Chaough from Mad Men” in my head.) Mainly his role in this movie is he’s supposed to use those big, innocent, doe eyes of his to relay how messed up it is that whatever’s happening in a given moment is happening. (In this case, he has reservations about airing Lou’s very gnarly footage of a gunshot victim being treated by paramedics.)

23:42: Riz Ahmed is here. He plays Rick, an extremely affable homeless man who Lou hires to be his assistant. A small thing of note: When Rick sees Lou sitting in the booth waiting for him, he hustles over and apologizes for being late. When he does, Lou asks, “Are you Richard?” to which Rick responds by telling Lou to call him “Rick.” Lou smiles, introduces himself (“I’m Louis Bloom”), and then when Rick says, “Hey, Lou,” Louis corrects him, telling Rick to call him “Louis.” The only time that Lou refers to himself as “Louis” is when he’s with Rick. He refers to himself as “Lou” with everybody else. It’s like he’s trying on a version of himself that he’s not quite ready to present to the rest of the world yet. And to that point…

24:08: See Louis’s hair? This is the first time he’s worn it like this in the movie. He did it specifically for this interview with Rick. We’ll see him do it one more time at the very end of the movie when he hires some new people. It’s his Business Hair.

25:53: Ah, man. Look how happy Rick is when Lou tells him he’s gonna hire him. Riz Ahmed is so good at doing that SLIGHTLY NERVOUS SWEETHEART thing. It’s what makes his death so pulverizing in this (and, incidentally, what made his performance in HBO’s limited series The Night Of so devastating). I wish I could grab Rick out of this movie and drop into one a little more befitting his sincerity, like Chef or maybe Wreck-It Ralph. Watching him alongside Lou in this is like if a baby bunny was hanging out with that bear from The Revenant.

30:41: Lou says this to Rick: “Do you know what fear stands for? False evidence appearing real.” If someone retrofits an acronym into a word during a conversation with you, that’s how you know you’re talking to a liar. It’s the kind of faux insightful bullshit that conmen throw out there.

30:42: P.S. Retrofitting an acronym into a word actually has a name: It’s called a “backronym.”

30:43: P.P.S. The funniest ever backronym was when Young Thug’s lawyer tried to convince a judge during a federal court case that the “Thug” in Young Thug’s name didn’t actually mean “thug,” it meant “Truly Humble Under God.” Young Thug’s full name is Young Truly Humble Under God.

32:04: Lou and Rick are working together now. They arrived at a crime scene a few moments too late (a guy shot up a house, and the police have already quartered off the area). Rather than walk away empty-handed, Lou decides to sneak into the house and shoot footage inside. He steals the victims’ names off some junk mail and adjusts some family photos on the refrigerator to make the bullet holes in the door look more intimidating. I would assume Nina’s gonna have some objections to this sort of behavior when he shows her the footage…

33:33: …Aaaaaaaaaaaaand never mind. Nina doesn’t care that the footage was likely obtained illegally. She wants to run it. When Ted Chaough from Mad Men says that it’s his job to decide what does or doesn’t make it onto the air, Nina snipes, “No, your job is writing the tweet of the day and getting Deb to turn sideways during the weather forecast. We’re running it.” I feel kind of bad for her here because in an effort to assert her control over her domain (which she is well within her rights to do), she unintentionally piques the romantic interest of a sociopath, who believes he may have found a woman who’s as willing to wander outside the lines of decency in pursuit of success as he is.

35:05: It’s so exciting when an actor finds the pocket with a character as perfectly as Gyllenhaal does in Nightcrawler. Like, I know that it’s Jake Gyllenhaal I’m looking at in all these scenes, but somehow, despite the fact that he obviously still has Jake Gyllenhaal’s face, he doesn’t look anything like Jake Gyllenhaal, you know what I mean?

35:06: P.S. I went back and watched a bunch of video interviews Gyllenhaal did during the press tour for Nightcrawler. He talks a lot about how he and Dan Gilroy (the director) kept picturing Lou as a sort of animal that had come wandering down from the mountains to interact with the Los Angeles cityscape. He said he lost about 30 pounds for the role, and started running upwards of 15 miles at night so that he’d look and feel as much like a coyote as he could.¹²

35:35: Jake is telling Nina he’s begun to realize that he doesn’t just love television news—he also believes he’s going to be very good at it. As he rapid-fires his way through the conversation, the camera cuts over to Nina, who is looking at him like this:

Is her look here saying, “I recognize this person’s drive and passion and appreciation for television news because I have the same thing in me,” or is it saying, “This guy is a fucking nut and so I’m just gonna stay quiet and smile at him right now so that he doesn’t get spooked and try to eat my eyeballs out of my skull”? I go back and forth on the meaning.

37:41: MONTAGE TIMEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. We get a 90-second sequence of Lou collecting clip after clip, cataloguing each one in his laptop for his own records. Some of the titles we see him type in: “MURDER/SUICIDE IN DUARTE,” “FIERY DEATH,” and “SAVAGE DOG ATTACK.” The one I have the most questions about, though: “TODDLER STABBED.” Like, I know that combination of words leads your mind toward an incident where a perfectly precious, perfectly innocent toddler was the victim of a truly horrible incident. But I offer this: What if that toddler wasn’t a perfectly precious, perfectly innocent toddler? What if it was a crime toddler? Like, maybe she was running a heroin distribution ring out of her daycare or leading a criminal enterprise that traffics day laborers into America? I guess basically what I’m saying is: Maybe that toddler deserved to get stabbed? Did you ever think about that? Or were you too busy being self-righteous?

38:41: The montage is over. My boy Lou got a new car, a new camera, a new laptop, and a new police scanner.

38:42: Here’s a question: We never get any sort of backstory for Lou. No family stuff, no personal stuff, no anything stuff. And in all of the interactions we see him have with people in the movie, he’s basically only talking in approximations of human-speak. But so what that makes me wonder is: Did he choose this particular car because it’s of some sort of personal interest to him? Like, is it a small peek at his real personality? Or did he buy it because he thought it was the best option for the job?

41:05: Oh, man. The first time we saw Lou manipulate a crime scene to get better footage of it, all he did was adjust some photos a few inches so they’d be framed differently. Now, he’s moving actual dead bodies to get the perfect shot.

41:06: P.S. Imagine how much it’d suck if you were killed in a car crash, and so your spirit was just sort of hanging around before getting called up to heaven or down to hell, and then as you’re there waiting you see some big-eyed weirdo dragging your lifeless body around so he can get a better shot of it. That’s probably how the very first haunting happened. Some ghost watched some guy do something weird with his dead body and was like, “I will not let this stand. Somebody brings me some ghost chains immediately.”

42:45: A thing Lou says to Nina after she tells him that he’s been doing really great work lately: “I’m focusing on framing. A proper frame not only draws the eye into a picture but keeps it there longer, dissolving the barrier between the subject and the outside of the frame.” Please, God, I hope this isn’t what I sound like when I talk about movies with someone in real life.

43:31: Nina asked Lou about some blood on his shirt (which ended up there because he was moving the dead body), to which Lou replied by asking her to go to dinner with him. Larami and I have been together for 25 years now, and so obviously I’m very far removed from the dating scene, but I feel confident in assuming that there should always be some distance between the time a person asks you about mysterious blood on your clothes and the moment when you ask that person out on a date.

45:32: Lou’s rise in the stringer community has been such that he’s now become a threat to Loder. That being the case, Loder asks Lou if he wants to team up. I love this scene so much. It starts out with both of them being amenable and tempering their natural impulses (Loder’s being that he’s a sleazeball, Lou’s being that he’s a violent human). By the end of it, though, Loder is shouting obscenities at Lou for not agreeing to partner up and Lou is openly implying that physical violence is on the horizon. Two masters at work here.

45:33: P.S. My absolute favorite tiny moment in this movie is when Gyllenhaal adds a little “hmmph” gesture to the final thing he says to Loder here. It’s the kind of touch that gives a character a real interiority. Let’s actually watch this whole sequence for this week’s FOOTNOTES:

God, I love Jake Gyllenhaal.

48:05: Lou pressured Nina into going to dinner with him by threatening not to sell footage to her anymore if she didn’t. He basically extorted his way into a date with her. And I know there are a lot of guys who read GOOD MOVIE, so this feels like a good time to say: Do not extort your way into dates. It’s bad. It’s a bad thing to do.

52:14: Gah. Lou upped the ante, telling Nina that he wouldn’t sell footage to her anymore if she doesn’t start sleeping with him. When she got offended, he listed off a bunch of information he learned about her on the internet (mainly that she’s never been at a news station for longer than two years, and she’s about to hit the two-year mark at KWLA, meaning that she’s probably gonna lose her job if she suddenly finds herself at the end of a two-year contract without his footage).

57:26: Okay, so, shit’s starting to spin out now. First, Loder (who was able to find a different work partner) beats Lou to an important accident site, getting prime footage of a private plane crash that Lou was supposed to cover. Then, Nina yelled at him in front of everybody for not delivering on his promises after she slept with him. And so now he’s having a meltdown in his apartment.

57:27: P.S. The way Gyllenhaal shifts immediately from Full-Throat Yelling Rage into Dead-Eyed Stillness without any in-between phase is incredible. (NOT EVEN A FUCKING NOMINATION?????????????????)

57:28: P.P.S. The broken mirror thing was apparently improvised. Gyllenhaal did it just because his body told him to in that moment. They actually had to pause shooting for a while because he had to have a wound on his hand stitched closed because he sliced it open while breaking the mirror.

1:02:19: Rick and Lou got to a crime scene early enough that the crime (a home invasion turned triple murder) was still happening. Lou hid in the bushes while the two criminals got away, filming not only their faces, but also their getaway car. After they drove off, he went into the house and found three dead bodies. When he tells Nina about it, she looks at him with an almost lustfulness in her eyes:

I wonder if Nina was a bad person before she met Lou or if his sour magnetism is what turned morality compass wonky?

1:09:40: Maybe the most depraved moment in the movie: Nina, Ted Chaough from Mad Men, a lawyer, and a production assistant are watching Lou’s footage of the triple murder crime scene and arguing about whether or not it’s against the law to air it. As they watch, the production assistant, reacting to a crib suddenly appearing in the shot, says, “Oh, Jesus. Is there a dead baby inside of there?” And Lou, the fucking sociopath he is, clearly seems disappointed when he replies, “No, the crib was empty.”

1:11:11: Here it is. The hall of fame moment of the movie, and what I would argue is the single best two-minute stretch of Jake Gyllenhaal’s career. What’s happening is: Lou and Nina have been haggling over the price of the home invasion footage. When he arrives at his final and firm price, though—and when he realizes she is completely boxed in by circumstance and has no escape from his wrath—he unloads everything on her. He’s so turbulent and propulsive in the exchange that it feels viscerally violent despite him never touching her. Let’s watch the build up and the landing together. Pay close attention to the way he becomes more and more intense as he steps closer toward her, ending everything with the “Not like the last time!” line that cuts her legs clean off:

Fucking hell, man. What a monster.

1:19:52: Brianna Barksdale from The Wire is here. She’s one of two LAPD detectives sent to pay Lou a visit. They have questions about his footage of the home invasion. (Brianna Barksdale’s real name is Charlene “Michael” Hyatt. However, same as with Ted Chaough from Mad Men, I’ll only ever know her as Brianna Barksdale from The Wire. She’s perfect in that show.)

1:26:51: Okay, here’s Lou’s plan: He was able to track down one of the two perpetrators of the home invasion. He wants to wait outside the guy’s place until he leaves, follow him to a more populated area, then call the police, tell them the guy’s location, and film the inevitable confrontation. Rick, who Lou has begun rubbing off on, realizes that Lou’s plan is illegal, and so he pressures Lou into giving him money in exchange for him not telling the police about it. When Rick stands firm, Lou takes a beat, measures the situation in ahead, then says, “Well, if you’re saying I can’t negotiate, then I guess I’m…” Lou goes silent for a few seconds, then looks at Rick like this:

And that’s when he finishes his thought, “…just gonna have to give it to you.” (If Rick had any sense whatsoever, he’d have known right here that there was no way he was making it through the night alive.)

1:28:47: After Lou tells Rick he’ll give him the money he’s asking for, we get this great, great, great read on Lou from Rick: “Well, alright then. Now I can feel good about it, at least. Now I’ll go the extra mile. That’s what you never understood, man. It’s been the problem the whole time. You gotta bring people in, Lou. Seriously. You gotta talk to them like they’re fucking human beings. I’m saying this for you, dude. For the future, to help you. Because you got a seriously weird-ass way of looking at shit. You know you do. You know what your trouble is, man? You don’t fucking… understand… people.”

1:32:40: Lou and Rick trailed the criminal and his partner (two Mexican dudes) to a fast-food Chinese spot with giant windows located off a major thoroughfare. These guys are both wanted by the Los Angeles Police Department for TRIPLE MURDER and they still thought it prudent to stop and eat in the most visible place possible. They risked going to prison for the rest of their lives over a plate of shrimp fried rice and some crab rangoons. Mexicans fucking LOVE Chinese food.

1:34:47: Lou’s rebuttal to Rick’s earlier read of him, which he offers when Rick tries to back out of their deal: “What if my problem wasn’t that I don’t understand people but that I don’t like them? What if I was obliged to hurt you for something like this? I mean, physically.” Dan Gilroy wrote the fuck out of this script. Like, he finished it, printed it out, took it to the leading fucktologist in the world, had him examine it, and when the fucktologist was done he was like, “Yep. Far as I can tell, this script is fuck-free. You wrote the fuck out of it.”

1:37:39: Oh fuck. Okay. Here we go. The police just showed up. Which means…

1:38:40: SHOOTOUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ONE OF THE CRIMINALS GOT KILLED, BUT THE OTHER WAS ABLE TO ESCAPE, WHICH MEANS…

1:39:35: CAR CHASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE POLICE ARE CHASING THE KILLER!!!!!!! LOU IS CHASING THE POLICE!!!!!!!! IT’S MAYHEM!!!!!!!!!

1:39:36: Wait, wait, wait. You know what I just thought of? Remember the part at the end of My Best Friend’s Wedding when Jules is chasing after Michael? She calls George (her main guy friend) to tell him that everything has gone to shit. She says that she confessed her love to Michael, and also that she kissed him, but Kimmie (Michael’s fiancee) walked in and saw it. Jules tells George that Michael took off after Kimmie, which is why she’s currently chasing Michael. George interrupts and, very matter-of-factly, recaps the situation by saying, “Michael’s chasing Kimmie. You’re chasing Michael. Who’s chasing you?”

Remember that? You remember that, right?

Okay, how about this:

The police are chasing the killer. Lou is chasing the police. But… *ahem* Who’s chasing…………… Lou?

(I’m so sorry.)

1:42:36: Gah. The killer ended up slamming his SUV into a parked car. Lou walked over, saw the guy was dead, and so he called Rick over to get some footage. When Rick arrived, however, the guy (who was actually still alive) shot him. Lou set Rick up to be murdered so he could get footage of it. What a bummer. Rick was such a sweetheart. Rest in peace, Rick.

1:45:15: This guy’s only friend died literally just a couple minutes ago.

1:45:59: Nina’s reaction to the footage, which depicts the fatal shooting of not only Lou’s partner, but also a police officer and the two killers from the triple murder: “It’s amazing.” And what’s more: Right before the station goes on air, Ted Chaough from Mad Men tells her that it’s just been confirmed that the triple murder happened because the people who lived there were drug traffickers (which directly contradicts the URBAN CRIME IS CREEPING INTO SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOODS storyline that Nina had been peddling). Nina’s response to that: SHE FUCKING IGNORES IT, lol. She has gone FULL LOU BLOOM. He infected her like Venom.

1:49:31: Lou is being interrogated by Brianna Barksdale from The Wire (at the station, this time). She finds it suspicious that he’s at the center of the story again. She believes that Lou knew more than what he told her previously, and that he orchestrated the confrontation between the police and the killers so he could film it (which is all completely true). When she confronts Lou about it, he doesn’t flinch. He makes up a perfect lie accounting for the coincidence. Brianna Barksdale from The Wire isn’t buying his story, though, which I know because this is how she’s currently talking to him:

That’s the most accusatory posture possible.

1:49:32: P.S. Look at the above screenshot again. It’s beautiful. That’s the work of Robert Elswit, the cinematographer on Nightcrawler. Some other movies he did: Boogie Nights, Michael Clayton, and There Will Be Blood. An A+ talent.

1:51:13: A thing Lou says to Brianna Barksdale from The Wire as she leaves: “I like to say that if you’re seeing me you’re having the worst day of your life.” That’s the same thing I say to the lady at Golden Corral who’s in charge of refilling the tray of fried shrimp poppers.

1:52:19: The last beat of the movie is Lou welcoming a team of interns to his company, which has now expanded to feature two separate news vans. Two things about this: (1) He brought his Business Hair back. (2) Every single person Lou interacted with in Nightcrawler came out worse for it.¹³ And yet, none of that ill will ever blew back on Lou. He is now richer than he was at the beginning of the movie, and more successful, and possessed of a real professional purpose. My gut reaction is to be like, “Well, things are eventually gonna fall apart for him, given the way he operates.” But that prediction would be rooted in hope more than in fact. All of the evidence we’ve seen so far would suggest that he’s only going to accumulate more.

1:53:13: The movie’s over. Good movie.

UNEXPECTED SIMILARITIES
Things that last week’s movie (Game Night) has in common with this week’s movie

• Both movies have characters who sleep with someone under peculiar circumstances. (In Nightcrawler, Nina sleeps with Lou so she doesn’t lose access to his news footage. In Game Night, Michelle sleeps with a guy because she thinks he’s Denzel Washington.)

• Both movies have scenes where someone drives a car recklessly.

• Both movies have two or more characters who are more known for their work on television than movies. (In Nightcrawler, we get Ted Chaough from Mad Men and Brianna Barksdale from The Wire. In Game Night, we get Lamore Morris from New Girl, Chelsea Peretti from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Michael C. Hall from Dexter.)

• Both movies have scenes where someone gets shot.

• Both movies mainly take place at night.

• Both movies have rich people who do illegal things. (In Nightcrawler, the rich people who get killed in the triple murder were trafficking drugs. In Game Night, a rich guy hosts an underground fight club.)

THE LAST BITS
Things that I Googled while watching Nightcrawler

• How much do racing bicycles weigh? Lou mentions that the stolen racing bicycle he wants to sell weighs under six pounds. You’ll not be surprised to learn that that was a lie. Most racing bikes weigh somewhere between 15 and 18 pounds.

• Is the Tour de Mexico a real thing? It is not. (But it is what I’m going to start calling it when I show people around my house.)

• 2015 Scars: What I meant to Google was “2015 Oscars” but my brain was moving faster than my fingers and so I ended up with “2015 Scars.” Turns out, there’s actually a movie called Scars that came out in 2015. (It looks real bad.)

• Is it illegal to withhold information from the police? It’s illegal if you’re doing so to intentionally mislead the police.

• What was Young Thug on trial for? He was on trial for criminal street gang activity and racketeering. He pled guilty to some of the charges, and no contest to the others.

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Next week’s movie: The Town

You can rent it everywhere you rent movies from.

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​​This essay was edited by Hannah Giorgis Yohannes. The FOOTNOTES video was produced by Richie Bozek.

1. Brian Rafferty wrote a really fun book about all the best movies from 1999 called Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up The Big Screen.

2. I was so happy to include Superbad in a list of movies that featured Gone with the Wind and Wuthering Heights.

3. Jaws, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon.

4. Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde.

5. Do The Right Thing, When Harry Met Sally, The Little Mermaid.

6. Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt fight time travel space aliens!

7. Bong!

8. Remember how much fun it was seeing this in theaters?

9. What a year for Chris Evans.

10. The greatest actor who’s ever lived goes on a killing spree in a hardware store!

11. Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio could both appear twice on this list if you wanted to include their dual liar roles in The Departed.

12. Here’s Gyllenhaal, via a press junket: “When you see them, they’re very skinny, and their eyes are kind of bulging out, and they kind of pounce in this way, and they move in this way. That was my main study.”

13. I forgot to mention: Lou also was able to knock Loder out of the stringer game by going to his house and secretly cutting the brakes on his van, causing Loder to get into a life-threatening accident.