Nocturnal Animals is an interesting but not wholly successful venture. The story-within-a-film conceit is hardly new, and here it is done successfully, but from the outset the film almost breaks under the weight of its themes, contradictions and juxtapositions (art vs artifice, emotion vs abstraction, real-life vs fiction and so on). This is also seen in the actual film-making in a film that unsurprisingly deigned and directed to within an inch of its life (sometimes smartly, sometimes eye-rollingly obviously) but has a strong but anachronistically melodramatic music score. Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal are both technically strong and at moments heartbreaking, both clearly relishing the challenges offered by the material, but overall Nocturnal Animals is clever rather than smart and ultimately does not wholly satisfy.
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