Pun Salad

Even though Netflix told me I would find this movie mediocre at best, it came into "either move it to the top of the rental queue or delete it" territory.

And I chose… poorly. Maybe because I like Amy Adams.

Anyway: Amy plays Susan, who, as the movie opens, is running a very trendy art gallery. So trendy that it features morbidly obese, impossibly ugly naked women dancing and grimacing at the viewers. Susan is also coming to realize that her second marriage, like her artistic tastes, is falling apart.

Out of the blue a manuscript arrives from her first husband, Jake Gyllenhaal. It's a novel entitled Nocturnal Animals! The movie breaks into three tracks: present-day Susan, reading the novel, getting freaked out; the rise and fall of past-Susan's relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal; and the movie that's playing in Susan's head as she reads the manuscript, in which the main character is played by … Jake Gyllenhaal!

This sounds more clever than it actually is.

The movie-within-the-movie is more interesting than the other two threads, but not that much: fictional Jake, his wife, and young daughter are driving on a semi-deserted highway, when they manage to irk a car full of degenerates. Who proceed to force them off the road and … well, it's pretty unpleasant. Jake seeks revenge, in which he's aided by a near-vigilante lawman, played by Michael Shannon.

Everything's disturbing, nihilistic, degenerate. Not my cup of tea at all, sorry.