Nightcrawler: Criminal with a Camera

The 2015 Nominee for best writing and original screenplay, Nightcrawler is a crime thriller—a story without a hero.  Nightcrawler focuses on a news hungry, coyote like man, Louis Bloom, who in a selfish quest of money and power, reveals his true psychotic and manipulative nature.  I watched this movie because I couldn’t access or find any of the other 2015 Oscar Nominee movies and this was on Netflix.  I’m not entirely sure what I expected—maybe something I would enjoy but not be too freaked out by.  I was wrong.  The movie is like a nightmare you want analyze the next day—you sit on the edge of your sit experiencing this man’s darkness, wondering how it started and what will end it.  There was a lot of graphic images in this movie, but I couldn’t ever look away because what was happening was so engrossing.  Nightcrawler is a low budget film, and the cinematographer works off that grainy feel for most of the film since Louis Bloom is filming off a low budget camera as well.  The actual movie, was shot on a mixture of film and digital—the film to get the grainy feel, but the digital for all the nighttime scenes. Since most of the movie was filmed at night, the lighting seemed to be super tricky, but yet the “good” characters were always lit higher than Louis, because in all his scenes he seemed to be shrouded in darkness.  I think as the movie goes on, he looks more and more like a coyote--encased by more and more darkness, having less light on him in the film.  Ironically one of the tag lines for this movie is "The closer you look the darker it gets". This movie is really good if you like American Psycho, but maybe not when you’re alone late Saturday night.   I give this movie 6/10 because I detested the ending.  When there’s a movie with no hero, everyone loses-making the ending a bit of a surprise.