I went to see Nightcrawler on its release date with my former housemate one school night and yet this movie still haunts me to this day. I recently decided to rewatch it, reminding myself why I think this movie deserves all the awards there is. Jake Gyllenhaal is an amazing actor. He has such diverse roles and always nailing each one of them (although after watching some of his thriller movies, it's so painful to see him acting romantic). In this movie, he's Louis Bloom; an unemployed young man who's unsettlingly very well-spoken, living on his own in the modern city of Los Angeles. He's becoming somewhat of a thief, but he did what he must to get money while constantly seeking for an opportunity to work. He eventually stumbles upon a lesser-known occupation called as nightcrawler--a job in which people roam the city at night while tracking police radio trying to get footage (videos or photos) of something worth documenting so that the morning news can create a bigger deal from it. In this case, "If it bleeds, it leads!", meaning that the more graphic and gruesome your footage, the higher news outlets will pay. Our antihero cynical Lou here only cares about shooting a scene to make it looks ten times more dramatic, thus setting him apart from the other nightcrawlers in this movie and make more money out of it. He works alone at first, but then recruited a homeless guy, Rick, as his partner. What follows as Lou and Rick finally work together is gonna be hard to process at first, yet the bigger picture will probably upset you even more.
Jake Gyllenhaal's eerie performance definitely make this movie an even more disturbing one to watch. Not only that he looks very very sunken physically, he also creates mannerisms that makes you feel really uncomfortable on the edge of your seat. Louis Bloom's misanthropic ass will wake you up that we're all in this for something that only matters to us and the rest is history. You will ask many questions after you watch this movie, which is a good thing in my opinion. What is the credibility of the news that we consumes everyday will also be a long social debate. We rely so much on the media nowadays as our source of information that we rarely ever think about what's really happening, since we're being spoon-feed headlines of events through small screens and typed words. I couldn't praise this movie enough for being smart, dark, ironic, and eye opening.
If you're interested about real life people who work as nightcrawler, you should go on and read What It's Like to Be a Real-Life Nightcrawler. Don't worry, it's not as immoral as this movie suggests.
