Picture the scene: A happily-married woman, Susan (Amy Adams), inadvertently opens up the door to her past upon reading a manuscript titled Nocturnal Animals.
Hailing from an ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) that she severed contact with some seven years ago, it’s the content of said script that really causes Susan’s skin to crawl, chronicling a family under siege by hoodlums on the highway late at night. The question then becomes, is it a harbinger of things to come?
That is, essentially, the elevator pitch to Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford’s latest feature and the director’s first since A Single Man back in 2009. Pegged to land in the awards-friendly corridor of November, Entertainment Weekly has today peeled back the curtain on that domestic feud, as Gyllenhaal has a run-in with the law and Amy Adams, housed up safely in her home, ponders the unnerving situation at hand.
Here’s the cracking premise at the heart of Ford’s new creative venture, one based on Tony and Susan, the page-turner penned by late Cincinnati author, Austin Wright.
A married woman named Susan receives in the mail a manuscript called Nocturnal Animals from her ex-husband, Edward, who she hasn’t spoken to in years. As she begins to read Edward’s book — a tense page-turner about a family under siege by hoodlums on the highway late at night — we read it right along with her. And we wonder, what does it all mean? Is the book an act of forgiveness? Or an act of revenge?
Nocturnal Animals is due to open on November 18. Armie Hammer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Shannon, and Laura Linney round out the enviable ensemble.