Nocturnal Animals

What is Weakness?

This seems to be the central question of the dark-contoured chilling movie, which doesn’t let the viewer feel comfortable or at ease for even a second.

We quickly learn that the main female protagonist Susan is unhappy, her life is unreal and unfulfilling to her. She has a beautiful home and a “dashing” financially struggling husband (is he? or is he just cheating on her?), she has a successfull career, managing her own art museum and has a daughter, with whom she doesn’t really have a close contact. And she is deeply empty.

One night, Susan receives a book named “Nocturnal Animals” from her former husband Edward which kickstarts the two stories — hers and the books’, encompassed into each other.

We learn that Susan made a critical decision 19 years ago. She left the man she loved, her first husband, got an abortion and moved away from Texas to New York.

The reason for her decision is a key point in the movie. Edward is a writer, a romantic and a gentle soul, who believes their love can withstand anything, that if you love a person it is enough to overcome any obstacle. Susan doesn’t think so. She is afraid. Her mother has warned her beforehand that she would not be happy with Edward, with someone who has no ambition, who is weak.

In the end Susan did exactly what her mother thought she would do. She left.

But why? That is the question.

Obviously as illustrated throughout the film, it turned out to be the worst decision of her life. She never found meaning or happiness after, even though she definitely got everything that her mother said she needed to be satisfied with life.

But Money vs Love is hardly the theme of this movie. It is much more subtle than that and requires close look at the complex interactions between its two plots.

The second plot, or the movie of the book, centeres around Tony Hastings, who decides to take a trip in the wilderness of Texas with his family which ends up ruining his life.

The Hastings get entangled with the group of young and cruel young men who end up raping and killing Tony’s wife and daughter. He can’t stop them, can’t even properly hit one of them. His wife and daughter are more spirited than him. People who are more animals than humans, shred his life to pieces in one fateful night.

Tony Hastings was not born for the harshness of the night. He is a human, not an animal. But he is weak.

The director here seems to give us the first definition of weakness. Weakness is the inability to fight for what is dear to you. Weakness is not being able to be an animal when in the kingdom of animals. Weakness is the inability to survive the night.

So what happens next?

Tony decides to find justice and together with the cancer-afflicted detective starts to hunt down the criminals. It turns out that justice system doesn’t care much for justice, obviously, and places much more importance on personal power and advancement of interest, as we have come to expect. So the detective offers tony a more primal way of restoring justice. To enact vengeance in a literal way. So they catch the remaining 2 bastards( the third died in some other altercation) to kill them but Tony is still unable to pull the trigger when it matters, so the detective ends up killing one of them and the other escapes.

In one of the final scenes we finally see Tony become someone else. He finds the killer, who taunts and calls him “weak” and only this keyword, as if it was programmed, makes Tony finally pull the trigger. But there is not much left in him, he dies empty with his vengeance. And the scene never feels as satisfying as we’d expect. It just feels empty.

(In general, there is no trace of satisfaction in this movie, only the paralizing feeling of helpnessness. The same helpnessness that seems to be imprinted on every character one way or another.)

Weakness, Revenge, Helplessness and Fear. These are the building blocks of this admittedly thought inspiring movie.

The second definition of weakness, belongs to Susan. Here we may learn that weakness is the inability to overcome fear. The inability to shed light on the the dark, shadow part of your own self, the part that is uncertain. Isn’t uncertainty what night is about? when you have love, you are alive, and when you are alive, the night will always give way to the day, if you wait long enough. But she didn’t.

Another intersection of the two stories comes in the theme of Revenge. On the one hand we have got Tony’s Revenge on the other hand Edward’s. And neither of them yield anything. They only succeed in showing the roots of death from which they have sprung. Revenge is neither strong not weak, in the end revenge is empty. It reverses nothing.

At the end I would like to say just a few words about Fear:

As long as you have it, you have something.

As long as you don’t give into it, it won’t become the food for nocturnal animals. Whether they are inside us or outside us.