"My motto is if you want to win the lottery, you have to make the money to buy a ticket."
— Lou Bloom
Nightcrawler is a 2014 neo-noir crime thriller film written and directed by Dan Gilroy in his directorial debut. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal (who also co-produced the film), Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, and Bill Paxton.
Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a man desperate for work who starts the film trying to make an honest living in various dishonest ways, including petty theft. He stumbles upon the world of "nightcrawlers" — cameramen that record graphic footage of violent incidents at night to be sold to local TV stations — and establishes himself with an unwitting partner, Rick (Ahmed), to get in on the game. Along the way, as he begins to make a name for himself, he blurs the line between observer and participant, and it becomes clear that he will do anything to make himself the star of his own story.
Gilroy had previously spent several years as a screenwriter prior to making Nightcrawler. He first came up with the idea for the film in 1988, originally planning to make it about the life of American photographer Weegee, who sold sensationalized photos to tabloids in the mid-20th century. He later switched focus after discovering the stringer professionnote , which he considered to be the modern-day equivalent to Weegee, and began work on what eventually became this film due to not being aware of any films that focused on stringers. Gyllenhaal also played a pivotal role in the film's production, from choosing members of the crew to watching audition tapes.
Has nothing to do with the X-Men character.
This film provides examples of:
- Ambiguous Situation: When Lou asserts that Rick turned tricks as a Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job, Rick denies it, saying that he's straight. Lou counters that straight people turn tricks too. He seems to be speaking from personal experience, having demonstrated his own recent lack of job prospects, but it's never confirmed.
- Ambition Is Evil: While Louis Bloom certainly takes the cake, this seems to be almost a job requirement for a nightcrawler. The nightcrawlers we see are competitive with each other and uncaring towards the victims of the tragedies they film.
- Asshole Victim: The murdered family were actually involved in the drug trade themselves, though Nina chooses not to broadcast this information when it comes to light because the story of a bunch of drug pushers getting what was coming to them won't sow fear among the populace.
- Bait-and-Switch Comment: Lou, when Rick angrily demands a 50:50 cut for the big coup: "If you're saying I can't negotiate, then I guess I'm... [long, long pause]... I'm just gonna have to give it to you."
- Batman Gambit: Lou withholds footage of the home invasion shooters so that he can report on them in a public setting, where he's ready to film, and manipulates his 911 call to put the police on edge, trusting that a gunfight will break out for him to film.
- Beeping Computers: Lou's laptop is making beeping sounds when data is shuffled back and forth.
- Blatant Lies: Lou blithely asserts that his stolen bike has 37 gears, and he won the "Tour de Mexico" on it. The pawnshop owner notes that no bicycle has 37 gears (because it's a prime number).
- Boobs-and-Butt Pose: Nina sarcastically tells Frank Kruse that his job includes "getting Deb to turn sideways during the weather forecast."
- Bookends: Lou films his first footage at 1st and Western. The shootout he helps orchestrate is just down the street on 3rd and Western.
- Boring, but Practical: By the end of the movie, Lou switches over to a set of big gray vans for recording footage from his higher-maintenance sports car.
- Car Chase: Lou manages to film a particularly wild and bloody one that he helped happen.
- Central Theme: Coming from the director Dan Gilroy: "I think to some degree it's certainly an indictment of local television news, but I'd like to cast a wider net in the sense that all of us really watch these images. I would hope that maybe a viewer would take it further and maybe go, 'why do I watch these images and how many of these images do I want to put into my own spirit?'"
- Comically Small Demand: As Louis begins to close in on a guaranteed windfall, he congratulates Rick and asks him to name whatever kind of raise he wants. Rick, not knowing the scale of what they're headed in for, asks for a raise of "100... 75 dollars" up from his prior pay of $30 per film. A little later he discovers Louis is hunting a $50K cash reward, so he starts angrily demanding to be given half.
- The Conscience: Frank Kruse makes it very clear several times that he objects on both legal and moral grounds to Lou's methods and the dishonest way the station spins his work. Unfortunately for him, no one listens.
- Deal with the Devil: Twice with Lou being the devil both times:
- Nina is forced to cave in to his increasingly insane demands, since his footage is the main thing keeping her career afloat.
- Rick makes a deal with him for a work. It eventually ends poorly for him.
- Dies Wide Open: While it is ambiguous as to whether Joe died or not, his final shot in the movie shows him lying all bloodied on a stretcher while being carried into the ambulance, staring nightmarishly into Lou and his camera filming him.
- Downer Ending: Not only does Lou get away with his crimes, but his nightcrawling business has expanded substantially, with several new assistants to abuse. After getting several innocent people murdered in his Batman Gambit, it's left to the audience's imagination as to what heinous misdeeds Lou will commit next in order to get more footage.
- Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: Lou is introduced stealing scrap metal to sell. Rick also recalls working a "mow, blow and go" landscaping job for a few weeks before having to quit. He insists, however, that he never tricked.
- False Reassurance: In the end, Lou assures his new workers that he wouldn't ask them to do anything he wouldn't do himself. But it's become quite clear at this point that there is nothing Lou wouldn't do.
- Give Geeks a Chance: Subverted; when Nina doesn't respond to his advances, Lou settles for extortion.
- Hard-Work Montage: Once Lou hires Rick, we get a montage of them getting into a routine of filming and selling footage, which ends with Lou having purchased a new Dodge sports car with his recent earnings.
- He Knows Too Much: Lou engineers Rick's death because he can't work with someone who has leverage over him, after Rick blackmails Lou with the knowledge of his criminal obstruction of justice.
- Hero Antagonist: The two police detectives are just trying to bring bad guys to justice. While they succeed (somewhat) in a Pyrrhic Victory in one scene, they are still misled by Lou's dishonesty and desire to save his own skin.
- Hollywood Law: The police would most likely have enough probable cause to get a warrant to search Lou's residence, but the film acts as if their hands are tied.
- Idiot Ball: The police who go to the diner after Lou calls in his tip about the home invaders being there are firmly clutching this. Lou identifies himself as eyewitness to the home invasion, positively IDs them, and reports they are armed. Despite all this, the police attempt to go in casually and act as if they are just there to get something to eat. In reality, they either would have waited outside for them to leave and then moved in, or they would have gone in and immediately pulled their guns on the pair, arresting and handcuffing them before they had a chance to react.
- If It Bleeds, It Leads: Exploited. Lou's job becomes getting the stuff that bleeds and giving it to Nina so that it leads. It's even noted that crime rates in LA are going down, which threatens the bread-and-butter of Channel 6's news operation. So Lou gets more and more sensationalist footage by deliberately engineering it, cutting the brakes on Joe's van to create an auto accident and causing a gunfight between the police and hardened criminals. Notably, the trope is namedropped by Joe Loder when Lou sees him at work for the first time.
- Jerkass Has a Point: After proving himself a success, Joe offers Lou the chance to work for him, to which Lou bluntly refuses, much to Joe’s anger. Considering that Lou had already offered to work for Joe earlier, only to get curtly turned down without a second thought, Lou has every right to decline Joe’s offer, especially when the latter was so transparently only interested in Lou after he proved himself a threat.
- Jitter Cam: In-universe, Lou does his best to avert this, repeatedly admonishing Rick to keep his hands steady when filming.
- Job Title: "Nightcrawling" refers to working as a reporter during the night to get the most sensationalist footage available.
- Media Scaremongering: A central theme. The evening news is shown to be driven by middle-class suburban paranoia. Nina pointedly refuses to air a new development in the mansion shooting because it would reveal that the couple were drug dealers rather than random victims, which would undercut the fearmongering.
- Missing White Woman Syndrome: Discussed by Nina; she knows full well that these types of stories sell best, and Lou is happy to accommodate. In her words, what grabs the audience is "a woman running down the street, screaming, with her throat cut".
- Noodle Incident: While renegotiating some of his work conditions, Lou demands that Nina do the things (in bed) that he wants her to do, not like last time! Apparently, Lou is into some weird stuff that Nina was not comfortable with. (see also Sexual Extortion below).
- Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Nina does not want the TV audience to start thinking this.
- The Oldest Profession: When Rick discusses having no permanent address or regular work, Lou says that he turned tricks. Rick denies it, but Lou insists that it wasn't a question.
- One-Word Title: The title has only the word 'Nightcrawler'.
- Product Placement:
- Lou's Dodge Challenger gets more screen time than most of the characters.
- Apropos of nothing, Rick reads a Bed Bath and Beyond sign and comments, "That's a good store."
- While Channel 6 is on commercial break during the "Horror House" segment, a Remax advertisement features on one of the monitors behind the characters. Later, the police shoot the "home invader" after a car chase beneath a Remax billboard that occupies nearly a third of the screen.
- A Bird's Eye vegetables ad is shown on the TV in Lou's apartment, and later on a monitor in the TV station during a commercial break.
- A couple of lingering shots of Lou's New Balance sneakers pressing into the gas pedal.
- Rage Against the Reflection: When Lou goes through a dry spell of footage, he smashes up his medicine cabinet mirror in a rage. What makes it all the more frightening is that it's the only display of any real emotion he expresses throughout the film.
- Satire: On the news media industry and sensationalist journalism in general
- Shown Their Work: Much of the methods of capturing footage and the behind the scenes in the news station aren't far off from real-life methods.
- The chaotic, strenuous nature of capturing usable footage in crime scenes while police and paramedics are doing their jobs. "Better to ask forgiveness than permission" is advice really given to field production students.
- The way Nina instructs the anchors about them playing up a narrative and making it relevant.
- While it might be exaggerated in the film, cameramen are in fact encouraged to get footage of corpses whenever they can, should a news station make use of it.
- The fact that getting the "perfect shot" in the field relies so much on chance. Thus why Lou tampers with crime scenes to get his money shot.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Definitely cynical. See If It Bleeds, It Leads, Karma Houdini, Villain Protagonist.
- Soundtrack Dissonance:
- Upstairs at the "Horror House", a music box is playing a cheerful lullaby while Lou explores the crime scene.
- Played with throughout the movie on a subtler, meta note. A lot of the music used in the film could be considered hopeful, optimistic and heartfelt, but disturbingly enough, it's used chiefly for scenes where Lou is being a power-grabbing, Manipulative Bastard.
- Touché: When Lou asks why the scrap metal foreman won't hire him, the man states plainly, "I'm not going to hire a thief." Rather than deny the accusation or get indignant, Lou simply acknowledges the wisdom and leaves with a smile.
- Trailers Always Lie:
- The trailers make it out to be a crime-heavy murder-thriller, filled with car chases. It's not exactly incorrect, but there's really only one car chase in the film, albeit packed with action.
- Blurbs for the film also opt to withhold Lou's psycho/sociopathy, or state that Lou becomes a muckraking journalist. It's quite the opposite, really.
- The trailer shows the junk dealer telling Lou he's not hiring, suggesting that Lou tried to find more legitimate work but was rejected by an uncaring society. It's expanded in the actual film, so we see that the junk dealer wouldn't hire Lou because he knew full well he was a thief, so we see that at least some of Lou's failings come from his own immorality.
- Trail of Blood: Lou is first to arrive at a mansion where a double murder has taken place. With his camera he follows a trail of blood upstairs where he finds a body in the sleeping room.
- Tricked to Death: Lou tricks Rick into getting himself killed after he starts asking too many questions about the company's profits for Lou's liking. After a car chase ends with a baddie's SUV being overturned, he tells Rick that the guy is dead — knowing that he's still alive and armed — and instructs him to step up to the vehicle to get a better shot. He later records Rick's dying body, explaining to him that he couldn't allow his company to be threatened by a disgruntled employee.
- Uriah Gambit: When Rick gets too demanding in terms of salary, Lou sets him up to be gunned down in the climax.
- Vehicular Sabotage: Lou tampers with the brakes of Joe Loder's van to make it crash, so he could monopolize the market.
- We Can Rule Together: Joe tries to talk Lou into working for him and manning a new van he just bought. Lou vehemently tells him to fuck off.
- Wretched Hive: Played with regarding the film's depiction of Los Angeles; while the film focuses on the darker aspects of the city, Lou mentions at one point that the crime rate has actually gone down. Interestingly enough, this makes his services as a nightcrawler all the more valuable to struggling news broadcasters.
"YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE MONEY TO BUY A TICKET!"