America is a country where everything is news, any fact of average or minimum importance can be exploited by the media with the firm purpose of generating attention and therefore money for those who expose the news, basically anyone with a camera can take advantage of this and get a good slice of money selling news to the big local media chains, and that is precisely what this film tries to expose; a media system that is corrupted and constantly exploited by employees and employers who only want to make the most of any news that may seem interesting.
Nightcrawler is a somewhat disturbing film because of the way in which it exposes the " working " growth of a very particular character, a character that takes over the plot completely because of the cold way in which it makes its way into the world of news, taking anyone down with all kinds of deception and manipulations that help it get to the top of the street reporters. This is a film that when I saw it for the first time I was somewhat shocked because I didn't know anything about the way news reached local media networks and what a surprise it was when I realized that just like social networks, media are capable of using any visual material to build a story.
As I said beyond the plot, this is a film where we feel trapped by the timid evil of a character when it comes to acting, a character who hides his intelligence in a cloak of cynicism and shyness that gives an excellent blow of tension to a character that scares us but we can't stop seeing. In short, the plot of this film places us in the life of a very particular man (Jake Gyllenhaal - Louis Bloom) who has decided on his own to start a business selling news in order to earn money and somehow create a professional career, but not everything is so simple because the world of news is a wild world where only the fastest and most intelligent is the one who manages to take the largest slice of money by selling material to the news networks.
Against all odds, our protagonist achieves little by little and using his highly developed instinct and intelligence manages to position himself as one of the best street reporters to the point of hiring a kind of assistant/intern to help him and thus can take his news gathering to the next level. The interesting thing is to see how this man makes his way into the world of news, using tricks and manipulations against the person in charge of news to the point of even "forcing" to have sex with him if she wants to continue receiving the best news and the best audiovisual material.
To see how Jake Gyllenhaal's character is even able to manipulate a murder scene in order to get more money out of a horrible event is incredible and denotes that his character is totally damaged inside since he puts his own motivations and goals above anything else. This is a man who wonderfully personifies the ambition, a man who puts himself in a position of power thanks to the way he manipulates a news story to even take advantage of it and get to star in it through a successive manipulation of a crime where he orchestrates the death of his assistant just for the simple fact of having ignored him and not wanting to follow the macabre game he was using to get news.
Without a doubt, this is a great movie, a movie that besides exposing the world behind the news we usually see on the news also does a wonderful job building a grim plot and develops in a tense atmosphere of constant suspense where we do not know how this macabre game of news search will end. The highest point of this film is undoubtedly the performance of Jake Gyllenhaal, however, the plot and camera work that the director manages to capture is also impressive, especially when we see the shots that are used to capture the maximum of the most complicated angles.
