Nocturnal Animals Free
- Genres: Drama, Thriller
- Rating IMDb: 75
- Year: 2016
- Duration: 1:56
Summaries
A wealthy art gallery owner is haunted by her ex-husband's novel, a violent thriller she interprets as a symbolic revenge tale.
A "story inside a story," in which the first part follows a woman named Susan who receives a book manuscript from her ex-husband, a man she left 20 years earlier, asking for her opinion. The second element follows the actual manuscript, called "Nocturnal Animals," which revolves around a man whose family vacation turns violent and deadly. It also continues to follow the story of Susan, who finds herself recalling her first marriage and confronting some dark truths about herself.
An unhappy and lamenting art curator (Amy Adams) begins to picture herself within the pages of a novel manuscript, sent to her by her former husband (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose negative associations of their relationship takes a fictionalized violent direction on the page.
Susan Morrow is a successful gallery owner. She is married to businessman Hutton Morrow, who is constantly traveling. She receives a manuscript of a novel, Nocturnal Animals, written by her first husband, Edward Sheffield. The gritty content of the novel strikes a chord with Susan and she starts to remember the times she and Edward had together. While this draws her closer to him, there are unresolved issues between the two.
Susan Morrow, the owner/curator of her own high end modern art gallery in Los Angeles, is facing strains in her marriage to her second husband, high powered and suave businessman Hutton Morrow. Most of their issues stem around his business problems, with she now also suspecting infidelity on his part. Despite loving him, who she always considered a sensitive man, she divorced her first husband, aspiring writer Edward Sheffield, because she no longer believed in his vision of their marriage, where he worked at a bookstore while he wrote in his personal time. She ended up losing faith in his writing ability, which made her feel unstable in their life. In the mail, she receives a manuscript for a novel from still unmarried Edward, who she has not seen in nineteen years since their divorce. The attached note states that this novel is different than anything that he has ever written, was inspired by her, that she will be the first person to read it and he will be in town until mid next week if she wants to meet to discuss it being that she was his sounding board on such matters when they were married. The story is a disturbing one of a family driving in the middle of the night through west Texas, they who end up being terrorized by three men in another car. The family does befall violence in the process of the encounter. As Susan reads the manuscript while she is on her own with Hutton out of town, she cannot help but think back to the course of her and Edward's relationship, and in the process if she ended up turning into a more modern version of her mother, which would have been her worst nightmare. She also cannot help but wonder how much of the story is based on them and if it means anything about their future.
