Nocturnal Animals already got a teaser trailer that was just actually 30 seconds longer than just-released its first full trailer, but the new one reveals a bit more about the film’s seemingly twisty and multilayered plot, as well as the twist of Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal having, it seems, occasional light southern accents in it! (Since part of the movie is a fiction-within-a-fiction, maybe one of those fictions has a touch of twang?)
The film, from fashion designer-turned-designer-of-very-attractive-films Tom Ford, looks like a worthy equal in attractiveness to Ford’s very attractive A Single Man. But while that film was achingly beautiful, Animals looks to be horrific… yet still beautiful, and perhaps all the more unsettling for it. Amy Adams’ brooding shades of lipstick! Those shots of lone, desert highways! Jake Gyllenhaal as just as menacing a presence as he was in Nightcrawler!
It’s an attractiveness that, presumably commingled with whatever it does thematically and with writing and acting, etc. etc., earned it the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, as well as praise from Flavorwire Film Editor Jason Bailey, who described it as “a movie that sticks with you,” while also emphasizing how brutal, despite its sleep stylization, parts of it really are, and how it features “tautly rendered” depictions of “domestic terror and toxic masculinity.”
The trailer starts out with Gyllenhaal and Adams’ characters running into each other after a long time and reconnecting over dinner, reminiscing jovially on having been each others’ first crushes. Then, suddenly, a fabulously coiffed Laura Linney appears to warn Adams against getting involved with him, at which point we see a montage of INTENSE THINGS — a wavering cross necklace, a stressful shower, a honking horn, a gun, and then that lipstick!
From there, it gets cryptic, with Adams describing him now as her ex-husband, saying “I did something horrible to him, I left him in a brutal way” — whatever that might mean, and then all of a sudden Jake Michael Shannon is there, talking to Gyllenhaal about “seeing justice done.”
Watch the new trailer:
And here’s the official poster, in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays Amy Adams’ nose:
