![]() Soon, this fictional world becomes more real than Susan’s waking-dream existence, with Michael Shannon breathing tangible, rasping life into Detective Andes, an end-of-the-line chain-smoker with a hacking cough and little patience for the niceties of law enforcement. And as Susan reads, Ford visualises – conjuring a dramatised version of the novel in which Gyllenhaal doubles as self-loathing husband and father, Tony Hastings, while Isla Fisher (whom audiences have long confused with Adams) is very smartly cast as Susan’s barely disguised stand-in, Laura Hastings. Having been captivated by Adams’s mesmerising performance in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, Ford here makes the most of that extraordinarily expressive face, focusing tightly on her all-but-still visage as she reads Edward’s increasingly harrowing work. Now that sobriquet has become the title of his as-yet-unpublished novel, which he has dedicated to her: a visceral, anguished tale (“it’s violent and it’s sad”) of brutal assault and ugly revenge in which a family are run off the road by rednecks in rural west Texas, with horrifying results. A sensitive soul whom Susan apparently abandoned in “horrible” circumstances, Edward used to call his wife a “nocturnal animal”. Out of the blue, Susan receives a package – a manuscript from her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), which promptly gives her a paper cut, significantly drawing blood. Financially, the couple are faltering emotionally, they are falling apart. After a notoriously jarring opening sequence (a slo-mo carnival of fleshy Americana), we meet Amy Adams’s pinched Susan Morrow, a disillusioned art dealer living in a glass-cage modernist LA house with her handsome creep husband, Hutton (Armie Hammer).
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