By Ben Hooper.

A slick and sick stare into the dark heart of news media.

An unemployed Louis Bloom, all polite persistence and ghoulish glare, finds his particular aptitude lies in television news. Once he starts turning up to car crashes and crime scenes with a stolen camera, he soon realises the lengths he’ll go to get that money-shot.

Bloom is a fascinating figure of sociopathic desperation hidden behind a mask of mannered naïveté. He’s brought to sickly life by Jake Gyllenhaal, whose white-knuckle grasp of control is a thrilling watch. It’s a subtle, unsettling performance, which makes the single scene in which Bloom allows his façade to crack (literally, in front of a mirror) all the more shocking.

Perhaps most uncomfortable is his expressionless extortion of TV channel head Nina Romina (a brave and bullshit-free turn from Rene Russo), in a skin-crawling scene that still leaves room for doubt as to whether Bloom is fully conscious of his malicious actions. We’re given little insight into why Bloom is like this, reflecting the distant and desensitised lens through which we view the world and its tragedies.

The narrative is tight and twists into a fairly disturbing finale, but by the end the film maybe feels too controlled. The tone is a mix of dry documentation and gritty intensity, but the film never fully commits to either. Nightcrawler is a fine directorial debut from writer Dan Gilroy, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that someone like David Fincher or Nicolas Winding Refn might have turned the story into something more grimily stylish.

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