Revenge Through the Weapon of Writing: A Psychological Reading of Reality and Fiction in Nocturnal Animals

Nour El-Hoda Fouad

After hours of waiting, not a single trace of resentment showed on Susan's face, even after she grew certain that Edward would not show up for their arranged meeting. It was as though, ever since she invited him, she had secretly hoped he would choose to ignore her and not come—a soothing pill to quiet the ache of her conscience...

Yet, what drove her to invite her ex-husband in the first place?

In Nocturnal Animals, we experience a meticulous dissection of the human inner emotional landscape facing external events. Consider, then, an artist whose engagement with occurrences departs from that of ordinary people, manifesting a divergent treatment of reality and far deeper, more abstract, interpretive, and expressive creative outlets.

Nocturnal Animals is a 2016 psychological thriller and drama adapted from Austin Wright's 1993 novel Tony and Susan. The film earned widespread international critical acclaim, crowned by the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. It also clinched a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, alongside dominating the BAFTA nominations with nine major nods, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score—cementing its artistic coherence and poignant visual and psychological impact.

Jake Gyllenhaal delivers one of his finest performances through dual portrayals of a single character, oscillating between acute emotional volatility and a profound inner calm that defines his persona. Meanwhile, Amy Adams delivers one of her most demanding roles—not merely because she is quite literally the villain in someone else's manuscript, but because her character represents the polar opposite of Jake's. On the exterior, she appears intensely serene and confident to the verge of arrogance; inside, she is torn between what she perceives through spiritual awareness and her delicate artistic sensibility, and her selfish impulses chasing an immaculate, glamorous lifestyle. It is as if the two characters embody an ongoing struggle within the art world of our real lives: both are genuine artists, yet one was born with the pure, faithful, passionate, and innocent soul of a creator, while the other cast aside that exalted artistic idealism in exchange for wealth and celebrity.

Susan, a visual artist hailing from an affluent background, leads an ostensibly idyllic life with a handsome, polished husband, as she often reminds those around her. Yet most of the time she appears on edge—an underlying tension and anxiety veiled beneath calm composure. This manifests in the striking dissonance between her sharp look, her curated surroundings, her mechanical gestures, and her hair intentionally draping over half her face in public, as though the hidden half represents an obscured part of herself, a flaw threatening her aura of perfection, or a secret she shrinks from facing the world with. Her husband absents himself under excuses that practically scream infidelity, yet she pretends not to notice; even when she uncovers his betrayal, she chooses to let it slide without ever letting him know she discovered it.

Susan is deeply shaken by the terrifying events of her ex-husband Edward's manuscript right from page one. The viewer's suspicions are only aroused gradually as the parallel escalation between the novel's plot and Susan's recollections reveals that she abandoned him in a devastatingly painful manner, as she herself admits...

Here, screenwriter and director Tom Ford deliberately places several overt confessions upon his protagonist's tongue—not merely as evidence against her while we judge her in our minds alongside Edward's reconstruction of her wrongdoing in his manuscript, turning the film into a virtual courtroom where the audience serves as a jury examining details and gathering evidence for a just verdict, but also to observe the heroine's profound need for catharsis, casting the viewer in the role of a father confessor.

Thus, she suffers and groans in silence, writhing in bed over the pages of her ex-husband's book. She visualizes Edward as the novel's protagonist husband whose wife and daughter are abducted right before his eyes by a band of young men on a deserted highway. The fictional wife is a redhead like Susan; her introduction shows her spontaneously yet noticeably tilting her nose up, echoing the exact mannerism Ford deliberately highlighted in Susan to imprint her image in our minds. The wife shares these traits with their teenage daughter: a beautiful, fierce-tempered redhead who provokes the abductor at the start by flipping him off after he deliberately harasses their car.

Edward, the gentle, romantic dreamer embarking on life as a novelist alongside the evolution of his courtship with Susan into marriage, has this entire relationship distilled by Ford into a mere four scenes. This is neither a subplot nor an alternative timeline, but an indispensable component of the overarching narrative. It bypasses linear storytelling about the former couple's past, their breakdown, and the breakdown of causes and effects; the central narrative here is simply Edward's internal experience of the tragedy and its lasting imprint on him.

Those four scenes illuminate Susan's inner world and psychological makeup. Born to a wealthy family, this affluence is embodied by her mother, who appears in the second scene draped in opulent clothes and jewelry to flaunt her station—evoking an 18th-century noblewoman with poise, rigid posture, and calculated body language. The mother attempts to dissuade Susan from marrying Edward on the grounds that he is fragile and unsuitable for a woman like her. Unsparing in her arguments, she cites Edward's vulnerability following his father's passing—a brilliant paradox delineating the matriarch's character when we recall Edward's bewilderment at Susan's harsh judgment of her mother in the first scene; he genuinely cared for her and never forgot her support after his father died. The mother further argues an intrinsic incompatibility, warning that Susan is just like her and will neither endure nor be content with Edward's romanticism in the long run.

While the two scenes interlock like puzzle pieces adding concentrated brushstrokes to the larger canvas, one remarkably profound and comprehensive detail cannot be overlooked: Edward's observation to Susan in the first scene about the shared trait he always noted between her and her mother—the sorrowful gaze in their eyes. It is a look betraying an insatiable, deep-seated inner void, acknowledged consciously by the mother and subconsciously by Susan. Hence Susan despises her mother and resists any comparison to her—and who else but Edward could discern that?

Returning to the manuscript, the husband appears powerless, at a loss as to what to do to save his family. When the third kidnapper misleads him and leaves him stranded in the middle of nowhere, only to return with the ringleader, Edward cowers, refusing to answer their calls and choosing to curl up into himself, surrendering to whatever horrific fate may have befallen his wife and daughter. He later recounts those agonizing moments to the police, admitting he had no idea why he did not call back.

In a haunting sequence, we discover the fate of both victims when Edward accompanies Detective Andes to the crime scene: they lie naked on an ornate red velvet sofa out in the open, frozen in stillness. We see only the backside of the young girl's body without her face, whereas we see only the mother's face as the detective confirms her death.

Revisiting the memories of Edward and Susan's relationship, the third and fourth scenes intertwine seamlessly with the visceral feelings sparked by the manuscript. We watch their domestic quarrel validate Susan's mother's prophecy—or rather, watch the daughter actively fulfill it as though her subconscious demanded its realization. The fourth scene encapsulates what Edward sought to channel through his writing: a layered sequence opening with Susan speaking with the man she is having an affair with—her handsome husband-to-be. While he attempts to soothe her guilt following an abortion, she notices Edward watching her from a distance, looking as though he knows everything transpiring between them.

Susan is thus left writhing in her bed with grief, fully comprehending the novel's underlying metaphor while compelled to read through to the very end. It is as if he is lashing her without whip or screams; despite her agony, she is powerless to put it down...

That metaphor can be crystallized as follows: Edward likens his marriage with Susan to a peaceful family journey, ambushed and preyed upon by manifested projections of the traits combined in Susan and her lover. The kidnappers symbolize their cruel, predatory, and treacherous natures, spearheaded by Ray Marcus, who embodies primal, animalistic drives. It was only natural for Ford to cast a strikingly handsome actor like Aaron Taylor-Johnson: untamed animalistic impulses in their evil guise must disguise themselves behind an impeccable facade, mirroring the outward gloss of the lover's charm, Susan's elegance, and their polished, civil veneer.

Edward's decision to withdraw from her life for years, only to return with this calculated, icy retribution, was no mere accident; it is the faithful mirror of the seminal act at the core of his novel. The protagonist husband's hiding in the dark, out of sight of the kidnappers, and his failure to answer his family's cries was an intensely candid self-indictment of Edward's own absolute paralysis and surrender in the past. He had stood completely powerless before Susan's dominating nature and her unilateral decision to rob him of his unborn child and his life with her. He retreated and recoiled precisely as his fictional surrogate did, slow-cooking his revenge over years until it could be unleashed upon the page.

In the protagonist's quest for elusive justice enters Detective Bobby Andes—a terminally ill lawman preparing for death, who chooses to aid the husband and circumvent the hollow laws incapable of convicting the culprits due to lack of evidence. In truth, this detective is nothing less than the living incarnation of the retribution buried deep within Edward—the internal voice that rebelled against reality's rules, wielding literature and art as an uncompromising weapon of vengeance to secure on paper the justice he lacked the courage to claim in real life.

When the protagonist finally takes matters into his own hands, eliminating the criminal in the very desolation where the initial outrage occurred, he literally manifests the devastation wrought by each page on Susan's spirit within her own home. Edward breached the walls of her lavish mansion and sterile seclusion to butcher her hollow peace, just as his hero pumped bullets into his family's violator—forcing her to drink from the exact same cup of loss and shattered sanctuary.

With the novel's closing line, the protagonist collapses and dies of his wounds. Through this symbolic demise, Edward announces the final death of that tender, pure, and innocent facet of his soul—the vulnerable, romantic dreamer once mocked by Susan and her mother. This metaphorical death provides the natural bridge to reality, manifesting in his calculated absence from their dinner reunion in the final scene.

Susan sitting entirely alone in that luxurious restaurant, waiting for a ghost that will never arrive, is the ultimate consummation of his revenge: an explicit proclamation that the man she once knew and destroyed is dead, and that the frigid, empty chair across from her is all she will ever receive from him.