Nightcrawler is a captivating crime thriller available to watch on Netflix

A man with a camera lurks in the bushes in front of a lush home in Granada Hills. A gruesome triple murder has just been committed here. He waits for the perpetrators to flee before sneaking after them. He roams the house with his camera and stops at a dying man lying in a puddle of his own blood, gasping weakly for air. But this man is not here to help. He’s here to get footage and make a quick buck off the carnage.

In Moth, Dan Gilroy’s neo-noir thriller now on Netflix, that man is Louis “Lou” Bloom, the protagonist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Bloom is an ambitious, fast-talking con artist who rattles off faux-motivational talking points about entrepreneurship and anecdotal statistics like a robot whose vague knowledge of human language came from a Tony Robbins self-help book. After witnessing a freelance camera crew film a car crash scene, Lou is inspired to become a stringer himself, driving around Los Angeles late at night recording violent crimes and accidents and selling the footage to local news networks.

Image: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment

After selling his first recording (a bloody man who is resuscitated) to Nina Romina (Rene Russo), the morning news director of a local TV station, Lou hangs on her every word. He is eager to learn and even more eager to please. Nina emphasizes that she is interested in crime, but not everything Crime. “We’re finding that our viewers are more interested in the urban crime that’s creeping into the suburbs,” she says. “What that means is a victim or victim, preferably wealthy and white, hurt at the hands of the poor or a minority.” But what Nina wants most of all — and what Lou needs to succeed — are incidents of drastic violence that shocking their station’s audience, playing on their fears and capturing their undivided attention. “The best and clearest way I can put it to you, Lou, to capture the spirit of what we’re broadcasting is to think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.”

As the plot unfolds, we see Lou thrive in his new career path, amassing a collection of fiery car crashes, gruesome murders, and other shady clips that he proudly annotates and categorizes on his home laptop. The film makes it abundantly clear that Lou’s success as a so-called “nightcrawler” is not despite his sociopathic personality, but precisely because of it. He feeds on death and tragedy like a carrion buzzard hurtling through the dark, winding streets of Los Angeles in his red Dodge Challenger, prowling for his latest prey. There’s no low he won’t stoop to to further his own goals, whether it’s aggressively forcing Nina to sleep with him, wrestling his disheveled assistant Rick (Riz Ahmed) down, or a competitor’s near-fatal car accident orchestrate and film his mutilated body on a stretcher. When Rick protests and tells him not to film the body because he’s “one of them,” Lou replies, “Not anymore, Rick. We are professionals. He’s a sale.” For Lou, every smile is a brushing of teeth, every compliment is a threat in disguise.

Image: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment

A characterization would be wrong Moth than the story of a man’s descent into depravity and horror, for in truth it was never such a descent for Lou. If any, Moth is both a gripping dark thriller with beautiful Los Angeles cinematography and an electrifying finale of a night chase, and a scathing indictment of the pernicious influence of contemporary news media in shaping stories that do not inform or edify, but rather exploit and dehumanize their subjects. It’s a powerful film that never moralizes its audience but forces them to consider how a system that drives a person like Lou came about in the first place.