Sadistic clarity makes 'Nocturnal Animals' an intense, stylish thriller

Acts of the imagination can unsettle, disgust and frighten us, even wound us - not in the flesh, but in the psyche - just as surely as actual ones.

Occasionally, they also make us think.

That's the theme of "Nocturnal Animals," telegraphed with almost sadistic clarity as we watch, under the opening credits, obese naked women shimmying in slow motion, their folds of voluminous flesh wielded like weapons.

Those videos are works of art in the Los Angeles gallery of Susan Morrow (Amy Adams), an art dealer in writer/director Tom Ford's creepily elegant, enigmatic drama from Austin Wright's 1993 novel "Tony and Susan."

Susan receives an unpublished novel, "Nocturnal Animals," by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), a struggling writer whom she dumped 19 years ago, when his career was going nowhere.

As Susan reads, we watch a film-within-a-film, a nasty revenge fantasy on a vacation road trip where the novel's protagonist Tony (Gyllenhaal) is forced off the road by sadistic thugs who do horrible things to his family (Isla Fisher and Ellie Bamber).

Chicago's Michael Shannon plays the Texas lawman investigating the crimes, perpetrated by lead thug Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

Reading the story, Susan appears tortured by the vicarious anger it expresses, yet also titillated by it. Maybe she's happy to experience a weird catharsis through the book's punitive plot, which could be Edward's crudely lurid, violent attempt to teach his ex-wife a lesson.

The story-inside-the-story is as hard to watch as the slow-motion videos that open Ford's movie.

Similarly, the "Nocturnal Animals" of Ford's movie are as slippery a read as the ones in Edward's book.

It's a bluntly told tale that arouses intense, evanescent emotion, then leaves you haunted long afterward by provocative, but arguably answerable questions.