Nightcrawler begins with a cautioning montage of L.A. locations, painted with hues of neon yellow and blue, turning skies, hills, and buildings into dirty but beautiful abstractions. We’ve never seen L.A. look so unusual or otherworldly, but rarely has it felt as real. Nightcrawler, like Heat, like The Dark Knight, like Blade Runner, is a city film. The city, L.A., is as much a character as as the leads, maybe more so. We come to know its character and cadence, internalizing the peculiar irregularities the way we do when we become close with someone. In every amazing, gorgeously photographed frame of Nightcrawler we feel the city’s breath, making L.A. seem alive and conscious, talking to the characters even. The cinematographer, Robert Elswit, regularly works with Paul Thomas Anderson, and he deserves a nomination. We become intimate with this city, and by the film’s end, we’re married to it. Only in a city like Nightcrawler’s L.A. could a character like Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) creep, and his sociopathic saga is amongst the hardest-hitting Hollywood parables in years. It is also, curiously enough, the third absurdist black comedy to be released in October (along with Gone Girl and Birdman). For fall 2014, comedy’s gone dark.

A neo-noir of the highest order, Louis Bloom, preferring to be called Lou, stalks the night. Both Gyllenhaal and first time director Dan Gilroy have said in interviews Lou’s a creature, a beast that comes out to hunt until dawn. Like a viscous coyote chasing a rat. For Lou, that rat is Broadcast News, which he’s recently discovered he’s very passionate about. We meet him illegally clipping fence wires, hoping to get a job. He recites self-help quotations like his Bible was written by Dale Carnegie and Stephen R. Covey, authors of How to Win Friends and Influence People and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Workbook. He talks with an off-kilter assurance that’s both convincing and creepy, two qualities we learn define his social relationships. When he sees a horrific car wreck and witnesses a freelance “Nightcrawler”, someone who uses a police scanner to follow crimes all night hoping to film and sell gruesome footage to news networks, he’s found his calling. His mantra becomes that spit out by Bill Paxton’s rival nightcrawler: “if it bleeds it leads.” Nightcrawler follows Lou on his increasingly horrific, shocking, intense attempts to capture the best and most graphic footage possible. Watching this unfold is thrilling.