“Toxic masculinity”: if any one term has graduated, through the tumult of 2016, from specialized social-justice parlance to mainstream media ubiquity, it’s this one. Misuse has inevitably come with popularity – it denotes the social normalization of misogyny and sexual aggression that can poison masculine identity, not an intrinsic male evil – but in the year of Brock Turner, Nate Parker and President-elect Donald Trump, cultural critics haven’t had to reach too far for illustrative examples.

Nocturnal Animals review – Tom Ford's deliciously toxic tale of revenge Read more

Nor have film critics, for that matter – quite aside from the off-screen case of the disgraced actor and film-maker Parker, who saw the success of his directorial debut, The Birth of a Nation, halted by revived college rape allegations, identifying his own “toxic masculinity [and] male privilege” in a much-circulated Ebony interview. (He later walked this statement back, refusing to apologize and denying any degree of guilt – only furthering the impression that his publicists were more au fait with the terminology than he was.) A number of films this year have knowingly fed the increasingly loud conversation about abusive patriarchy – few more queasily than Nocturnal Animals, the fashion designer Tom Ford’s second turn behind the camera, an intricately folded double narrative in which male violence takes both bloodily literal and more smoothly insidious forms.

“I did not realize that Nocturnal Animals would be such a tough movie to watch the day before the election,” tweeted the US critic Sam Adams last week, going on to describe it to a colleague as “A Field Guide to Toxic Masculinity”. The film, adapted from Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan, nestles one chilly fiction inside another. In the “real” world, disaffected gallery owner Susan receives the manuscript of a novel by her long-estranged ex-husband Edward, and is invited to ponder the resonance of its contents; in the novel’s world, math professor and family man Tony’s world unravels when his wife and daughter are raped and murdered by a passing band of Texan thugs, setting him on a grisly revenge mission.

The crimes are committed without apparent motive beyond a hint of class-related antipathy – with Tony arguably representing the metropolitan elite so vilified by Republicans in this year’s election campaign. As such, they are the most direct manifestation of toxic masculinity in Ford’s film: played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, kitted out in bluntly stereotypical lumberjack plaid, the killers’ ringleader is a symbol of unevolved chauvinism beside Jake Gyllenhaal’s more sensitive, cosmopolitan victim. (I’d say “effete”, but it’s still a robustly bearded Gyllenhaal we’re talking about.) Ford’s social symbolism isn’t especially subtle or measured: working-class white America in effect gets the “basket of deplorables” treatment here, give or take Michael Shannon’s sympathetic but coarsely law-bending sheriff.

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Things get more ambiguous in the film’s framing story, however, as it gradually dawns on Susan that this unsavory reading material may itself be a passive-aggressive act of revenge against her. As the dissolution of her marriage to Edward, and her apparent role in its failure, is rehashed in her mind, the allegiances of Ford’s film become harder to parse: is this mini-melodrama a critique of the ways in which men blame women for their own emotional insecurities? Or is Nocturnal Animals, by its bleak, isolating finale, a misogynistic cautionary tale complicit in punishing its heroine? It’s a film arch enough to reflect either interpretation in its gorgeous, mirrored surfaces.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train. Photograph: Allstar/Dreamworks Skg

Though it aspires to a higher grade of pulp, Nocturnal Animals makes a rather good companion piece to this autumn’s multiplex phenomenon The Girl on the Train, a largely standard-issue whodunnit that reveals a far more interesting gendered subtext once the machinations of its critical twist are laid bare. There’s no denying it brings toxic masculinity to the metropolitan elite: in its moneyed slab of upstate New York (relocated from Paula Hawkins’ bestselling UK source novel), three unallied women turn out to be linked by the undisciplined, domineering sexuality and self-protective gaslighting trickery of one aggressively entitled man. His psychology remains opaque to the last; no reason is presented for his use and abuse of these women but the fact that he has the power and privilege to do so, which might be the most salient point this lurid potboiler has to make.

A female protagonist gets a more proactive role in policing male violence, meanwhile, in Paul Verhoeven’s arthouse lightning-rod Elle, which sees Isabelle Huppert’s independent video game CEO unusually responding to her rape by pursuing her attacker, determining her own degree of pleasure in her violation. It’s a fearsome rewrite of the rape-revenge genre’s dubious rules of exploitation, and one that has feminists split down the middle on its progressiveness or otherwise – but it’s a game in which male sexuality gets coolly outplayed. Female sexuality, meanwhile, is all but incidental to the toxic masculinity of Andrew Neel’s discomfiting campus drama Goat, which scrutinizes the grotesque hazing rituals of a university fraternity as a kind of microcosm of the ways in which brutally competitive male communities, fixated on outdated ideals of steak-eating straight masculinity, finally destroy themselves; the feminist Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier put an absurdist Mediterranean spin on similarly pernicious alpha infighting.

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Next year will see the release of Nacho Vigalondo’s curious monster-movie hybrid Colossal, in which Anne Hathaway’s self-destructive protagonist discovers an absurd affinity with the Godzilla-type creature laying waste to south-east Asia across the globe – a connection that turns out to hinge on her fractious relations with overbearing men. The Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson provocatively posited that “the straight men [he] saw the film with didn’t like it,” while other viewers “will know exactly why those men didn’t”. True or otherwise, it’s a critical statement indicative of its times: far from the unifying escape route they’ve long been viewed as in times in political upheaval, the multiplex looks more than ever like a place to see our divisions writ large.