There’s a double-shot of horror and Nabokovian despair in this outrageously gripping and absorbing meta mystery-thriller from director Tom Ford, adapted by him from the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. It’s a movie with a double-stranded narrative – a story about a fictional story which runs alongside – and it pulls off the considerable trick of making you care about both equally, something I think The French Lieutenant’s Woman never truly managed. Clive James once wrote that talk about “levels of reality” never properly acknowledges that one of these levels is really real. That probably holds true. But in Nocturnal Animals, these levels are equally powerful, and have an intriguingly queasy and potent interrelation.

Ford has surely raised his game from his faintly wan and over-determined drama A Single Man from 2009. There is something much more uninhibited and even raucous about this picture, which combines melodrama with a kind of teasing sophistication.

Amy Adams in Nocturnal Animals

The scene is Los Angeles where Susan (Amy Adams) is a successful gallery owner who appears to specialise in shocking and provocative conceptual pieces – and if I have a quarrel with the movie (a quarrel I’m setting aside because of how much pleasure the film gave me) it is that this world is a bit too parodically and grotesquely represented, especially in the bizarre sequence over the opening credits. That is misjudged, I think – a quasi-Lynchian freakout which doesn’t quite gel with the mood which is being set up. I concede there is an interesting visual echo in a later bar scene.

Susan is successful, but her personal wealth derives chiefly from the business activities of her smoothie husband, Walker (Armie Hammer), with whom she is deeply unhappy. Then she is astonished to receive, out of the blue, the manuscript of an unpublished novel from her first husband, Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal), a sweet, sensitive boy and wannabe writer from her Texas hometown whose heart she broke twice over: by leaving him for Walker, and by declaring he didn’t have the right stuff to be an author – that he was insecure and weak. There is also another terrible issue in their pasts.

While Walker is out of town for the weekend, Susan begins to read and Ford dramatises the novel in front of us. The clash between supercool LA and this couldn’t be more jarring. Because this is no feathery literary confection: it is a brutal west Texas crime thriller about a married man – Susan imagines Tony, that is, Jake Gyllenhaal in the role, who takes his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and his daughter Helen (Ellie Bamber) on a road trip on vacation across the remote desert, where they are terrorised by a wild gang of good ol’ boys led by the brutish Ray (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). It is a horrifying situation which is to lead to a confrontation with a classic, laconic, Stetson-wearing Texas lawman, terrifically played by Michael Shannon.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Nocturnal Animals

Susan is horrified – and we feel her personal, extra-textual horror. Where is this coming from? It’s like Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me with a dash of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and Steven Spielberg’s Duel. There’s also a touch of the opening monologue about Texas in the Coens’ Blood Simple: “... down here ... you’re on your own.”

Of course, the theme of revenge begins, inexorably, to emerge. The book is entitled Nocturnal Animals, which is what these psychopathic criminals are, but it is also a queasy perversion or deliberate betrayal of an affectionate nickname he once gave Susan, a restless night-owl when they were together. Here is what happens when the weak guy decides to get tough. The book is about revenge and it is revenge – a cherry bomb of rage and malice lobbed into Susan’s perfect little life.

But there is more even than this. It is about the revenge of the past on the present and the present on the past. The older person avenges the slights and reversals of struggling youth by getting rich and successful. The younger person, reaching out maliciously from the past, mocks this bland victory by with memories of the idealism you have abandoned, the youthful beauty and hope you have lost and the sickening inevitability of becoming like the older generation you once despised.

There are tremendous flashbacks, triggered incongruously by the grisly crime-genre shocks, which carry Susan back to the decisions she made and unmade in her youth. And there is a glorious scene with Susan and her reactionary, Martini-sipping mamma, wonderfully played by Laura Linney.

As I say: some of the scenes in the LA art world are a bit broad. But this is a terrifically absorbing thriller with that vodka-kick of pure malice.