D/S: Dan Gilroy. P: Jennifer Fox, Tony Gilroy, Michel Litvak, Jake Gyllenhaal, David Lancaster. Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Bill Paxton, Riz Ahmed, Ann Cusack. UK dist (DVD/Blu-ray): Entertainment One.

In Dan Gilroy’s feature debut Nightcrawler (2014), Jake Gyllenhaal delivers an incomparably creepy lead performance as Louis Bloom, a supremely self-confident (but unemployed) loner whom we first encounter, in the dead of night, stealing a wire fence – and, incidentally, a fancy watch from the security guard unlucky enough to disturb him in the act. Always smiling, forever polite, Bloom is a self-educated oddball we instinctively know is a wrong ‘un. Spouting business lore gleaned from his hours spent scouring the internet, Bloom is grimly determined to be a Success. Sharp and quick-witted, Bloom has one major flaw: he’s a psychopath, utterly incapable of empathising with other human beings. Thus far, his efforts to secure gainful employment have met with failure; the scrap-metal merchant to whom he sells his stolen wares responds to Bloom’s pitch for a job with a cold rebuff (“I don’t hire thieves”). Masking his dismay with a rictus grin, Bloom finds inspiration by chance one night when he happens upon a fatal shooting being filmed by a hard-boiled TV news cameraman, Joe Loder (Bill Paxton). There and then Bloom vows to become a “nightcrawler”: one of many independent newshounds driving the city streets in search of sensationalist crime scenes, which they film and sell to the highest bidder (i.e. TV stations seeking to boost their low ratings with grisly verité footage).

After a shaky start – barging into crime scenes with only a cheap camcorder and a barrage of idiot questions for the onlookers – Bloom soon develops an affinity with his work, and strikes up a professional relationship with local TV news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a hard-boiled veteran of small-time TV news who’s desperate for a hit. In Louis Bloom she sees her own dark reflection: ruthless, ambitious, totally amoral. With Bloom’s uncanny knack for sniffing out headline-grabbing footage, it seems the pair’s fortunes are on the rise. And when Bloom lucks into a lethal home-invasion scenario, leaving three dead in an affluent white neighbourhood, his moral corruption sinks to a new and yet-more lucrative level. Arriving at the house before the police, Bloom films the killers escaping in a black SUV (whose licence plate he also captures in crystal close-up). However, he carefully edits out this crucial information before selling his footage to Nina’s station – using the vehicle registration to trace the killers to their home address. With cold deliberation, he follows them to a well-lit public place before calling the cops, knowing full well that the killers are unlikely to give up without a (very bloody) fight. And Bloom will be there, capturing it all on camera…

For those unconvinced of Jake Gyllenhaal’s talents, his flesh-crawling turn here will be a revelation. He’s superb. Gyllenhall has evidently shed a lot of weight for the role; with his cadaverous face and staring, thyroidal eyes, he looks like something that crawled out of a grave. Highly apt, since he’s playing a very up-to-the-moment kind of American ghoul: the kind that feeds on human misery and death, while calling it Freedom of the Press. (The character seems based in part on famed US photo-journalist Arthur Fellig, aka “Weegee”, who was seemingly not averse to re-dressing a crime scene to improve its pictorial composition; at one point, Gyllenhaal actually drags a bleeding auto-wreck victim across the tarmac to obtain the perfect Kodak Moment.) The film paints a jaw-dropping picture of the cutthroat world of American TV news reporting, with rival camera teams (monitoring LA police news frequencies) breaking every speed limit there is to beat their competitors to the site of a blazing air-crash, domestic shooting or orphanage fire – often risking their own lives (and also, by the bye, those of hapless bystanders). Rene Russo’s cold-hearted TV boss actually seems sexually aroused by Gyllenhaal’s gorier footage, seeing in it the realisation of her wildest ambitions: together, these two are every bit as ruthless as Mr and Mrs Macbeth. Nightcrawler expands greatly on previous movie critiques of US TV news; William Hurt’s calculated manufacture of a single tear in Broadcast News (1987), for a cutaway reaction shot in a tragic news item, now seems endearingly naïve. I doubt such a subterfuge would even occur to Louis Bloom.