Welcome to Movie Shortens. Follow us today to a 2014 American psychological thriller film
called: Nightcrawler. Before we start, be aware: there are spoilers!
Our story opens at night, overlooking Los Angeles. Someone is cutting a fence wire when
a security guard drives up. We see a man called Louis Bloom talking with the security guard
then suddenly he attacks the guard, steals his watch and drives off. Louis takes the fence wire,
along with some other metal things, to a scrap metal yard to sell them.
He tries to get a job at the yard but the foreman tells him he doesn’t hire thieves.
As Louis is driving along a freeway he sees a car that’s crashed and two policemen trying to
help a woman inside. Just then, a news team’s van pulls up and two men named Joe and Marcus
rush to the scene to film the accident. Louis is watching the proceedings and he asks Joe if he’s
in need of hiring anyone. Joe tells him “No,” then calls Marcus to go to another emergency.
The next morning we see Louis in his apartment watching TV and scouring the news channels
till he finds the report of last night’s car crash where he saw the news team filming.
Louis goes to the beach and steals a racing bicycle and takes it to a
Pawn shop where he exchanges it for a camcorder and a police radio scanner.
Now it’s night time and Louis is parked in his car listening to the police station dispatcher calls.
He drives to the scene of one of the calls. When he starts to film the scene,
the police tell him to get out of there. He finds the same response from other police when he tries
to film each incident. He goes to a scene of a shooting where a news cameraman is already
filming. When he gets too close, the police tell him and another cameraman to get back.
Louis takes his video footage to a local news station known as KWLA
and shows it to the news editor named Nina and her assistant named Frank. Nina then pays him $250 for
his footage. The start of things to come! The next morning he watches the news report
which shows his video footage. He looks up the meanings of the police
call codes and makes notes to study them. We see Louis sitting in a fast food restaurant.
He is soon joined by a young man called Rick. After a short conversation Louis hires him as
an assistant. That night they head out together with Rick as the navigator, but Louis drives so
fast that Rick gets very nervous. They arrive at crime scenes but always too late. At one
shooting crime scene, Louis enters the house from another door and starts taking videos and photos
from inside the house. Louis takes his footage to Nina at KWLA and she is impressed with his work.
Louis and Rick continue night after night pursuing police calls and shooting videos at the scenes.
Now we see Louis and Rick getting petrol in Louis’ new car.
They arrive at a crash scene and Louis actually moves the body of a victim so he
can get a better video shot. As the police and other news film crew arrive, Louis walks away.
The next morning, Louis is standing next to Nina in the TV studio as they’re about
to read the morning news. He asks her if she would like to have dinner with him.
At first she declines, but she’s not quite sure. Outside the studio, Joe is waiting for him.
He offers Louis a job, taking control of his second news film van. Louis tells him he’s
not interested, despite Joe trying to coerce him. In the end, Joe walks off really angry.
Now we see Nina and Louis sitting in a Mexican restaurant together
and Louis is complimenting Nina on her good looks. After some heavy conversation he makes
it clear that he wants to be more than friends with her. So what happened? We don’t know!
The following night Louis and Rick are driving to a hit and run accident when a report comes
on the radio of a small plane crash, so they go to the plane crash. They get there too late and
Joe has already filmed the scene. Louis goes to KWLA to see Nina but she is really pissed off
because he didn’t get the plane crash video and he has little else to offer her.
In Jake’s apartment, the news report with Joe’s video is playing on the TV while Jake is in the
bathroom, screaming at his reflection then he hits the cabinet, breaking the mirror.
The next morning we find Louis underneath Joe’s news van doing some handiwork. He slides out and
quietly walks away. That night they’re on their way to the scene of a one vehicle accident, which
just happens to be Joe’s van that has crashed head on into a power pole. As the ambulance
crew is wheeling Joe to the ambulance, Louis is filming the whole scene. We see Joe looking
up at Louis with a strange look in his eyes. Now as they’re driving down the road they get
a call on the police scanner of a “home invasion” so they speed to it and arrive before the police.
Louis jumps out with his camcorder and runs up the driveway. As Louis gets close to the house
he hears gunshots from inside the house. When two men run out of the house, he hides in the
bushes and films the two men running out, getting into their car, a black SUV, and driving away.
Once they’ve gone, Louis goes over to the house with the video camera rolling. He films a shotgun
outside then enters the house to find a woman shot dead on the sofa. He quickly makes his way to the
staircase, following a trail of blood upstairs. He enters a baby’s room but the cot is empty. As he
moves through the upstairs rooms he finds the body of a woman lying dead on a bed before he runs back
downstairs. Moving into the kitchen, he hears a man coughing and finds the man lying face down in
a pool of blood. Now he runs to the front door to find that Rick has come looking for him. Together
they run back down the driveway to their car with the sound of police sirens coming closer. They
drive off just as the police car is approaching. Once they are back in town, Louis stops and
tells Rick to stay in the car while he goes to the rear of the car and edits the footage so
there is no video of the two men or their SUV. Louis walks very confidently into KWLA and tells
Nina about the video he just filmed. Nina and her staff watch the video in shock. Once alone,
Nina and Louis negotiate a price for the footage. It gets very serious and Louis tells Nina that if
he doesn’t get what he wants, he’ll take it to another news station that will pay him more.
He wants to meet the staff of this station and to tell them that he is the owner and President
of his company – “Video Production News.” He also tells her that the next time they’re
alone together in her apartment he wants her to do the things he asks her to do!
Now we see Nina introducing him to all of the KWLA staff. Shortly after,
they are in the production room as the story is about to be aired. The news show starts and
shows the graphic images that Louis filmed. The next morning Louis is watching all the TV
stations reporting the same story from last night when there is a knock at the door. We see a woman
named Detective Frontieri (fruhn·teer-i) and a man called Detective Lieberman (lee·bmuhn) at
the door. They enter the apartment and question Louis about the triple murder that he filmed
the night before. He tells them that he saw two men driving off in an SUV as he arrived
but he doesn’t tell them that he actually got a good video of the two men and their SUV. Detective
Frontieri thinks Louis is not telling them everything. Louis tells her that he entered the
house to see if he could help someone. He gives them a copy of the “edited” video and they leave.
Now Louis is doing some police work of his own. He watches the unedited version of the video
and gets a better look at the two men, then he zooms in and gets the license number of the SUV
and does an online search to find the address of the SUV owner.
Early that evening, Louis picks up Rick and tells him that he knows the address of the SUV owner.
He plans to go to that address so they can follow the SUV to a good area for filming a video.
Rick is obviously very nervous and thinks that Louis should call the police immediately
but Louis has other ideas. Louis stops the car and tells Rick he’s promoting him to Executive Vice
President of Video Production News and giving him a raise. They go to the address and park the car
close by to wait and watch. Louis tells Rick that there’s a $50,000 dollar reward.
He tells Rick he wants to film the police as they arrive and make the arrest or a possible
shootout. Rick says he wants half the reward but Louis isn’t so keen on that till Rick tells him
that the police would be interested in why Louis didn’t call them earlier. Louis accepts the deal,
50 – 50 on what they make tonight. After waiting for some time, one of the
men comes out and drives off with Louis and Rick following. The man picks up his friend then after
getting some petrol at a petrol station they go to a fast food store to eat. Louis and Rick park
across the road and Louis calls 911 to report that he thinks he has found the two men who murdered
the three people in the house the night before. After the call to the police, Louis turns on
the police scanner to listen to the report of his call. Louis tells Rick to take his camera and film
from further down the street. Rick objects but when Louis threatens him he reluctantly agrees.
As they start filming, a police car arrives. The two policemen enter the restaurant and
go to order some food. Louis sees one of the men holding a gun under the table. Just then another
police car arrives and as the two policemen enter the restaurant the two men start shooting. One
policeman is shot and the two men are also wounded but one of them manages to escape in the SUV.
One police car chases the SUV and Louis follows the police car. They go through a red light
barely missing the other traffic but at the next intersection with a red light, the police car gets
hit. Louis keeps following the man in his car when another police car enters in front of the
SUV. The SUV rams the police car and it tips up and slides on its side then the SUV hits a pole
and flips onto its side as well. Louis comes to a screeching halt and jumps out to start filming.
Louis tells Rick to come and film the dead man in the SUV but as Rick approaches, the man inside is
not dead and he shoots Rick four times. Rick drops to the ground, fatally wounded. The man kicks out
the windscreen and stands looking at Louis who is still filming then as he walks away, another
police car arrives and they shoot the man dead. More police cars arrive and Louis walks over to
Rick, still filming the video as Rick lies there dying. Rick asks Louis why he didn’t tell Rick
when he knew the man was alive. Louis calmly says that he didn’t want to lose a good video.
That’s ruthless! Louis takes Rick’s video camera and leaves.
Now we see Louis at KWLA showing Nina the video footage of the crime scene
but the video is cut before Rick speaks. Nina tells Louis that she’s amazed. He takes it as
a compliment but I think she'd be amazed that he would actually video his partner dying.
As they’re about to air the story, Frontieri and Lieberman arrive and ask for the video footage
of the crime scene. Nina tells them it’s the property of KWLA and they’re going to put it
on the news show. Frank pulls Nina aside and tells her that they got word from someone called Joel,
who was told by someone in the Police Task Force, that there was over 50 pounds of Cocaine found
hidden at the murder scene, so it was actually a drug robbery. She tells him they can report
it later but for now they’re sticking to the original story of a home invasion.
Frank can’t believe that she is starting to sound a lot like Louis, cold and unemotional!
At the police station we see Frontieri interviewing Louis about the facts of
his previous police report. He tells her a story about how the two men in the SUV had
been following him and that when he saw them enter the restaurant, he called the police.
Frontieri knows he’s lying but she can’t prove it. She’s disgusted that he actually
filmed his partner dying. She walks out of the interview room and leaves him there alone. Louis
calmly walks away from the police station. In the final scene we see Louis talking to
his three new employees as they stand next to his two new Video Production News vans.
He gives them a pep talk, then they climb into their vans and drive off into the night.
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