What to make of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals? Soap opera of the rich and heartless? Eulogy for the squandered creative self? A treatise on the misappropriation of masculinity by toxic values? Tom Ford’s film explores all three, with three corresponding plots swirling around each other in a myriad of collapsing narratives.

The central story concerns Amy Adams as an art dealer, Susan, as she reflects on her successful, if hollow, life. The second is about a novel sent to Susan by her ex-husband, novelist Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), a revenge story set on the Texan border. And third is the story of Susan and Edward’s courtship and divorce. Each story elides into the others, challenging the audience to identify what connects them. What is true? What is false? Ford’s skill in this diegetic juggling act is notable. He connects each story through motif and theme, visual echoes such as naked redheads or pouring showers, gently nudging the viewer into understanding.

This is a step up from Ford’s debut, A Single Man. Where A Single Man’s ornateness veered dangerously into superficiality; given critical grace by the sheer force of its beauty, Nocturnal Animals utilises Ford’s aesthetic sensibilities for something far more sinister. The competing plots are given their own specific light and colour palette: the humdrum Texan backwaters given a postcard neon glow reminiscent of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas; the austere art world shot with an unremarkable steely grey and blue as though Amy Adams’ art dealer is trapped in a metal box.

But perhaps what elevates Nocturnal Animals above its predecessor and other films so far this year is its central concern: the merit of strength when celebrated as a masculine or feminine virtue. The terrorised father of the film’s novel strand is emasculated by the toxic masculinity of hillbilly hoodlums, as they taunt and destroy his family in front of his eyes. His powerlessness to protect them, to fulfil his male role versus the childish glee with which the group tear his family apart, exposes the the fallacy of masculine strength. Neither position is desirable. Meanwhile, Adams’ character, conversely, possesses a self-acknowledged ‘strength’ that prevents her from achieving domestic harmony with the ‘weak’ Edward. Is this a sly dig at how we quantify and prioritise strength as a virtue? As a masculine trait, Ford shows us its ugly inverse, repurposed as ‘feminine’ virtue it breeds emotional alienation.

Adams and Gyllenhaal are competent in their respective parts. Adams, expanding on the icy reserve she cultivated in The Master, carries the film but her role is a cipher. The various plots actualise within her mind and through her interpretation. Consequently, the character is deliberately disengaged and insular. Gyllenhaal does a good line in whimpering sensitivity, but is under-served by a part that requires little more than anguished screaming and his stock in trade – pleading Bambi eyes. But the supporting turns really crackle. Michael Shannon plays a sheriff with an errant sense of justice, imbuing the part with a laconic determination that unsettles as much as it calms, his bulging eyes unfaltering when staring through his target. Aaron Taylor-Johnson channels Sam Rockwell in a gleefully unhinged performance that oscillates wildly between predatory menace and childish mischief.

Nocturnal Animals plays like a Chanel advert via David Lynch, Ford finding visual beauty within a nightmare.