Nightcrawler

This film's way too heavy on the psycho for me.

It follows a creative innovative narcissist on his rise to the top, as he tenaciously works to excel, diligently researching his subject to gain a strategic edge, maximizing his manipulations to leverage a precise position.

A competitor recognizes his strengths and offers him opportunities which he ignores, trusting to his own professional instincts, obsequiously going at it alone.

The small fry.

The competitor winds up seriously injured.

The troubled succumb to his designs as he continuously provides them with material to advance their own interests, graphic shots of increasingly violent disturbances, communal misery, cracked and capitalized.

No ethical considerations, just raw carnal base savagery, risk, action, advantage, success.

Murder.

Films like The Talented Mr. Ripley pulled this off in the past, but they usually contained a potent ethical element, a sense that the psycho is brilliant yet deranged; Nightcrawler celebrates Louis Bloom's dementia (Jake Gyllenhaal) like it's some kind of demonic virtue, the fact that he breaks the law repeatedly while abusing unwritten professional codes more of a high-five than a diminution, a harvester of death, moribundly reaping.

Without a sense of impending doom, Nightcrawler becomes a sadistic shock-and-awe jitterbug, he obviously would have been arrested, the ending like a strychnine-laced lollipop.

Gyllenhaal's performance is strong and his confidence inspiring but it's like the rest of the world is an infantile blush, possessing no agency, after the opening moments anyways.

Too focused on the individual.

Lacking the threat of consequences.

Revelling in exploitation.

The unregulated flow of capital.