The themes of A Single Man (2009) are painfully evident from the first minutes of the film. George Falconer (Colin Firth) is reeling from the death of his longtime partner Jim (Matthew Goode). Jim has died in a car accident while visiting his family. Since this is the early-1960s, the pain is compounded because George lives his life forced inside the closet. There is almost no one with whom he can share his grief; he is even denied the chance to attend Jim’s funeral when a relative tells him the viewing is only “for family.”

Not only is George hiding himself from the world around him as a closeted gay man, but he is prevented from processing his grief due to this wholly private grieving. This theme of hiding, both from the world and from yourself, is further emphasized by Charlotte (Julianne Moore) who uses her sexuality to hide her fear of vulnerability, fear of aging alone and inability to truly love. The world around our characters further reflects this theme, as the Cuban Missile Crisis is unfolding, and fearful Americans are literally hiding in bomb shelters.

Though the costume design of Arianne Phillips is beautifully rendered, period accurate, and evocative, Ford doesn’t really lean on her work to elucidate these themes as much as you might expect. Instead, Eduard Grau’s camera and Dan Bishop’s production design enforce these feelings of isolation, loneliness and fear.

Many scenes in A Single Man take place in the “Schaffer Residence” built by architect John Lautner in 1949, which serves as George’s home. The House is notable for its massive windows framed by wooden planks. George is often shot from outside or between rooms of the house. As a result, he is often obscured by pieces of wood or behind glass. Working these physical barriers is, of course, a great technique for reinforcing a sense of isolation.

This obscuring continues when we are outside the house. George is lost in mobs of students when he is on campus. In a similar way, various actors are shot through mirrors rather than straight on at various points in the film.

When characters could be photographed naked or in erotic poses, Ford often chooses to cover them up, denying the viewer the sensuality that we can feel under the surface of the film. As a result, the rare nudity we do see pulses with forbidden electricity (not unlike the forbidden love that A Single Man chronicles).

There are a few scenes where we get our characters shot straight on, unencumbered, and these are the moments of greatest emotional connection and truth in A Single Man. Most notably, George and Charlotte have dinner and reveal their deep pain to each other towards the middle of the film, and near the end, George has a cathartic sexual encounter. In both of these scenes, we see unobscured close-ups and the camera lingers on actors’ bodies.

In his second film, Nocturnal Animals (2016), Ford explores similar themes, and uses similar filmmaking tactics. As with A Single Man, Nocturnal Animals deals with fear, but here the focus is not on the isolation that comes with fear, but rather how reticence to confront the unknown can led to violence and pain.

To emphasize this point, Ford chooses to shroud his characters in darkness. Once again, he denies us access to the bodies of his lead performers (here, Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, and Isla Fischer lead a star-studded cast), but instead of obscuring them with objects like in A Single Man, he shoots them in darkness.

The film takes place in two “worlds.” One story is the relationship between Susan (Adams) and Edward (Gyllenhaal), who married young and perhaps cut things off too soon. Edward is a novelist, and the other half of the film takes place inside his novel, also titled Nocturnal Animals, which Susan reads throughout. Director of Photography Seamus McGarvey uses light to effectively evoke the suffocating nature of fear most effectively in the novel “world,” where he can draw on familiar Western genre imagery and police procedural tropes for inspiration.

Thinking of both literal and metaphoric “interrogation,” we only really get dead on, well lit shots when the characters in any of the "worlds" are openly and honestly communicating. A lighter palette is almost exclusively reserved for flashbacks to when Susan and Edward had a better relationship.

Speaking to Variety last year, Ford identified the thematic similarities between the two films. He said, “like everyone, [George, in A Single Man] has a heart and soul; but he also has a shell. Susan [Adams’ character in Nocturnal Animals] is like a crustacean; her protection is all from outside layers. Inside, she’s not like that. She’s polished and controlled, but trying to hold onto what is soft.” In Ford’s view, fear is what leads us to build this “shell,” and from his first two efforts, his project seems to be compelling his characters to burst through that shell.

It is clear that, as a designer, Ford has an admiration and respect for the power of bodies. He knows what showing a naked couple dousing each other in perfume or a handsome man in a tailored suit can do, and he uses that impact for dramatic punctuation.

One of the most abrupt scenes with Nocturnal Animals occurs when Gyllenhaal’s “Tony” (his lookalike in the fictional novel’s “world”) comes across his murdered wife and daughter left by a shack in the middle of the West Texas desert. The form of the body is left bare in this minimalist moment; with the two women killed off-screen and discovered without showing their faces, the beauty of humanity is completely overridden (or better yet, in the concept of this commentary, obscured) by the darkness of human nature.

The greatest proof of this is the opening sequence of Nocturnal Animals. Quite a departure from his generally naturalistic work, the film opens in an surreal dreamscape reminiscent of David Lynch. Naked, overweight women in marching band hats and gloves wave pom-poms and sparklers as they toss confetti jubilantly. While the sequence, at first glance, may appear to be outside the context of the film, this is a thematic statement. These women are brave and beautiful because they lack fear. While a part of Susan may be repulsed by these dream women, ultimately, she envies them, and the audience is meant to admire them.

Ford said as much when premiering Nocturnal Animals at the Toronto Film Festival last year. He remarked:

“I filmed these women and they were so joyful, I found such incredible beauty in them. In the end, they have let go of what society tells them they are supposed to be, and they are the most free.”

You might assume that a successful fashion designer would see beauty as an easy commodity. After all of those naked ads, perhaps, the human form would be devalued. In the case of Ford, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The human body spurred his twin passions of design and filmmaking; the human body is his primary canvas. And, to the man who once sold a penis pendant that looked remarkably like your typical Christian jewelry, the human body is sacred. Ironically, it’s his obscuring of the body, both in a literal sense (as shrouded by geographic surroundings or sheer darkness) and in a metaphorical sense (through the coverage of “the closet” or the “shell” of past memories) that has made his characters compelling and his films memorable. Aesthetics are hardly the end-all-be-all for this storied fashion designer-turned-director.

In a way, Tom Ford’s filmmaking offers the opposite of exploitation, and that is what makes it so alluringly, painfully beautiful.