Nightmare Alley marks director Guillermo Del Toro’s newest film since winning the Oscar for The Shape of Water. Just like his previous efforts, it has a lot of his signature visual trappings and characters who are completely bizarre and unorthodox, but it also has a myriad of components that make it endlessly mesmerizing.
I occasionally use the term Audacious Rorschach Test to describe a movie that dares to be unconventional and leaves us picking apart sequences and making of them what we will. Nightmare Alley fits the bill this year in the hands of a virtuoso like Del Toro.
Based on the 1946 novel by William Lindsey Gresham which was made into a film in 1947, this remake stars Bradley Cooper as Stanton Carlisle, a man who takes a job at a carnival run by Clem (Willem Dafoe). The carnival has a lot of oddities including a man who savagely devours a live chicken and a half-woman/spider. These gimmicks would be right at home in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Stanton receives lessons on how to perfect his craft from husband and wife fortune tellers (David Strathairn and Toni Collete).
Stan also becomes attracted to Molly, (Rooney Mara) and he creates his own act involving putting her in an electric chair and leaving customers baffled as to how she survived.
Stan and Molly decide to leave the carnies and take his act on the road and they eventually wind up in Chicago with audiences spellbound by his psychic abilities. However, one person doesn’t buy the act and that is psychologist Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett). She’s determined to prove his act is an elaborate deception despite Stan’s supposed insistence that it’s genuine.
Del Toro knows a thing or two about how to make the macabre look beautiful and empathetic and this film is no exception. He manages to combine a noir atmosphere with the aforementioned macabre creatures and then shifts his attention to the real inner demons that eventually come out of these characters that are just as animalistic as their carnie counterparts.
Granted, each character is very much depicted as amoral for one reason or another, but Del Toro’s structuring of the screenplay that he co-wrote with Kim Morgan takes its time with giving us the hows and whys of how these people end up like they are and why they see no problems with their actions. It’s a multilayered portrayal pulled off beautifully by Del Toro and his star-powered cast.
“You don’t fool people, Stanton,” says Blanchett. “They fool themselves.”
One thing that didn’t fool me is how Del Toro marries his visual aesthetics with a complex, borderline Hitchcockian vibe as well as shady characters with soupy morality and puts it all together in a package that is confident, intriguing and even disturbing from beginning to end.
Grade: A
(Rated R for strong/bloody violence, some sexual content, nudity and language.)
