I always forget how nasty Guillermo del Toro can be.
This is, after all, the filmmaker behind The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Crimson Peak. Yet there’s a joy to his macabre creativity—a playfulness to even his ickiest designs—that makes me think of his work as, almost, cuddly. Then we get something like Nightmare Alley.
Based on a book by William Lindsay Gresham (which was previously made into a 1947 film), Nightmare Alley signals its ugly intentions from the start, with a shot of its main character, Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), dragging a body from behind the camera toward a hole in the floorboards of a dilapidated farmhouse. We don’t get many other details—those will come in harrowing, nightmarish flashbacks sprinkled through the rest of the movie—but we do get plenty more darkness as the film proceeds.
Stan next arrives via bus in a town with an old-timey carnival and “freak show” (we eventually learn the setting is America, circa 1941). He picks up some odd jobs at the carnival but mostly keeps his head down; we don’t hear him speak until a good 20 minutes in. For the next hour or so, Nightmare Alley floats along without much of a narrative thrust (del Toro wrote the screenplay with Kim Morgan), more content to soak up the carny atmosphere and introduce us to a cast that’s an embarrassment of riches: Toni Collette as a carnal tarot-card reader; David Strathairn as an alcoholic mentalist; Willem Dafoe as the malevolent carny boss who cruelly breaks in “geeks;” and Rooney Mara as a performer who claims to control electricity. (Del Toro stalwart Ron Perlman also shows up as a strongman.) As we learn the ins and outs of the carnival—the various ways the tricks are pulled on audiences—we’re left wondering if Stan is being conned into something insidious, or if he’s the true con artist in the bunch.
Nightmare Alley eventually jumps ahead two years after Stan has convinced Mara’s Molly to leave the carnival and start their own mind-reading act among high-society types in the big city. Here things get spookier, especially when Stan begins crossing the line between mentalism and spiritualism, feigning that he can communicate with the dead. Helping him is a psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett, going full femme fatale) who feeds him crucial details about former clients, including a powerful tycoon (Richard Jenkins) who eventually demands Stan dredge up a particular ghost—or else.
And so we have film noir, horror, and grotesquerie all at play here—a melding of 1945’s Detour, Crimson Peak, and Tod Browning’s Freaks. It’s a potent mix and, in del Toro’s hands, far more than a thin pastiche. In nearly every scene of Nightmare Alley we’re forced to ask: who is conning whom here? What is actually going on? (There might not be a single instance of the supernatural in the film.) Ultimately, as the plot tightens around its characters and we learn more about Stan, we begin to see that the most frightening specter in the movie is the past. It’s best not to dredge up previous sins unless you’re truly prepared to deal with them.
Most of the delirious visuals—a del Toro given—evoke this idea: the carnival “fun house,” which is designed as a trip to hell; a jar holding the corpse of a baby with a third, condemning eye; the licks of fire that dominate Stan’s flashbacks. This is a movie dripping with guilt and gullibility.
As Stan, Cooper is compelling, if a bit of an ill fit. He’s played unlikable characters in the past, but there’s a weasel element to Stan that he can’t quite tap. (Leonardo DiCaprio, who was reportedly considering the part at one point, would have been perfect.) There’s no doubt, however, that Cooper nails the final scene, whose awfulness you see coming yet still can’t escape. Like each of del Toro’s nastier pictures, Nightmare Alley closes in on you with a hellish elegance.
(12/14/2021)
