Perhaps I’m just excessively stupid, but if you’d said the name ‘Guillermo del Toro’ to me before I’d watched Nightmare Alley, it would have meant nothing. Apparently, I have no ears to the ground of the film world, because Del Toro is not only the director of one of my favourite films ever (Crimson Peak) but also The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth, one of the Hobbits, The Witches, and, randomly, Kung Fu Panda 3 (that one has confused me as well.) Basically, my point is that I am the perfect vessel to impart cinematic critique on Nightmare Alley, because I had absolutely zero prior knowledge of context to any of the director’s work thanks to my own idiocy. You’re welcome.
Nightmare Alley is rated a 15, but from the amount of times I actually jumped in my chair, I would have rated it higher. Psychological thriller meets carnival freak show, Nightmare Alley plays with magic without touching it -- unlike many of Del Toro’s previous films, there is nothing supernatural lurking inside the circus tent, or in the mansions of its 1940's New York setting. Instead, it hinges on a very human form of trickery, twisting a man who can play mind games into a medium that is able to read people so well that they -- mistakenly -- believe he can tell their futures. If you like the occult, you’ll like this. I annoyed my dad by explaining the tarot cards to him before the actors did, which a) was irritating to the people sitting next to me but also b) boosted my ego. If you like gore, this is also the film for you -- not ten minutes in do we witness a man who is boasted to be ‘both man and beast’ bite the head of a live chicken. For a brief moment, I was entertaining the idea of vegetarianism, and that’s not an easy thing to make me think.
Bradley Cooper plays the leading man, Stanton Carlisle, and though I’d say he’s too old for the role (46 is past the age when you’re trying to ‘find yourself’, hate to break it to you, Stan) he does it well, both a conman and a figure of startling sympathy as he flees a shadowy past that the audience cannot quite make out. To give you the briefest outline: destitute and on-the-run, Stanton Carlisle befriends a mentalist and her husband while working at a travelling carnival, but quickly realises he can use their tricks to earn a fortune in the city, where he meets an elusive psychiatrist who promises to help him con the elite -- or does she? The gift of this film is its ability to repulse and intrigue, helped by a cast that includes Willem Defoe as a circus leader who owns a dead cyclops fetus in a jar (yes, that’s as weird as it sounds) and Cate Blanchett who plays the ultimate noir femme fatale, pistol and all. If you want to learn how to use opium to entice a man into becoming a ‘geek’ -- circus “sideshow freaks” in Depression era America whose one job was to kill and eat live animals in front of the audience -- watch Nightmare Alley. Though the twist wasn’t really a twist at all, and the ending was only a surprise if you’d missed half the film to get popcorn, the eerie shots of an always-grey sky and the grotesquely sumptuous beauty of the immoral rich more than make up for it.
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