Nightmare Alley: Guillermo del Toro Noir Epic Lovely to Look At, Dreary to Behold

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B-

Visually opulent as only a Guillermo del Toro movie can be with gorgeously detailed, period-perfect costumes and interiors and a marquee cast, the noir thriller Nightmare Alley checks all the grand boxes of the genre. Yet the film feels emotionally inert, stacked with unsympathetic, strangely uncharismatic characters that defy empathy. Or worse: defy abiding interest.

Much has been made of the fact that Nightmare Alley — a remake of a 1947 film starring Tyrone Power, based on a novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham published in 1946 — is a rare del Toro work absent a supernatural presence. True, though it’s clear the story’s many manipulative, back-stabbing characters are monsters of a different sort who take a long and winding route to make that point.

The film hinges on Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a palpably shady but swift and ambitious drifter who we meet deposting a body into a hole in a floor of a house he promptly sets on fire. So, not the nicest fella, clearly. Stan dreams of bigger things, certainly in an orbit far above the pathetic, alcoholic, chicken-chomping geeks he encounters in the traveling carnival where he lands and who will, naturally, return to haunt him later.

Stan embeds himself with so-called mentalist Zeena and her husband David (Toni Collette and David Strathairn), who use coded words to trade information and make it seem like they can read minds. Stan is a quick study, and is soon wielding his own powers as a paid-for mentalist.

But Stan does not navigate the path alone. With him is Molly (Rooney Mara), who serves as the film’s sole conscience and is co-opted by Stan as his unlikely lover and cohort, and whisked from her carnival home. The pair head to the big city, where their fancy-pants mentalist dinner theatre routine attracts the attention of a well-placed judge mourning the loss of his son as well as that of arch psychiatrist Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett).

Lilith — all suits, red lipstick, and snappy lines much in the mold of 40s-era femme fatales — has the dirt on the city’s elite, thanks to her method of recording her consultations with patients inside her lavishly decorated office. What she doesn’t have is a back story, odd considering who she is and how fiercely she is motivated. Not del Torro’s fault in adapting the source material, perhaps, but this feels like a missed opportunity to elevate a juicy if enigmatic female character.

Stan and Lilith conceive of a swindle against rich but ruthless tycoon Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), who Stan convinces (via Lilith’s recorded cache of confessions and secrets) that he can let him communicate with the dead, specifically one woman with outsize influence on Grindle’s life.

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Grindle doesn’t just take Stan as his word; there is testing and not-so-veiled threats. But Grindle eventually coughs up heaps of cash for Stan’s services, which Stan and Lilith — two villainous, scheming dark souls we are expected to believe are willing to abet each other despite having zero chemistry — hope to abscond with.

Of course, this being Nightmare Alley and populated by nefarious deviants, things don’t go to plan. There’s a critical break between Stan and Lilith, more murder, more back-stabbing, alcoholism, fleeing, and Stan’s bleak comeuppance, upon which the film snaps to a close.

Filmed in Toronto and Buffalo, New York, Nightmare Alley has the bonus of being fun for locals playing spot-the-location. The screenplay, co-written by del Toro and Kim Morgan, offers cinematographer Dan Lausten (see also del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Crimson Peak) a literal carnival landscape to conjure.

The effect is often mesmerizing; inky darkness punctuated by blinding colour, snowy exteriors, those before-mentioned interiors. The whole thing looks beautiful, and persuasively foreboding.

But two-and-a-half hours of skullduggery powered by wholly disagreeable characters is a lot to bear even as the senses are dazzled. As a fan of del Toro, I desperately wanted to love this movie. I watched it twice. But it just didn’t connect.

Nightmare Alley. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Richard Jenkins, Toni Collette, and Rooney Mara. In theatres December 17.