Directed by: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, David Strathairn
Rated R, 150 minutes
While Guillermo del Toro was working on his second feature film, 1997’s “Mimic,” his father was kidnapped. According to the Mexican director, the hostage negotiator on the case warned del Toro to watch out for psychics, who would inevitably come flocking, preying upon the distraught family to make a quick buck. Sure enough, psychics soon showed up at del Toro’s mother’s house, promising to lead her to her husband, claiming they could feel his presence.
Recounting this troubling episode in an NPR interview this year, del Toro (whose father was eventually released by his captors) noted that the lies those psychics told his mother were repeated almost verbatim in key scenes in “Nightmare Alley,” his adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name. The film, which follows a grifter whose con gets out of hand, reserves little sympathy for liars and swindlers, whether they’re self-proclaimed psychics or religious zealots or wealthy industrialists. The brooding neo-noir atmosphere, thick with cigarette smoke and Depression-era art deco flourishes, lies heavily upon the story like the lid of a coffin waiting to be nailed shut. It’s del Toro’s most sinister film, and his best, since his opus, 2006’s “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
Opening in the grotesque orbit of a traveling carnival and later moving to swanky big-city nightclubs and mansions, “Nightmare Alley” boasts a clever anti-hero in Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper, “A Star Is Born”). At first a quiet stagehand—he doesn’t say a word for the first 10 minutes of the movie—Stan eventually learns the secrets of psychic trickery from the crafty Zeena the Seer (Toni Collette, “Knives Out”) and her husband Pete (David Strathairn, “Lincoln”), and before long he becomes a showman in his own right. A performer with a flair for the dramatic, Stan runs off to the city with his carnival sideshow paramour, the pensive “Electric Girl” Molly (Rooney Mara, “Carol”), who becomes his assistant for his new mentalist act.
Despite Pete’s warnings not to promise too much to credulous customers—“It ain’t hope if it’s a lie,” the older man says, and later, more on the nose, “When a man believes his own lies… people get hurt”—Stan does exactly that, becoming the personal medium to extravagantly wealthy men and using every tool at his disposal to pull off the con. Enlisting the help of the enigmatic psychotherapist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett, “Carol”), a classic and scene-stealing femme fatale, Stan’s ploy to con his way into a fortune eventually, inevitably, backfires.
Del Toro’s last several films have been a series of flashy but incoherent exercises in cinematic escapism, a string of middling movies stretching from the mecha-kaiju action bonanza of “Pacific Rim” to the wheedling fairy tale simplicity of “The Shape of Water,” but “Nightmare Alley” represents a welcome rebalancing of his directorial talents. The story is harrowing, a compendium of acts of human cruelty—not just murder and theft but enslavement, the lording of addiction over the addicted, the opportunistic use of another’s trauma for one’s own profit—but del Toro imbues the movie with bold characters and exciting set pieces that make it feel buoyant. His characters are unforgiving and often unforgivable, but he brings out strong performances from everyone in the excellent cast, performances that compel us to follow these lowlifes down whatever dark paths they tread. In the film’s final shot, a haggard and weary Stan breaks down in maniacal laughter at his new lot in life, the crazed look in his eyes a big exclamation point on the film’s two and a half hours of psychological intrigues.
Del Toro remains an unapologetically unsubtle director, and as such “Nightmare Alley” is full of distracting winks and nods, from the many corny sendups of film noir dialogue to the frequent reliance on old tropes (a therapist who has her clients lie on a couch and within minutes traces every errant behavior back to their parents; imagine that!). Still, it’s the most watchable movie del Toro has made in 15 years, somehow both bizarre and traditional in equal measure, possessed of emotional and thematic heft without sacrificing an ounce of its entertainment value. Del Toro, without foregoing the lurid impulses that made “Pan’s Labyrinth” such a lasting monument of cinema in this early century, has finally hit his stride again.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 2/18/22.