Josh Reviews Nightmare Alley

As Guillermo del Toro’s film Nightmare Alley opens, we see images of a man apparently hiding a corpse underneath the floorboards and then burning down the isolated house as he walks away.  It’s 1939, and that man, Stan (played by Bradley Cooper) winds up finding work in a carnival.  He works his way up from doing manual labor to being involved in the scam clairvoyant act of “Madame Zeena” (Toni Collette), who needs help as her partner and husband (David Strathairn) is loosing himself to alcoholism.  Stan quickly gains confidence, and finds a connection with Molly (Rooney Mara), a beautiful young woman whose act involves apparently electrocuting herself.  But Stan’s growing ego threatens them both, particularly when he gets involved in private psychic shows for the glamorous psychologist Dr. Ritter (Cate Blanchett) and the rich recluse Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins)…

I’ve been a fan of Guillermo del Toro for ages.  I love his earlier Spanish language films (such as Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone); I love his two Hellboy films (Hellboy and Hellboy II: The Golden Army), and I’ve been delighted that in recent years he’s been able to make studio films at a sizable budget that still maintain Mr. del Toro’s very specific stylistic touches and interests (films such as Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water).  It broke my heart that I wasn’t able to see Nightmare Alley in theaters (Omicron kept me out of theaters for a while), but I was very excited to turn the lights off and watch Nightmare Alley on my big TV at home.

I loved this film!  It has an extraordinary cast and a wonderfully twisty story.  It’s incredibly suspenseful; Mr. del Toro is able to masterfully turn the screws on the audience and create a sense of mounting dread and doom.  I never knew where this story was going — it kept me guessing right up until the perfect ending.

Most of Mr. del Toro’s films involve the supernatural, and I wondered to what degree that would be the case here.  I won’t spoil all of the film’s twists and turns here, though I will say that it was an interesting change of pace for Mr. del Toro to interest himself more in human monsters than supernatural ones.  He and his team have created a wonderfully creepy and compelling modern noir.  There are also elements of horror; that might not be for everyone (there are a few moments of intense violence), but for me I was very hooked into this creepy, scary, sad story that Mr. del Toro was telling.

The film is gorgeously shot.  Mr. del Toro always has an incredible eye for mise en scene, and the film’s production design is incredible.  Each new location is beautiful and intricate and memorably distinct.  The tents of the carnival are gloriously dingy and weird and scary but also warm… while the buildings and rooms inhabited by the filthy rich in the city gleam with mystery and menace.  (I particularly loved the design of Dr. Ritter’s office; what an intriguing and memorable location!)  It’s all captured beautifully by cinematographer Dan Lausten.

Mr. del Toro has assembled an extraordinary cast.  Bradley Cooper leads the show as Stan.  Mr. Cooper is in pretty much every scene of the film, and he is absolutely fantastic.  He takes us on quite a journey, as we see Stan’s fortunes fall and rise over the course of the story.  As the movie begins, I wasn’t sure if Stan was mute — Mr. Cooper conveys everything through his movement, his posture, and his facial expressions.  As the story unfolds, we see Stan as a charismatic charmer and also as a cold, cruel egomaniac, with many different layers in between.  It’s a terrific performance, one that blasts through the roof in the incredible final seconds of the film.  Mr. Cooper is terrific throughout the film, but wow did he blow me away with those final seconds!!!  Amazing!!

I’ve enjoyed Rooney Mara’s work ever since The Social Network (in which she has a small role) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (in which she carries the film).  She’s great here as Molly.  When we meet Molly, she seems like an innocent… but at the same time, she’s already a skilled hustler, convincing carnival audiences that she’s in danger of death by electrocution during her act.  So there’s a lot of nuance to this character, and Ms. Mara sells both sides of Molly’s character well.  She’s also a great audience surrogate, as we see Stan through her eyes.  Ms. Mara skillfully gets the audience to invest in and root for Molly.

Willem Dafoe is mesmerizing as Clem, who runs the carnival where Stan finds a home.  Mr. Dafoe is so magnetic and so weird at the same time; he’s great fun to watch!  He gets some terrific monologues in the film, particularly his horrifying explanation to Stan about how he goes about recruiting a new “geek” for the show.

Few directors seem to know how to use the great Ron Perlman as skillfully as Guillermo del Toro, and so I wasn’t at all surprised by how interesting Mr. Perlman was here as Bruno, the somewhat over-the-hill circus strong-man who has been a father-figure to Molly.  I want a spin-off film telling the story of Bruno’s life!!

Toni Collette and David Strathairn are brilliant and compelling as Zeena and Pete.  This husband-and-wife duo seem to have an incredible partnership; they’re so in-synch that they’ve been able to fool audiences for decades into believing that they have psychic powers.  At the same time, there’s a distance between them when we meet them, and they both seem to be keeping secrets from one another.  (Or maybe they each know all about the other’s bad behavior?  The film makes the clever choice to keep that something of a mystery, allowing the audience many different reads on their relationship.)  Both Ms. Collette and Mr. Strathairn command the screen whenever we see them.  Here too, I want a spin-off film telling their life-stories!  (I love how richly developed all the film’s side characters are, so much so that I long for more.)

Mark Povinelli plays Major Mosquito, and he’s very solid in his supporting role.  Mr. Povinelli is a little person; it’s not surprising to see a character like Major Mosquito in a movie about carnivals in the thirties, but the film commendably makes almost no mention of the character’s short stature.  He’s treated like all the other supporting characters who we meet in the carnival, which made me very happy to see.

When the film shifts into the big city, Cate Blanchett storms onto the scene as the fiercely intelligent, mysterious psychiatrist Dr. Ritter.  Dr. Ritter seems to take an immediate interest in Stan, first trying to publicly discredit him and then getting involved in a scam along with him.  Ms. Blanchett brings her charisma — and her rich, beautiful voice — fully to bear as she and Bradley Cooper’s Stan fall into one another’s orbits.  Their scenes together really crackled.

Richard Jenkins (so great in Mr. del Toro’s last movie, The Shape of Water) is again great here as the rich, reclusive Ezra Grindle.  We see Mr. Grindle’s power and danger right away when we first meet him (when he has Stan stepped into a polygraph), and Mr. Jenkins is able to turn on and off the character’s edge perfectly as the story unfolds from there.

Mary Steenburgen pops up for a few scenes as another wealthy socialite, Felicia Kimball, and as always Ms. Steenburgen is incredibly magnetic.  Holt McCallany (Wrath of Man, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back) is great as Ezra Grindle’s threatening bodyguard.  And I was delighted to see the always-entertaining Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Incredible Hulk, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Watchmen) appear in the movie’s final scene.

Like I said — what a cast!!

In a Guillermo del Toro film, I know all the pieces of the film — story, character, design, colors, etc. — will be well thought out and will fit together well.  No surprise, I was very satisfied with how the film’s twists and turns resolved themselves in the end.  (With only one small exception — we never really got an explanation for why Cate Blanchett’s Dr. Ritter took such an immediate interest in Stan.  It felt out of nowhere to me, so that I started guessing that Dr. Ritter had a connection to Stan’s past, maybe even the mysterious corpse/fire we saw in the film’s opening moments.  That didn’t turn out to be the case, which is fine, I just wish we’d gotten more insight into why Dr. Ritter took that initial interest in Stan.  For me, that was the one small piece of the movie’s clockwork-like plot that felt out of place.)

There’s so much to take in and think about in Nightmare Alley, that this is a film I am eager to watch again.

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