Nightmare Alley

Since his unexpected Oscar wins (Best Director and Best Picture for The Shape of Water in 2017), horror and fantasy specialist Guillermo del Toro has been occupied with writing and producing TV and feature projects for others. He returns to the director's chair with this adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, which was previously made into a film the year after the book was published. The story follows the rise and fall of conman Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) who joins a seedy travelling carnival and learns the tricks of mentalism from a clairvoyant named Zeena (Toni Collette) and her drunk, down-on-his-luck husband Pete (David Strathairn). Stanton's talents quickly become too big for the small-time carny circuit so he takes his newly acquired knowledge, as well as his pretty young carney bride named Molly (Rooney Mara) to New York City where he can work his grift on the wealthy elite. But when he crosses paths with a mysterious female psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett) his desires begin to exceed his abilities. 

Everything about this picture feels artificial, and not in the kind of way that might be thematically apt for the story of a grifter who claims to be something he is not. Every image looks downright fake, like so many modern period pieces that attempt to capture the style and vibe of a bygone era in filmmaking. Think Edward Norton’s neo-noir Motherless Brooklyn (2019) or Robert Zemeckis’s World War II romantic spy thriller Allied (2016). The sets, the lighting, the costumes, the make-up, the cityscapes, smoke, fire, the views out of windows, everything has a crisp, clean, utterly synthetic look that feels much closer to a contemporary video game than to a seedy carnival or a glamorous city in 1946. And it sure as hell doesn't conjure up film noir as it's intended to. Film noir, and horror for that matter, require shadows, and areas of the screen that are allowed to go black. Here, everything has the slick brightness of digital imagery. Even dark corners of rooms and the midnight skies radiate a kind of lustrous illumination, which contributes to the screen-saver look of each composition.

The cast does their best to create layered, emotionally engaging performances—except Blanchett, who delivers her most all-surfaces turn since Elizabeth: The Golden Age—but none of them can disappear into their characters. No matter how many shades and dimensions each actor brings to their role, they never seem like anything but moviestars playing dress-up.  Del Toro, known as a master at creating imaginative fantasy environments, just fails completely here at casting a cinematic spell.  All 150 minutes of Nightmare Alley feel like a long commercial for a prestige TV show. We keep waiting to sink into the story, for there’s a good story here, but the film just never connects. 

NOTE: I see that del Toro plans to release a black & white version of this movie, following the recent trend started by prestige filmmakers like George Miller and Bong June-ho. I just have to wonder if this movie would have played better if the director committed to one look. The notion that a film can be shot to look great in both color and black & white is another fallacy of the digital era, where directors and cinematographers have so much control in the color-correcting phase of post-production they fail to make critical decisions during the shooting. I saw Nightmare Alley at a preview screening and by the end, I was so disappointed I wondered if this is just what all period pieces are going to look like in the age where cinematographers do most of their creative work long long after their footage has been captured. Of course, I know that's ridiculous—visually stunning movies produced with digital cameras have been coming out for decades. I was reassured of this after I left the screening of Nightmare Alley and went into the neighboring cinema to catch a late-night screening of Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta. That digitally shot period piece looked as beautiful and believable as any widescreen period drama shot on 35mm (and the story and subject matter of the shamelessly provocative picture should make it a whole lot harder to believe in than  Nightmare Alley.)