In looking up times for Sing 2 to go to with my mum, I stumbled across the last two showings in my local cinema of Nightmare Alley. Although I hadn’t seen much advertising for Guillermo del Toro’s latest feature, the little bits I had seen were utterly compelling. A neo-noir thriller based on a 1946 novel is exactly the sort of thing that I live for. My mother was less excited about it, but she booked the tickets anyway. It was only by chance that I stumbled upon this film while watching The Film Review, it was so severely lacking in advertisement. Still, with a central cast of Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, I felt reasonably confident that I was in for a treat.
I’ll just come right out and say it: I found Nightmare Alley an incredibly tense watch and I am unlikely to revisit it any time soon. That’s not to say I didn’t like the film, I thought it was excellent. There are, however, several scenes that require a strong stomach in order to get through them. It’s not something I would describe as “fun”. Entertaining? Yes. Visually strong? Yes. Utterly gripping? Yes. Fun? Absolutely not. This is so quintessentially a psychological thriller. The story is meandering in its pace, but delivers with big moments. As a result, I was glued to my seat, waiting for reveals, fights, cathartic resolutions. I got them, and they were good. The shadowy past of protagonist Stanton Carlisle is revealed to us agonisingly slowly, and I could never quite decide how I felt about him. Bradley Cooper is such a charming presence and perfectly encapsulates Stanton’s complex character, while the chemistry between Cooper and Cate Blanchett on screen is utterly electric.
A moment must be dedicated to the visuals. I’m a huge fan of del Toro’s directing (though controversially I wasn’t a huge fan of The Shape of Water) and Nightmare Alley has just cemented that love further. The 1939 setting is indicated through everything from the decor, to the costumes and even the scene transitions have something very Art Deco about them. It’s easy for a thriller such as this to come across as tacky in some way, but so many of the scenes just ooze realism. The clearest example of this is in the office of Blanchett’s Lilith Ritter. Scenes there were like being teleported into another world: one even more sinister than we came from. The warmness of the lighting in the daytime compared with the cool nighttime scenes, with the pathetic fallacy of the rain and the snow in the moments of turmoil and unrest are just some of the ways in which del Toro masters visual storytelling in this film.
Overall, Nightmare Alley is a masterclass in visuals and storytelling. It represents exactly what I love about film: I was transported to another world in which I was scrambling for character backstories and motivations, trying to work out what was going on before I was told. Of course, I wasn’t quite sharp enough to reach most of the conclusions but that’s beside the point. While there were certainly parts that I would actually quite like to erase from my memory (the man eating a live chicken and Bradley Cooper picking bits of nose and teeth out of his knuckles will be forever etched in my brain) Nightmare Alley is an absolute masterpiece, and I’m only sad that so few people know about it.
Caelum Reviews 