Then you lie. You lie. And when the lies end, there it is. The face of God, staring at you straight. No matter where you turn. No man can outrun God, Stan.
There are a lot of reasons I’m a fan of Guillermo del Toro’s work. His quality level has certainly been variable over the years (or do I owe Mimic a rewatch? No, no, I don’t think I do). But even in some of his less than stellar work, there’s almost always something there that’s, pardon my French, cool as ****. And I think, as his career has developed, he’s continued to stretch himself into a filmmaker with facility in more and more subgenres of the fantastic, which is usually where he lives. And Nightmare Alley is, I think, a movie about the fantastic, just not the explicitly supernatural. If you want to attribute Stanton Carlisle’s rise and fall to the judgment of a righteous God, I suppose that’s fine to do though.
I think del Toro’s pulled off something really phenomenal here. He hasn’t made a neo-noir or even a twist on noir; he’s just made a pure film-noir. These days, film noir is a genre that’s most often approached with an eye to subverting the tropes, but del Toro is playing this one deadly straight. It’s serious, committed, mean-spirited and not a wink in sight. And I loved every single, solitary second of Nightmare Alley. I’ve seen it twice now and I enjoyed it just as much the second time. Maybe that’s because Nightmare Alley, even on your first viewing, has a sense of inevitability to it. It’s a characteristic of the best film noir that the ultimate fate of its characters feels fated. There’s a point at which a film-noir character typically makes one decision, typically a bad one in a string of bad ones, and you feel that it is at the moment of that decision that their fate has been sealed. The dramatic satisfaction is in watching that ever approaching moment of damnation as the character either desperately attempts to escape his fate or chooses to more and more embrace the path he’s chosen. Del Toro is in no hurry here and the film is absolutely meticulous in every way; by the time the final scene arrives, there’s no doubt in our minds of what horrible fate awaits Stanton, but he doesn’t rush the scene; he lets the scene quietly unfold until it reaches the moment of climactic horror we’ve been expecting. And horror, I should say, it is; the fates of film noir characters are usually pretty grim, but this one is downright nasty.
But the film has earned that ending with the depth of story-telling and character building that has gone on. I’ve seen a lot of people say the film is too long; I disagree – I was so captivated by Stanton’s journey that I loved every bit of it. It seems like a novel to me, really; it has the length that it needs to tell the story the way it wants to tell it. I understand that, for some people, it spools out too slowly, but about the only thing I think is even remotely cuttable is the strong-man character who doesn’t have any real impact on the plot or the characters. Beyond that, this is a movie where I feel that every shot, every slow push-in, every quiet moment is about building a deep experience. There’s a shot late in the film where we see a bloody handprint on a wall and the beat that the movie takes to let us see it, during a scene that is, you know, pretty suspenseful and pretty violent, really sums up the approach of the film, I think. The camera just pauses on that image, the bright red smeared handprint on the shiny, otherwise spotless wall, and then it just pushes in quietly and slowly. In this movie, del Toro finds moment after moment after moment of exactly that kind and he’s created one of the most meditative “thrillers,” which I think this unquestionably is, I’ve ever seen. The tension and suspense and dread isn’t created by the moment to moment camera work as much as it is by the overall atmosphere and the existential state of Stanton Carlisle, a bad man doing bad things and expecting to get away with them. The tension is, as I said above, that we know he won’t.
While this story takes place in the real world, del Toro’s fascination with world-building is as beautifully on display here as it is in any of his more fanciful films. The film is gorgeous to look at. I didn’t get to see the black & white version of the film that was released in theaters after the original run was finished and I would have liked to because I think it would have really been a seamless noir experience in black & white. But I like the use of color, greens and reds and greys: neon lights, bright blood and quiet snowfall. The film just has a real atmosphere, whether it’s the seedy carnival at night, the elegant luxury of Lillith Ritter’s office or the bitterly cold landscapes of the Grindel mansion. Nathan Johnson’s score is perfectly pitched as well; he brings in enough of the melodrama while keeping it muted at other times. The score is atmospheric and perfect. I’m glad Alexandre Desplat had to drop out honestly; I’ve always found him to be a very overrated and overwrought composer and I think he could have impacted this movie very negatively if he’d done bad work.
And, while I’ve been praising del Toro’s craftsmanship as both director and writer, you have to give props to the amazing cast. This is a movie that, heavy handed as it is, could easily become campy or ponderous based on the performances, but del Toro has assembled an incredible ensemble. Bradley Cooper turns in yet another really excellent performance; he’s able to make every step on Stanton’s journey feel real and you feel the weight of his sins closing in on him as the movie progresses. Cate Blanchett gives another magnificent performance as well; the scenes between her and Cooper have real spark and danger. You can tell immediately that getting involved with her is going to be one of the biggest mistakes Stanton makes and, by the time she gets to her final scene, she’s scarier than most of del Toro’s horror movie monsters. David Strathairn and Toni Collette are fantastic as carnival performers; Strathairn gets saddled with the movie’s most heavy-handed and portentous speech and you could easily see a lesser acting whiffing on it and the entire movie going off balance because of it. But Strathairn absolutely slays it and the moral weight he gives to that speech about the judgment of God informs the entire movie from that point on. The moral weight of Stanton’s choices are just charged with dread and darkness and you feel that inescapable gaze on him at all times; he’s pursued by a recurring motif of eyes and of religious symbols. An early funhouse mirror directs him view himself as a “sinner;” later that all seeing eye has been appropriated into his own act. It’s a movie rich in symbols really, cloaked in the mystery of its carnival scenes.
But, man, I got off track; I was supposed to be talking about the cast. Also giving great supporting performances are Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe and the rather improbably named Jim Beaver as the equally improbably named Jedidiah Judd. And let me just talk about Richard Jenkins; I had forgotten he was in this movie, so when he showed up about ninety minutes into this thing as Ezra Grindle, a character of pure menace and threat, I just about started cheering. One of the things that makes this movie feel very novelistic to me is the way so many of the characters really feel like they have lives outside of the movie. There’s a very late revelation about Grindle and you buy it completely; it isn’t jarring at all because the movie has imbued him with such menace and Jenkins’ performance has embodied the character so perfectly. A lot of the characters get moments like this: Dr. Ritter revealing a scar, Pete’s haunted eyes when he won’t talk about why he stopped the mentalist act all those years ago. You feel the weight of the lives that all of these characters have led before they encountered Stanton, the accrual of moral choices that have led them all, inexorably, to the places they are now.
Look, if you couldn’t tell, I love this movie pretty unreservedly. It’s just packed with amazing scenes and moments, visually arresting and beautiful, deeply invested in its characters, meticulous in its world-building. It’s nothing short of a masterpiece and I think it’s del Toro’s most emotionally mature work to date. It’s a work of cinema that stands up as both a work of art and a work of compelling entertainment. Del Toro has always had mastery over some elements of filmmaking and he’s always been boldly audacious even in areas where he hasn’t had complete control. But this is a piece of filmmaking mastery and, while I’m always interested to see what del Toro does next, I don’t think I’ve been this excited for him yet. It remains to be seen if Nightmare Alley marks an entry into a new phase of his career or not and I’m not saying I want him to abandon his flashier, more blockbustery style of filmmaking – I’m a huge fan of Pacific Rim for instance. But the depth of this movie reveals that he’s reached a new level of control and perfection. Nightmare Alley is a knock-out and if we’re talking about the Oscars, it’s one of the few Best Picture nominees from 2021 that I think actually deserves the nomination. (Ask me why the cast, not even Blanchett, got nominated and I’ll just shrug; who knows?). Either way, it’s all killer, no filler, a mean-spirited, unflinching noir about a bad guy doing bad things getting what’s coming to him. Now that’s entertainment. 4 stars.
tl;dr – an incredible ensemble of actors bring life to a deep, character-based & rich script and del Toro’s direction has rarely been this beautiful; a film noir with no irony, nasty as they come. 4 stars.