Nightmare Alley blends Gothic horror and noir.
Guillermo del Toro's latest film has a slow middle, but more than makes up for it in the end.
The Short Take:
Guillermo del Toro meticulously crafts a gorgeous, intoxicating world in Nightmare Alley. I ate up all the classic Hollywood noir and loved the 1930s carnival. The story lumbers through the middle act, but an astonishing ending — sublimely acted by Bradley Cooper — made me glad I stuck it out. Recommended for GdT fans and anyone in the mood for a luxurious yet creepy period thriller.
Image Credit: Forbes
The Long Take:
Step right up. Step right up.
A pickled baby with a third eye floats in a jar. A woman electrocutes herself for show. A man savagely eats a live chicken. Fortune tellers. Contortionists. Con artists. This is the weird and wonderfully dark world of Nightmare Alley.
Well, it’s at least half of the world of Nightmare Alley.
The other half is hard-boiled noir, steeped in Art Deco glamor and decadence. Spotlights on stages. Coats with tails. Scalloped ceilings. Gilded wall hangings. Bright red lipstick. Finger curls. Pencil thin mustaches. And a shadow of murder and mayhem cast over all of it.
If any of this already sounds appealing to you, exit stage right now and return after you’ve seen the film, which you can conveniently stream on HBOMax. The production design and general craft behind this film alone makes it worth a watch; I think that’s most likely why it made it into the list of Best Picture Oscar nominees this year. And I can’t think of a director other than Guillermo del Toro to meld these two worlds — the bizarre and the noir — into one spellbinding tale.
Image Credit: Entertainment Weekly
I’ve been a big fan of Guillermo del Toro’s work ever since Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). His specific take on fantasy appeals to me because it celebrates the beauty of the bizarre and grotesque. He’s able to tell stories with emotional depth — though the milage may vary on that from film to film — while also tapping into a childlike wonder and fun. His films can be whimsical one minute and horrifically creepy and dark the next. I’ll even go to bat for The Shape of Water (2017), even though my cinephile friends and the film critics I follow generally agree that the quirky romance between a woman and an amphibian man is not very good, or at the very least should not have won Best Picture. And while Nightmare Alley is tonally a big shift from its Oscar-winning predecessor, I can still see his fondness for outcasts in this film. I can still see the rich, strange fantasy I fell in love with in Pan’s Labyrinth.
Above all, Guillermo del Toro adores monsters. At a WonderCon panel I attended in 2013, as he was teasing Pacific Rim, I remember the glee on his face as he described kaijus fighting. It was clear that he had had a lot of fun making this huge blockbuster movie (which was fun but a little disappointing), primarily because it allowed him to relive the big monster B-movies he loves so much. His description of a scene sounded like a child playing with action figures, with unpretentious joy. He gazes upon the monstrous and sees only beauty.
There are no monsters in the literal sense in Nightmare Alley. In fact, when I originally heard that GdT was adapting William Lindsey Gresham’s 1946 novel, which a year later became a film noir starring Tyrone Power, I was confused because it didn’t sound like his usual work. Once I realized Gresham’s novel examines the world of carnival workers or carnies, I realized how this would be right up GdT’s alley (pun not initially intended, but I’ll take it).
The history of carnivals as “freak shows” gives GdT the opportunity to show reverence for what others would find disgusting. The added wrinkle here, though, is that while carnivals do often feature people society deems unnatural or abnormal, a carny’s trade — as Nightmare Alley shows us — relies upon creating an illusion to fool people into to believing in monsters. Or, as some characters smugly say, encouraging people to fool themselves.
As nearly every review of the film I’ve seen says, the men are the real monsters here. The warmth of The Shape of Water is nowhere to be found. This carnival bares its seedy underbelly and often exposes how sad and drab it is behind the scenes. Stan Carlisle, played by Bradley Cooper, is arguably one of the biggest monsters of all. He stumbles upon the carnival by chance, having recently fled a dark and mysterious past. The ringleader, played by Willem Dafoe, offers him a job and Stan ingratiates himself into the community from there. He becomes a talented mentalist, able to trick people into believing he can tell who they are based on objects alone. When he wants to take his show into the realm of the supernatural, his fellow carnies ominously warn him that “spook shows” are too dangerous and not worth the trouble. (You can easily guess what his response to that is.)
Once we leave the carnival an hour into the film, my interest diminished. Part of me wanted GdT to tell a story focused on the carnival rather than originating from it. Stan is not a likable character at all, even though we constantly see him charm other people. Not once was I rooting for him. I did want to see how close he would fly to the sun, but with a sinking sense of dread. Thus, being able to care about the relatively well-meaning supporting players around him helped with my overall investment in the film early on.
The film drags in the middle when the focus shifts to Stan more exclusively. It’s not clear where exactly the story is going and just watching Stan con a series of wealthy people desperate for closure is not enough to keep me interested. Rooney Mara, who shares a lot of screen time with Cooper during this time, doesn’t have a lot to do. She’s doing the best with what she’s been given, but the impressionable, trusting young woman who can’t keep up with the sinister world Stan drags her into gets old pretty fast.
Cate Blanchett, on the other hand, who arrives on the scene around this time, plays the femme fatale Dr. Lilith Ritter to perfection. She is the show-stealing spectacle that held my attention most when we weren’t at the carnival. She channels Lauren Bacall’s sultry intimidation without undermining the originality of Dr. Ritter as a character. But, again, it takes a while for her character’s purpose to become clear, and I wasn’t sure it would be worth the wait.
Thankfully, it was. Once everything clicks in and revelations begin to topple over on one another, I sat up and paid attention, kicking myself for almost writing off the film entirely. There are twists and turns, and the stakes are high. The film comes full circle in a way I never would have expected. Details that seemed like pure flavor and color before suddenly become meaningful. I don’t think this planting of narrative seeds was nearly as precise as it was in The Power of the Dog, so far fewer people who see Nightmare Alley will likely pick up on how it all fits together. I am not nearly as confident in the interpretation of events (that I will provide shortly) as I was in my Power of the Dog review. Whereas Jane Campion tells her story with a scalpel, Guillermo del Toro does so with a messy, blotchy, but still beautiful brush. Bradley Cooper gives a soul-crushing, brilliant performance in the last few minutes of the film. I’d tell you to fast forward just to appreciate that, but the impact of the scene may be lost if you haven’t followed the whole story.
One of the best Oscar pundits working today, Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture, appreciates many aspects of Nightmare Alley like I do, but his big critique of the film — which was echoed by several of his colleagues on their podcast review — was its thematic and narrative shallowness. I think one other critic used the word “hollow” to describe the screenplay. I agree that Stan’s backstory is pretty reductive, as we know he has alcoholic daddy issues, but beyond that there’s not much distinctive nuance. The bigger themes that include but are not limited to Stan’s character, however, are much more compelling: judging people, manipulating them, putting on a good show, exploitation, survival, ambition, vengeance, how people are so ready to delude themselves into anything if it can bring them happiness, and how hard it is to escape the past.
I think Guillermo del Toro is the only one to tell this story because he understands Gothic fiction. My favorite biographical factoid about him is that he owns two houses called Bleak House 1 and 2, presumably after Dickens’ urban Gothic novel. They exist purely as places to house his massive collection of memorabilia. He can display a giant Frankenstein’s monster head in the foyer and write his next movie in a room where, no matter what, it’s always raining. As a British Literature PhD who spent a lot of time studying the Victorian Gothic, I especially appreciate how he views monsters, ghosts, and ambient rain as component parts to a whole Gothic mood.
When Crimson Peak released in 2015, GdT did not call it a horror film in interviews. He said it was a Gothic romance. Sure, the house is haunted (as he says in an interview, “Ghosts are real. End of story.”). But the main ghost in that film is really a catalyst to dredge up all the painful family history that has occurred in the house. The past coming back to haunt you may not be a particularly new or nuanced idea, but the combination of the psychological haunting with the suggestion of a literal haunting is a cornerstone of the Gothic.
I see this same trope in Nightmare Alley, only the ghosts are the ones Stan’s clients want to see, but can’t.
[SPOILER WARNING: In order to flesh out what I mean here, I’m going to have to go into spoiler-prone detail.]
Image Credit: Variety
The final, desperate attempt Stan makes to convince his big mark, Ezra Grindle, that he’s a real medium who can materialize Grindle’s dead mistress for him is the most obvious example of GdT drawing on the Gothic because Stan asks Molly to dress up to look Grindle’s mistress, Dorrie, who died of a forced abortion decades earlier. Her hair and high-collared dress are very Victorian, and the fake blood she douses herself in makes her look incredibly creepy. This sequence reminded me so much of Crimson Peak in its imagery not only because of Molly’s hair, make-up, and costume, but because GdT contrasts her red blood against her white dress and the white snow. (There’s literally a Victorian novel called The Woman in White, so, unsurprisingly, white standing in for purity is very much a trope GdT could be referencing here.) The way Grindle reacts to seeing Molly (who he thinks is Dorrie) is equally horrific. He crumbles at the sight of her but then confesses to assaulting other women in the wake of Dorrie’s death. Richard Jenkins does a great job of making Grindle a terrifying menace tortured by his misdeeds.
Even Blanchett’s character, Dr. Ritter, is haunted by her past. The film never comes out and says it, but I inferred that Ezra Grindle was the one who left the scars on her chest when he assaulted her during his time as her patient. She initially warns Stan that Grindle is unpredictable and violent. Later on she says that when powerful people are unhappy with you the world closes in on you very quickly. And when she reveals the scars to Stan she only says that “life happened.”
This may in part be because the trauma is too severe to discuss, but I theorize that it’s also because revealing the source of the scars will jeopardize her long con on Stan. In the gripping scene of her betrayal, she not only asserts her dominance over Stan in retribution for the way he tried to “take her down” and humiliate her during his show. This is the more obvious motive, as she belittles him and says that he’s a small man. But she’s also using Stan as a weapon against Grindle, so she can murder him without getting her hands dirty. To reconcile the traumatic past that torments her.
I thought all this clicked into place really well and made me realize that, at least from a plot perspective, this film had also been conning me. Long after I finished watching — days later even — I’m still thinking about the extent to which Dr. Ritter uses her skills as a psychologist to get a reading of Stan that will allow her to manipulate him. Her observations about the way Stan refuses the alcohol, using the word “never,” combined with what he says about his father could arguably have told her that he had inherited alcoholism from his father. It makes sense, then, that she would want to get him to drink to make him lose control, easier to manipulate. She literally takes a sip and then kisses his lips, knowing that just one taste, even by proxy, would make him succumb to his disease.
There is palpable tension here not just between Dr. Ritter and Stan but between Freudian psychoanalysis and mentalism. Both claim to be able to “read people.” Stan doesn’t actually have any psychic powers; he just makes Sherlockian inferences based on peoples’ age, gender, and appearance. Similarly, we see Dr. Ritter draw a lot of information out of Stan by asking him follow-up questions based on her observations. She’s able to deduce fairly quickly what his hang-ups are. I could see this as a problematic accusation that psychologists are con artists too. But perhaps the outcome of the film negates that; Dr. Ritter triumphing over Stan in order to retaliate against her abuser could be seen as an argument for psychology’s superiority. The anti-feminist history of the femme fatale figure in noir complicates that some. If anyone has thoughts about what to make of Dr. Ritter’s character, please share them in the comments.
Regardless of what meaning the cat and mouse game between Dr. Ritter and Stan carries, Stan’s story in isolation stands as a fable or fairy tale — one that is dark and disturbing like those by Aesop or Grimm. There’s some kind of twisted moral justice or karmic retribution at the end in a mind-blowing final scene.
Seeing Stan return to the carnival that gave him his start in absolute shambles is, of course, a full circle moment. But the new ringmaster reciting the same lines — almost verbatim — that Willem Dafoe’s character says at the beginning of the film when he explains how he entraps vagabonds so they can be the geeks in his show really pushed it into the realm of crazy thriller payoff. AND THEN the look on Bradley Cooper’s face as he realizes what’s happening but chooses to drink anyway. I was gasping and gesturing at my screen this entire time. (Something like DON’T DRINK IT! followed by OMG, HE KNOWS?!) The multitude of emotions he’s clearly feeling as he hysterically yet contentedly says, “I was born for it” blew me away. Oftentimes mediocre endings can taint otherwise incredible films. This was the opposite. The ending made me forgive whatever had not been working for me up until that point.
I can see Nightmare Alley creeping up my films of the year list as I type. The process of writing this review has actually made me appreciate the film as a whole a lot more. I hope reading it does the same for you.