Nightmare Alley (2021)
dir. Guillermo del Toro
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Searchlight Pictures
With Nightmare Alley, virtuoso director Guillermo del Toro has added neo-noir, alongside gothic horror, fantasy, and science fiction, to the growing list of genres he’s proven mastery over. His fidelity to the gritty, nihilistic films noir, made popular after WWII and featuring broken protagonists who play fast and loose with society’s mores – and often get brutally punished for it – almost doesn’t need the “neo” qualifier. Nightmare Alley is the closest rendering of an actual film noir made in the 21st century thus far. At the same time, Del Toro puts his distinctive stamp on the film, blending in flourishes of straight horror and devastating morality tale.
Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name – the book was previously adapted for the big screen in 1947 – del Toro cowrote the screenplay with film journalist, historian, and screenwriter Kim Morgan. The two, romantically linked since 2018, got married in a mid-2021 surprise ceremony.
Initially set in the late 1930s, the story follows Stan Carlisle, whom we meet as he’s seemingly covering up a grisly crime. All we know for sure is that Stan has dumped a body under the floor of a house, then set the house on fire to cover his tracks. Del Toro accentuates this mysterious opening by keeping his protagonist silent. Stan doesn’t utter a word for the first ten minutes of Nightmare Alley. By that point, he has joined up as a day-laborer for a traveling carnival and freak show.
Del Toro delights, in the first third of the film, in exploring the transgressive delights of the almost underworld culture of carnies. The source material most likely – I’m unfamiliar with both it and the 1947 film version – provides ample inspiration. Gresham credited the novel’s origin to conversations with a former carnival worker, and the author went on to write a 1954 book titled Monster Midway: An Uninhibited Look at the Glittering World of the Carny.
As del Toro sets the stage for his tragic morality tale, immersing us in this world of sideshow hustlers and flimflammers, he calls to mind Tod Browning’s nasty 1932 Pre-Code horror film Freaks. Also set in a circus sideshow, the tragic downfall of that picture’s marginal protagonist is echoed, to harrowing affect, in Nightmare Alley.
The most disturbing relic that del Toro explores from this practically by-gone bit of showbiz’s lurid underbelly is the performer known as the sideshow circus geek. The circus geek was essentially a feral man who would digest almost any rotted and rancid carcass thrown to him. The grand finale of a geek show almost always included the performer biting the head off of a live chicken.
Del Toro brings his most disturbing inclinations – honed in the likes of his films The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth – to bear in the fleeting moments featuring the geek. Building the sense of foreboding is Willem Dafoe in a brilliant extended-cameo as carnival owner Clem Hoately. Clem explains to Stan the process for luring a down-on-his-luck man into what the man thinks will be a temporary position as a sideshow geek. The duplicitous dealings described by Clem – involving free booze secretly spiked with opium, in order to make the unsuspecting new geek dependent and pliant – act as a perfect shorthand for the carny world. Nothing is what it seems, and everybody is on the make for a quick buck.
Stan befriends and learns from Pete and Zeena, a married couple who profess to be psychics to the rubes who pay for the privilege to be scammed. In reality, the pair employ a mix of cold reading and inventive subterfuge to make their marks believe they have supernatural abilities. (Del Toro pays clever homage to the Hays Code-era conceit of using a fade-out to suggest sex, when Zeena makes it clear that she is attracted to Stan.)
After a tragic accident, Stan decides to take what he’s learned from Pete about the convoluted coded-language system for Pete’s medium act in order to break away from the sideshow circuit. He asks the woman he’s fallen in love with, Molly Cahill, whose own act involves passing an electrical current through her body, to come along as his assistant.
It's at this point that del Toro shifts gears from almost straight forward horror into the noir elements that define most of the film. A major symbol of that shift comes in the form of Lilith Ritter, the femme fatale of Nightmare Alley. Lilith has been sent to test Stan’s true abilities during a performance of the medium show he now travels the country performing with Molly. He passes the test and is introduced to a local judge and his wife. The old couple are desperate to communicate with their deceased son. This leads Stan down a path that Pete, and later Molly, warn him against: the spook show. That’s where a purported medium strings along a mark with promises of channeling a dead loved one.
Lilith, a psychologist, double crosses the judge; she is willing to supply Stan with information on his mark in order to make his readings more accurate. She also has information on another, richer member of the local social elite named Ezra Grindle. Grindle lost a mistress because of his own vanity and he is desperate to speak to her from beyond the grave.
Here the plot kicks into overdrive. So much so that it causes del Toro to mismanage one of the film’s story arcs. As is usually the case in a hardboiled noir, our hero falls for the femme fatale. Stan begins an affair with Lilith. One of the best lines of the movie – it could have come straight out of Double Indemnity – comes when Stan tells Lilith, “I know you're no good. And I know that because neither am I.” As effective as that story thread is, it isn’t wholly earned. The scenes in which Stan and Molly’s relationship begins to fall apart feel rushed and obligatory so that we understand why Stan feels pushed toward Lilith.
Stan also starts drinking for the first time in his life when he begins the torrid affair with Lilith and starts bilking Grindle with spook shows. One of the most intriguing things about Nightmare Alley is attempting to peer though the opaque exterior of Stan. Bradley Cooper’s close-to-the-vest interpretation of the character makes Stan a fascinating puzzle. Like many of film noir’s greatest tortured heroes, Cooper’s closely guarded facial expressions and mysterious air adds a satisfying ambiguity to the role. I could never quite get a lock on Stan’s true motivations, whether he cares or not about who he’s hurting.
The rest of the cast is as magnetic as Cooper. Cate Blanchett turns in a sultry, duplicitous performance as femme fatale Lilith. Rooney Mara is good as Molly, although she’s not given much to do until the climax of the movie. Toni Collette and David Strathairn are wonderfully understated as Pete and Zeena. Del Toro regular – and ultimate badass – Ron Perlman turns up in a few scenes as a carny worker. Iconic character actor Richard Jenkins, who worked with Del Toro for The Shape of Water, gives a bleak performance as Ezra Grindle, a man hiding dark secrets.
Del Toro is known for giving us nasty bits of horrific storytelling set against meticulously crafted and beautiful backdrops. Nightmare Alley is no exception. His set decoration and set design collaborators give us flourishes of art deco while his costume design team splendidly recreates the look and feel of the late 1930s and early 1940s period.
Del Toro also uses filmmaking techniques from the golden age of Hollywood, like iris-ins and -outs and other transitions. His and Kim Morgan’s dialog crackles as if it’s coming out of the likes of Robert Mitchum and Lauren Bacall.
Nightmare Alley is Guillermo del Toro’s florid homage to film noir, but it’s much more than that. The director made the genre his own, embellishing it with horror-tinged suspense and a comeuppance of an ending that will haunt me for years to come.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Mood, tone, exceptional acting, compelling storytelling: Nightmare Alley has it all plus style to burn. The one slight issue I have with one story arc pales in comparison to the art del Toro and his collaborators have crafted here.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The sign in the carnival fun/hell house that Stan looks into (it’s printed on a mirror) that says “Take a look at yourself, sinner,” says it all.
- “Folks here, they don’t make no never mind about who you are or what you done.” I could watch Willem Dafoe play a carnival boss all day.
- I love the little touch that del Toro adds about World War II breaking out and Stan barely noticing. He is a singularly-focused character.
- There is a cut structured around a brutal bit of horror that focuses on Mary Steenburgen. It’s one of the most haunting images in the film.
- That last line reading is chilling.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I am now in write-about-all-the-Oscar-best-picture-nominees-before-the-ceremony mode. I think this is the most far behind I’ve been since I started. I need to write about seven of the 10 nominees (six after Nightmare Alley). It’ll be close. I’ll write about the last one the morning of the day that the Oscar ceremony takes place. Luckily most of the films are (or will be soon) available on streaming services. I saw Nightmare Alley on Hulu. It’s also available on HBO Max, in addition to being in wide release in theaters.