Nightmare Alley

By all accounts, it looks like the key to enjoying this movie is not knowing the source material. Which is the case for me, and so I instead thoroughly enjoyed the gradual unfolding of the scope of the plot and its unexpected twists, which actually makes practically the entire first half of the film mere exposition. As long as I didn't recognize it in the process, though, I'm fine with it. I enjoyed the preservation of the noir naivety and boorish dialogue, as well as the adaptation of noir visual schemes under actual filming techniques. Nightmare Alley never feels like a faithful illusion of a point in time, instead it's very stagy and polished, which on the one hand relegates the plot to the cheap interiors of circus marquees, yet on the other hand invites us back into the most stylish office ever, which must have actually cost about the same as it would to build the Taj Mahal. Likewise video games circa 2010 (before the gritty look became trendy) such as FEAR, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or Doom 3. Everything was shiny and looked unnaturally clean, including the dirt. I also often thought of Verbinski's A Cure For Wellness while watching it. (28/04/2022)

An epochal experience. It's very nice that we get such an ideal film even in the cloud of this year's Oscar nominations. Great stuff is drawn from William Lindsay Gresham's novel "Nightmare Alley" (1946), which had already proven to be a novelty when it was first adapted in 1947. Stylistically, it is a treat with classic film punctuation, the production design is absolutely art deco and the decadence of a circus setting and a wicked big city are combined. What more could you want? The acting roles, which are a given: Cooper, Blanchett, Dafoe, Mara, Collette... A decade earlier, Water for Elephants was a similar treat. And on TV, maybe Season 4 of AHS or the unfinished HBO series Carnivàle. (04/04/2022)

I’m not fond of carnivals from the first half of the 20th century, with their bizarreness, the way their tormented animals and boasted about the deformity of disabled people, but the setting in the late 1930s and early 1940s suits me. However, I feel that the story and its plot arc is not so substantial to justify the enormous runtime. I would have cut the beginning at the carnival by half, maybe more, and nothing would have happened, leaving Bradley and Rooney Mara's reunion and , for the final (very funny, by the way) twist, the important monologue of the the demonic Willem Dafoe about how they recruit human scum to play the role of renegades who are locked permanently in a cage and eat chickens alive. On the other hand, if I were Del Toro I'd focus more on the intrigue in the big city, its grimness and depravity, because Cate Blanchett is a great femme fatale and the sparks between her and Bradley are electrifying. Overall, I enjoyed it, but a pair of scissors for the editor would have been really nice. But it's hard when you consider how much del Toro loves the bizarreness of the old fairs and carnivals, he must have felt like a kid in a candy store in their backdrop. (17/06/2022)

The continuation of a cycle of stories, which, like Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water, lay dusty in the attic until Guillermo del Toro came along and turned it into a visual masterpiece with the help of a stellar cast, one that critics admire but audiences do not. However, compared to the aforementioned works, Nightmare Alley is more mature, thoughtful, confident, and ambitious in its setting and themes. It plays with psychology, noir, detective stories, or almost a hundred-year-old horrors, and despite the predictable twist, it describes the narrative circle almost perfectly. Perhaps only the screenwriting habit of making the main character make exactly the mistakes that the supporting characters (often repeatedly) warn her against seems unnecessary to me since Pan's Labyrinth. But for lovers of the spine-chilling and immersion into images that look like they have aged for decades, this manipulative journey is a sure bet and, for me, the best del Toro film since Hellboy II: The Golden Army. (11/03/2022)

Guillermo has stepped away from his beloved monster(s) and with the grace of a visual perfectionist and a focused depicter of dark, bizarre and fragile characters, he has made the most mature film of his career so far. Nightmare Alley is a psychological drama about false pretense leading to a loss of one’s self, a visual retro pleasure with every shot, the camera gently floating even in the most intimate dialogue scenes. While watching Nightmare Alley, you will recall Browning’s classic Freaks, and your soul will be soothed by the delicate noir stylization and each of the actors’ performances, which adorn the film like a Christmas tree. The protagonist is the story’s worst character – a charismatic but inwardly depraved liar who manipulates the trusting people around him. In the surprising casting of Bradley Cooper, it’s all the more impressive and entertaining to see how splendidly the actor handles playing that character. (26/01/2022)