Nightmare Alley

Folks will pay good money just to make themselves feel better.

It felt a bit weird to be watching a Guillermo del Toro movie which wasn't a genre piece. Part of me get expecting some sort of monster to appear. The thing is though, Nightmare Alley is full of monsters, but they are very human monsters. 

There's a really strange narrative structure here with two very defined sections that almost feel like two different movies. Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) arrives in a carnival and is offered a job. There he helps the owner Clem (Willem Dafoe) deal with the 'geek', a human who acts like an animal, and falls in with 'clairvoyant' Madame Zeena (Toni Collette) and her husband Pete who are expert scammers. He also forms a relationship with Molly (Rooney Mara). 

There's lots in this first section that feels quite irrelevant and this is where time is wasted. The film is two and a half hours long and doesn't need to be and I think it's the carnival stuff that could have been moved through more quickly. All the same I enjoyed it with the carnival atmosphere really captured well and I like the way the customers see amazing things but the film takes us behind the curtain and shows us the human tragedy behind them all. 

Stanton takes what he learns from Pete to become a professional Mentalist and makes a successful career of it. Despite plenty of warnings against it, he decides to accept an offer to communicate with a man's dead son. He also forms a connection with psychologist Lilith (Cate Blanchett) who immediately recognises he is a con-man but uses her patient's information to help him with his work. 

Essentially this second section is a con movie. I've seen bits and pieces of mentalism and seances in films before but I've never seen a film so effortlessly show how someone is able to fake it. Stanton has a natural ability to infer things about his marks, in a Sherlock Holmes -esque manner, and it's a lot of fun watching how he does this and how he can push things further with a bit of extra information. 

You expect a noir to be dark but this was still darker than I'd have thought. With the possible exception of Molly, every character is extremely morally questionable to one degree or another and most are willing to do horrific things to exploit their fellow human beings. Stanton is a likeable character but he absolutely deserves the downfall you know is coming to him because he does some really awful things. Lilith is the most fascinating of the characters, played so wonderfully by Blanchett, and the film really lifts when she arrives. 

I felt that the script has a few problems. As well as being too long, it's not the most subtle in the way it explores the human psyche. I also saw the ending coming a mile off and felt some of the foreshadowing for the end was more overt than it ought to have been as well. That said, whilst I knew exactly where the film was headed I did enjoy the journey to that point. 

Something the film does successfully is make you feel like you've bathed in something disgusting and it will take a while to wash it off and cleanse the mind. So much of it is horrible, in a good way.