Nightmare Alley: Guillermo Del Toro’s Noir Morality Play

Guillermo Del Toro is something of a known quantity. Whether it’s monsters, superheroes, or Disney folk (look for Pinocchio coming to a Netflix account near you), you can always count on a dose of the mythic and a dark, dank atmosphere.

Nightmare Alley is exactly what you’d expect from the auteur behind Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water adapting a post-WWII psychological noir novel about a little bad carny trying to scam his way in the big bad world.

Out of a murky past, Stan (Bradley Cooper) finds his way to Ten-in-One carnival. After the proprietor (Willem Dafoe) and a husband-and-wife mentalist team (David Strathairn and Toni Collette) take a shine to him, Stan learns the tricks of the trade so well that fetching fellow carny Molly (Rooney Mara) runs off with him, confident they’ll find a bigger, better life. Two years later they’ve found it, with two shows a night in a ritzy Buffalo supper club. But when the opportunity for big money comes a’knocking, Stan can’t resist going against the advice of his mentors and trying to pass himself off as more than mere entertainer. 

Plenty happens during the first act of Nightmare Alley, but for the entire hour you can’t shake the feeling that this is all a set-up to the main action, which gets underway once we trade the shadowy interiors and stormy skies of Stan’s carny life for the art deco fantasy in which he gets mixed up with a psychologist with a heart of pitch (Cate Blanchett). 

Although the ride isn’t half-bad, with Cooper and Blanchett positively smoldering with amorality, ultimately we’re derailed by character choices that seem contrived to drive us to a preordained destination rather than informed by internally consistent logic — an especial failing in a film that explicitly draws attention to its characters’ psyches and motivations. 

Verisimilitude, however, is never at the top of Del Toro’s to-do list. The man is a fabulist, and Nightmare Alley is at heart a morality play. A reviewer intent on maximizing brevity and concerned only for theme could summarize the whole kit-and-kaboodle in seven words: A crooked man walks a crooked mile. With all his gifts, Stan is a bad man, and you reap what you sow.

But deploying such laconicism would be to overlook Del Toro as stylist, which is his strongest suit. Not only does Nightmare Alley drip with his signature ambience, but Del Toro displays more attention than ever to the subtleties of sound design — the tick of a watch, the ringing of a crystal glass. Like him or not, there’s little to say against Del Toro’s craftsmanship.

Because its surface is the best thing Nightmare Alley has going for it, if you’re going to see this, you would do well not to wait until you can bring it home. Not every film suffers equally from being viewed at home rather than in a theater, but this one probably isn’t much without immersion. On the big screen, at least, it’s a universe you inhabit. From the inside, it’s easy enough to forgive all that it’s not. 

Nightmare Alley is playing at the Art Theatre of Long Beach through Dec. 30 and other theaters near you.