Director Report Card: Guillermo del Toro (2021)

11. Nightmare Alley

It seems every major filmmaker, and all the movie nerds that love them, have an unabating passion for some cinematic genre that is considered hopelessly passé by the rest of the film-going public. This is why a big-name director tries to revive the musical every decade, to middling reactions from actual audiences. The same can be said of film noir, a style that peaked in popularity seventy years ago. With the newfound clout of his Best Director Oscar, Guillermo del Toro chose a new entry in this influential but unpopular genre as his follow-up to "The Shape of Water." That would take the form of a new adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's "Nightmare Alley," previously filmed in 1947. It has now become the second of del Toro's movies to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. 

A drifter named Stan arrives at a carnival. He quickly integrates himself into the crew, befriending a fortune teller named "Zeena" and her alcoholic husband, Paul. After accidentally contributing to Paul's death, Stan leaves the carnival with Molly, another sideshow performer that's fallen in love with him. Using the secrets he stole from Paul, Stan reinvents himself as a psychic and spiritualists among the rich of Buffalo, New York. There he meets Lilith Ritter, a duplicitous psychiatrist, and the two conceive of a con to defraud a millionaire industrialist. Yet as Stan seeks to exploit other people's dark pasts, his own is starting to catch up with him. 

In the lead-up to "Nightmare Alley's" release, del Toro has been careful to specify that his film is not a remake of the original "Nightmare Alley" but rather a new adaptation of the novel. This is presumably to dispel the stigma of remaking a beloved classic, as the original is among the most respected (and darkest) of classic noirs. Yet the new "Nightmare Alley" follows the events of the older movie fairly closely. The most notable difference is some more violence in the last third and the ditching of the original's tacked-on happy ending. It includes some of the details from the book left out of the first movie, so it's definitely different. But I still think "remake" isn't a dirty word to use here. 

The theme that most links del Toro's "Nightmare Alley" and all the ones before it is its moral philosophy. The film, at first, appears to be totally agnostic. The mechanics of cold reading and fortune telling are repeatedly explained. By tracking Stan's rise from carny to high-class spiritualist, the film shows there's no difference between the disreputable profession and the respectable one. Stan becoming a full blown con artist is a natural leap from there. And he's more than happy to take advantage of people's religious beliefs to achieve his goals. Yet from her Tarot card deck, Zeena warns Stan that he is on a grave path. There is no divine punishment here, no ironic comeuppance from the spirits that have been trespassed against, but a man does dig his own grave with his cruel actions. Whether were meant to take the Tarot as genuine divination or if Zeena could deduce Stan's fate, cold reading his future like she does so many people's past, is up to interpretation.

Noir as a genre is defined primarily by its deeply cynical opinion on humanity. In "Nightmare Alley," almost everyone is acting in a totally self-interested manner. Stan preys on the emotionally vulnerable. Lilith records her patients with the intention of blackmailing them later. Clem, Stan's first boss at the carnival, happily gets bums addicted to opium to turn them into chicken-eating geeks. Betrayal is a common thread throughout the story. Yet noir is also a deeply moral genre. Every wicked act Stan performs brings him closer to his downfall. He doesn't care about the people he's hurt or the death and destruction he's responsible for. Yet it certainly catches up with him in the end, the film's circular structure seeing Stan's inhumane actions turning him into a beast eventually. Noir often seems to say that the world is cruel but that there is, frequently, a certain karmic justice to the way things play out. "Nightmare Alley" remains faithful to that idea. 

This is not the only way "Nightmare Alley" shows its allegiance to the tropes of noir storytelling. In fact, the film often feels like a full-blown pastiche of the genre than del Toro’s personal reinterpretation of them. Like many noir protagonists, Stan is a man fleeing his past. Though he mostly feels no remorse for his actions, the one friend who has died as a result of his actions haunts him. We get glimpses at his troubled past. Yet the character remains frustratingly vague at times. Bradley Cooper has a certain charm in the role but mostly plays it stoic. He is not a deconstruction of the hard-as-nails noir protagonist, with dark secrets of his own, so much as a straight example of it. 

If “Nightmare Alley’s” amoral antihero is a stock-parts noir archetype, this is even more true for its female leads. Ronney Mara plays as the good girl love interest, Molly. She is literally virginal, admitting to Stan on their wedding night that she’s never been with a man before. As his criminal acts intensify, she grows increasingly wary of Stan and eventually abandons him. Why such a sweet girl would stay with a man like Stan is never addressed and Mara plays it close to the chest. Molly stands in contrast to Cate Blanchett’s Lilith, a classical femme fatale who seduces and manipulates men for her own purposes. Watching Blanchett play such a devious character is delightful, especially once the reveal arrives. But “Nightmare Alley” is stubbornly disinterested in a deeper addressing of noir’s problematic good girl/femme fatale dichotomy. 

If del Toro’s straight-forward handling of noir story tropes is a little frustrating, his treatment of the genre’s cinematic qualities are impressive. “Nightmare Alley” is a gorgeous looking movie. Dan Laustsen’s cinematography is wonderful, getting as much shadowy depth out of the images as possible. (I imagine this is even more true of the black-and-white version that was released earlier this year.) Many memorable sights are created, such as a rabbit sitting in a hallway or a moonlit reunion with a seemingly deceased girl. The camera even irises in a few times. The production design has the meticulous quality we’ve come to expect from del Toro. An early trip into a demonic looking funhouse is especially notable, while all the carnival sequences are fabulously detailed. Nathan Johnson’s atmospheric score suits the material nicely without being a boozy saxophone-laden parody that most noir pastiches go with. There's lots of trench coats and fedoras as well, of course. 

“Nightmare Alley” is maybe most interesting when it leans into the Freudian undertones of the noir genre. The story invites this, with one of its major characters being an analyst. Lilith delves into Stan's mind, digging up some of his lingering guilt and Daddy issues. Something of a parallel between is drawn between Stan's ability, as a cold reader, to dig into someone's life just by looking at them and Lilith's skills as a shrink to dig into someone's psyche. As Stan's scheme starts to unravel, we get more and more glimpses at the dark past that forged him. Repressed secrets bubble up to the surface from a number of characters, violence and depravity always just hidden behind the human face. As in all noir, the literal shadows here also represent the shadows of the human mind. 

We know for a fact that Tod Browning's “Freaks” is one of Guillmero del Toro's favorite movies. So it's no surprise that he revels in the sideshow setting of “Nightmare Alley's” first act. One of the most lovingly assembled scenes in the film involves Stan designing a more elaborate version of Molly's “electric woman” act for her, full of moving parts and shooting steam. This being a del Toro joint, he doesn't miss the opportunity to include a shelf full of pickled punks, the light shining through their cloudy jars. He even makes a mutated fetus, with a ever-watching cycloptic eye, a reoccurring omen in the story. Considering more than one review has noted that the first half of “Nightmare Alley” is a little stronger than its second half, I wonder why del Toro didn't set more of the movie in and around the carnival.

Another thing that has been said of “Nightmare Alley,” leading up to its release, is how it's a departure for the director. This is del Toro's first movie without any supernatural or science-fiction elements, falling totally outside of the horror or fantastique genre... But does it, really? An early scene, during which Stan and Clem chase the half-mad geek through the hellish fun house, certainly feels like something that could exist in a horror movie. A spiritualist, albeit a phony one, manifesting a ghost is still part of the plot. And of course this director soaks up the macabre visuals of a beautiful, ghostly maiden in blood-splattered clothes emerging out of the mist. A story of a scumbag committing increasingly brutal violent acts, on his way to a fittingly ironic fate, just needs a ghost or zombie to be a “Tales from the Crypt” episode. You can take the horror director out of the genre but you can't take the genre out of the horror director.

Being an A-list director now, del Toro can easily assemble A-list casts. While all the leads could probably do more, the supporting cast in “Nightmare Alley” is packed. Willem Dafoe steals all of his scenes as Clem, emanating a sleazy but totally captivating energy every second he's on-screen. Toni Collette is good at keeping the obvious world-weariness she has just under the skin, making Zeena a woman who has seen a lot but tries to stay positive. Richard Jenkins has a good villainous vibe as the businessman, who seems untrustworthy from the moment he appears. Naturally, del Toro sneaks Ron Perlman into a small role as the carnival strong man. (One can only assume Doug Jones was busy with “Star Trek: Discovery,” or else he would've been on hand as the living skeleton or something.)  

Like most every attempt to revive a long since dead genre like this, “Nightmare Alley” was met with complete audience indifference when released in theaters last December. (It certainly didn't help that Disney, probably eager to unload a film made by Fox, seemed to barely promote the movie.) However, it was well-liked by critics and scooped up four Oscar nominations this season. Even though it's a film obviously eager to be taken seriously, this still feels closer to del Toro in “Pacific Rim” mode than “Pan's Labyrinth.” In the sense that he's having fun paying homage to something he loves, rather than mixing his own influences up into something truly new and exciting. Yet “Nightmare Alley” is still an expertly assembled film full of effective touches, even if I couldn't help but come away hoping for more. [Grade: B]