Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nightmare Alley’ on Hulu and HBO Max, in Which Guillermo del Toro Goes Hitchcock-Noir

Now streaming on Hulu and HBO Max, Nightmare Alley has a tough act to follow in Guillermo del Toro’s filmography: 2017’s The Shape of Water, a wonderment that won the filmmaker four Oscars, including best director and best picture (and until Parasite, was the most deserving big winner in modern Oscar history). But follow it del Toro does, mightily, taking William Lindsay Gresham’s novel about a grifting mentalist and adapting it more closely than the 1947 middlebrow noir Nightmare Alley – and drawing upon his own experience with predatory psychics, who descended upon his family after his father was kidnapped and held for ransom in the late 1990s. Del Toro, this guy, he’s lived a LIFE, and that sure seems to be one of the reasons he’s such a tremendous artist making tremendous films.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) drags a body into a hole in a house’s floorboards. He lights a cigarette then lights the house on fire and solemnly walks away. Soon he wanders into the “geek show” at a traveling carnival, where he watches in subtle, silent horror as a filthy, pathetic man bites the head off a live chicken with deranged fury. The “geek” is under the care of a shameless exploitationeer, carnival ringleader Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe), who gives Stan a buck and a square to help tear down the tent and all the sideshows. Soon enough, Clem is showing off all his stuff – a collection of disturbing aborted fetuses in bottles, one of which has a large eye in the center of its head; the secret to training the “geek,” which you really don’t want to know – to Stan, who’s taken a shine to the carny life, with its strongman Bruno (Ron Perlman), “electrified” girl Molly (Rooney Mara) and the like.

Stan falls in as an assistant to a mentalist act run by Zeena the Seer (Toni Collette) and her alcoholic husband Pete (David Strathairn), after he pays Zeena a dime for a bath, a package deal with an unadvertised shining of an unmentionable body part. I mean, her husband is a drunk who passes out smack in the middle of their grift act, so one can understand her dissatisfaction due to a lack of action. Anyway, they share all the tricks of their trade with Stan, who has goals beyond bilking gawkers out of nickels and quarters. He gets in Molly’s good graces by helping her beef up her act, then courting her all gentlemanly-like, then asking her to run off with him and start their own grift, you know, reading minds and such, and here’s where we worry about poor sweet Molly, because she’s not privy to the opening scenes which imply that Stan killed a man. Anyway, the mentalist act is alarmingly close to being a medium between melancholy everyday folk and their dearly departed loved ones, which is a line you don’t cross if you’re Pete. “You never do a spook show,” is his warning to Stan. “No good comes out of a spook show.”

Two years later, Stan stands center-stage twice a day in sold-out nightclubs, performing a sophisticated grift on people who think they’re too sophisticated to be vulnerable to such things. One of them is, indeed, too sophisticated, and this is the part of the noir where the dame with the gams walks in. Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett) sees through the grift and pokes holes in it, but Stan, ever the showman, turns it around and humiliates her in front of the audience. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. Dr. Ritter is a psychoanalyst, and not only leads Stan to big money grifts, but gets him to talk about his father pretty much against his will. Quid pro quo, baby. See, Dr. Lilith records all her psychotherapy sessions, and can feed Stan the dirt he needs in order to bilk rich people out of large wads of dough by being their private medium. He can’t resist – and that applies to any number of things for a man with many appetites. His biggest, fattest mark is Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), whose money is disproportionate to his morality. And at this point, all I can say is, Stan probably should’ve followed Pete’s advice.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: When del Toro goes Hitchcock like this, look out. I see shades of Spellbound, with its psychoanalytic themes, Shadow of a Doubt’s classic noir stylings, and Vertigo, which is sometimes called a “fairy tale noir.” Del Toro also draws upon other moody classics, including Detour and The Third Man.

Performance Worth Watching: Cate Blanchett as a femme fatale? Smelling salts, please. Cooper finds the black heart of his character with subtle intensity, his performance coalescing in the film’s final shot, where he delivers a truly haunting punchline within a grievous delirium. It’s an unforgettable moment.

Memorable Dialogue: Best lines, out of context:

“Nothing matters in this goddamn world but dough, and you got that raw.”

“You’re no good, and I know that ’cause neither am I.”

“Life. Life happened to me.”

“You think you take my breath away, Stan?”

Sex and Skin: Bradley Cooper’s bare ass; that soapy bath; some kissing of scars in tender places.

Our Take: Nightmare Alley is dense and dark, about shades of blackness, the human creature’s capacity for cruelty, the bleak recesses of the psyche. In this world, the nature of belief, and hope by extension, is defied by predators at every turn: grifters after their money, religions after their hearts, and people like Stanton Carlisle, who wants both. Or at least the former at the expense of the latter, less so to feed his coffers than the insatiable beast within him, the type that Freud would feed hand-peeled grapes on a Sunday picnic. One of the lessons that Stan learns is that there’s always a bigger, hungrier shark in the ocean; the question is whether he’s inspired to be it or fears becoming it.

Knowing del Toro’s affection for ghosts, fairy tales and myth, my initial impulse was to anticipate a supernatural twist from Nightmare Alley, where the grift eventually transcends this plane; there’s another warning doled out here by poor old Pete, about the dangers of the grifter who starts to believe his own bullshit, which I took as foreshadowing or suggestion. But del Toro’s interests here are wholly corporeal, whether it’s the simple act of separating fools from their money or the creation of the “geek” by strategically feeding and starving the addictions of a destitute man. In setting aside his usual “spook show,” the filmmaker plumbs the darknesses of our reality, from the sinister components of desire to the lies that people so desperately want to believe.

A second viewing of the film brought it into full bloom. Its rich visual detail manifests in the tiny horrors of the carnival sideshow or the lush period interiors of Stan and Molly’s posh hotel room and Dr. Lilith’s long, narrow office with the cl-CLICKing recording devices. Its performances are universally tremendous – Blanchett’s seductive vampiress (she and Cooper participate in a luscious showdown, each working their gears furiously in an attempt to psych-out the other), Dafoe’s baldly cruel barker, the tragic arc Strathairn finds within Pete, the film’s moral center who’s taken more damage, from within and without, than he can withstand. In a scene where Zeena is forced to improvise a conversation with a woman’s dead loved one, Stan asks Pete, “Is it so bad to give her hope?” “It’s not hope if it’s a lie,” is his reply, and I’ll add to it: This world is held together by lies.

So Nightmare Alley isn’t uplifting. It’s grim outlook is unsettling, punctuated by del Toro’s signature bursts of graphic violence. There are good people, but some may be hopeless. Maybe the film’s outward beauty is at odds with its psychological brutality, plush carpeting set gently atop an expanse of impaling spikes – but that’s a shallow criticism. The film is a cautionary tale, a call for careful skepticism, a meditation on the cyclical nature of abuse and suffering. One look at its final moments, and there is no ambiguity to its message. This is not a cold examination of harsh realities; it’s a questioning, a spirited indictment of the exploiters, some of whom absolutely get their just desserts.

Our Call: The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water and now Nightmare Alley. It’s premature to call del Toro’s latest a film for the ages, but it makes you wonder if there’s room in his filmography for another masterpiece. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.