Guillermo del Toro’s carnival noir is the best-looking film he has made and, for its first hour in the tents, one of his best. Then it moves to the city, slows down, and repeats itself for another ninety minutes.
Guillermo del Toro has made a film with no ghosts in it. Nightmare Alley, adapted with Kim Morgan from William Lindsay Gresham’s novel, follows a drifter called Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) into a Depression-era carnival, teaches him the mentalist’s trade, and sends him to the city to use it on people who can afford to be lied to. For its first hour, among the tents, it is close to his best work. Then it goes indoors and the air goes out of it.
The carnival is a whole place, and Tamara Deverell built it in the mud. Dan Laustsen shoots the nights a deep blue with the lamps burning orange in them, so every face is half warm and half cold. Willem Dafoe runs the show as Clem Hoatley, and his account of how you make a geek, delivered like a man explaining how to keep a boiler going, is the most frightening speech in the film. We were repelled by the geek show, a man in a straw pit gnawing at a live chicken, and we stayed repelled, because del Toro films it plainly.
Toni Collette and David Strathairn are Zeena the Seer and her husband Pete, a ruined mentalist with a word code for reading minds. Strathairn plays Pete as a man who knows what his gift is for and drinks so he will not use it; his warning to Stan never to run a spook show is the film’s one moral. Collette is warm and sly and underused. Rooney Mara is Molly, with Ron Perlman as Bruno, the strongman who looks after her. Cam McLauchlin cuts these scenes slowly, and they can take it.
Then Stan and Molly leave for the city, and the film changes colour. Deverell’s city is green marble and snow, and Luis Sequeira puts Cooper in suits that get better as he gets worse. Cate Blanchett arrives as Dr. Lilith Ritter, a psychiatrist who sees through his act, and she is having a marvellous time. She holds her cigarette like a scalpel and delivers every line as though she has already read the last page. Richard Jenkins, as the rich and guilty Ezra Grindle, gives the second half its only real pain. But the con repeats where it ought to escalate. By the second séance we noticed we had stopped following Stan and started admiring the lamps.
The trouble is the lead. Stan is meant to fool everybody, himself first, and Cooper plays him as a man who has already been found out. In the carnival he is watchful and good. In the city he is knowing from his first line, and a man who knows has nowhere to fall from. Nathan Johnson’s score, low strings and the odd brass chord, tells us the ending is coming without hurrying towards it.
Del Toro keeps the novel’s ending, and it is the right one; the last few minutes did to us what the preceding hours had been reaching for, and we sat through the credits without moving. Whether that excuses 151 minutes of build we argued about and did not settle. Against del Toro’s record this sits with Crimson Peak (2015): the design is the star and the people are there to be dressed.
See it for the carnival, for Dafoe and Strathairn, and for Blanchett’s cigarette. It carries a 15, for a few bursts of brief, nasty violence. Do not wait for a monster; del Toro has decided, this once, that people will do.
