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Movie Review: Nightmare Alley

Mike Tyrkus

Although the latest film from director Guillermo del Toro, Nightmare Alley, exhibits many of the director’s signatures, it also manages to produce a pleasingly pulpy noir tale that effectively carries on the director’s motifs and aesthetics.

The film begins with a man apparently disposing of a corpse by reducing it and the house it is in to ashes. This is our introduction of aimless, yet charismatic drifter Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) – or the man disposing of the corpse – that eventually finds his way to a traveling carnival in 1929. Once ensconced as a jack-of-all-trades by the proprietor of the carnival – a man named Clem (played by Willem Dafoe) – Carlisle endears himself to the troupe’s resident clairvoyant, Zeena (Toni Collette), and her once-great mentalist husband Pete (David Strathairn). After feeling he has mastered all of the tricks that this pair had to offer him, Carlisle convinces fellow performer, Molly (Rooney Mara) to leave the traveling carnival and move with him to New York where they will run their carnival tricks as a nightclub act in which he claims to be able to communicate with the dead on the unsuspecting elite of society. That is, until the pair set their sights on tycoon Ezra (Richard Jenkins) and the equally dangerous psychologist Lilith (Cate Blanchett) and their web of lies begin to entangle Carlisle and Molly as well.

Bradley Cooper in “Nightmare Alley.” Photo by Kerry Hayes.

The script, written by director Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan, weaves in and out of the real and imagined as effortlessly as the carnival cons perpetrated throughout the film by Carlisle and his contemporaries. This otherworldliness is reminiscent of the director’s other work as well as his straddling the line between believable and not so much.

Nightmare Alley also sports an ethereal hue courtesy of Dan Lausten’s austere cinematography that gives one the impression that perhaps this carnival exists somewhere out of time and space, or at least, just out of reach of the real world. Entombed within the confines of the exquisite production design by Tamara Deverell, the film manages to not only create, but also solidly maintain the world in which it is set throughout its entire duration to spectacular effect.

While it may not be Del Toro’s most ambitious film to date, it is certainly not devoid of the intent to try something out of the ordinary. Nightmare Alley proves to be an effective exercise in the art of storytelling through the use of exquisite character development and execution.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com
An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

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