Nightmare Alley

by Julian Spivey

Photo: Searchlight Pictures

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Willem Dafoe & Cate Blanchett 
Rated: R
Runtime: 2 hours & 30 minutes 

Director Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” begins with a scene of Bradley Cooper’s lead Stanton Carlisle throwing a dead body into a hole in the floor of a home before lighting it ablaze and walking off into his future. So, we know right from the start our main character has a dark side, but we’re still willing to take the ride with him because the story, written by del Toro and Kim Morgan and based off William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, is so intriguing and Cooper’s performance so mysterious.
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Stanton comes upon a local carnival, where he’s immediately offered work by a carnival owner named Clem (Willem Dafoe), who runs the geek show. I found Dafoe’s performance to be the most intriguing of the entire film because, well, how can Dafoe as a carny master not be, which is disappointing because the carnival aspect of “Nightmare Alley” is less than half of the film. The best part of Dafoe’s performance is a bit of foreshadowing where he explains how he finds new geeks for the show.

Stan quickly falls into carnival life with a clairvoyant act Madame Zeena (Toni Collette) and the brains behind the outfit, her alcoholic husband Pete (David Strathairn) and falls for another carnival act Molly (Rooney Mara). Pete teaches Stan everything he knows about mentalism, but when he dies mysteriously (or maybe I just find it mysteriously in that I have doubts whether it was accidental), Stan and Molly leave the carnival behind for bigger things.

The movie jumps forward two years to find Stan the star of his own clairvoyant act with Molly as his assistant at a big city hotel. It’s during one of these performances in which he’s interrupted by psychologist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett) attempting to prove him to be a fraud. However, when he bests Ritter, he’s approached by Judge Kimball (Peter MacNeill), one of the local wealthy elite, to help his wife Felicia (Mary Steenburgen) communicate with their dead son. Remembering Pete’s warnings about never turning their act into a “spook show,” Molly tries to dissuade Stanton from going through with the act, but he just can’t help himself having turned from carnival act into con artist.

Carnival life might have been dark with its images of geeks biting the heads off of live chickens, but at least the carny’s had their own moral code (well, I’m not sure Clem did), unlike the upper class elite willing to pay good money to be reunited with the deceased, but dangerous if Stanton can’t succeed. I don’t want to spoil anything, but dangerous it does indeed become and there’s so many spirals of deceit playing out at the end you might be surprised by who’s pulling the strings all along.

I figured out before the end exactly how this movie was going to end, but that was OK for me because it’s almost exactly how I wanted it to end. It’s a Rod Serling/’Twilight Zone’-esque ending. The only thing that would’ve made the ending sweeter for me would’ve been for Dafoe to have replaced the character played by Tim Blake Nelson in the finale. But maybe that would’ve been too dark or maybe would’ve given the ending away sooner than del Toro would’ve liked.

“Nightmare Alley” was recently nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It can now be streamed on Hulu.