Nightmare Alley

This time, form wins over content, as the atmosphere is superb and the direction is meticulously detailed, but the story didn't quite grab me by the heart. The first (roughly) circus half was great, and since I didn't know anything about the plot (even the short official distributor blurb here is actually a spoiler), I was curious to see where it was all going. Unfortunately, this eventually led to a not so interesting second and third act, in which almost everything was suddenly expected, including the beautifully vicious ending. I'm a bit disappointed because I really like Guillermo Del Toro and he got a dream cast for Nightmare Alley, but at the same time I'm not too disappointed. P.S.. Bradley Cooper's hero is a downright Lovecraftian character, and I' d like to see some of that Cthulhu next time. (29/01/2022)

Guillermo has stepped away from his beloved monster(s) and with the grace of a visual perfectionist and a focused depicter of dark, bizarre and fragile characters, he has made the most mature film of his career so far. Nightmare Alley is a psychological drama about false pretense leading to a loss of one’s self, a visual retro pleasure with every shot, the camera gently floating even in the most intimate dialogue scenes. While watching Nightmare Alley, you will recall Browning’s classic Freaks, and your soul will be soothed by the delicate noir stylization and each of the actors’ performances, which adorn the film like a Christmas tree. The protagonist is the story’s worst character – a charismatic but inwardly depraved liar who manipulates the trusting people around him. In the surprising casting of Bradley Cooper, it’s all the more impressive and entertaining to see how splendidly the actor handles playing that character. (26/01/2022)

By all accounts, it looks like the key to enjoying this movie is not knowing the source material. Which is the case for me, and so I instead thoroughly enjoyed the gradual unfolding of the scope of the plot and its unexpected twists, which actually makes practically the entire first half of the film mere exposition. As long as I didn't recognize it in the process, though, I'm fine with it. I enjoyed the preservation of the noir naivety and boorish dialogue, as well as the adaptation of noir visual schemes under actual filming techniques. Nightmare Alley never feels like a faithful illusion of a point in time, instead it's very stagy and polished, which on the one hand relegates the plot to the cheap interiors of circus marquees, yet on the other hand invites us back into the most stylish office ever, which must have actually cost about the same as it would to build the Taj Mahal. Likewise video games circa 2010 (before the gritty look became trendy) such as FEAR, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or Doom 3. Everything was shiny and looked unnaturally clean, including the dirt. I also often thought of Verbinski's A Cure For Wellness while watching it. (28/04/2022)

An epochal experience. It's very nice that we get such an ideal film even in the cloud of this year's Oscar nominations. Great stuff is drawn from William Lindsay Gresham's novel "Nightmare Alley" (1946), which had already proven to be a novelty when it was first adapted in 1947. Stylistically, it is a treat with classic film punctuation, the production design is absolutely art deco and the decadence of a circus setting and a wicked big city are combined. What more could you want? The acting roles, which are a given: Cooper, Blanchett, Dafoe, Mara, Collette... A decade earlier, Water for Elephants was a similar treat. And on TV, maybe Season 4 of AHS or the unfinished HBO series Carnivàle. (04/04/2022)

The continuation of a cycle of stories, which, like Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water, lay dusty in the attic until Guillermo del Toro came along and turned it into a visual masterpiece with the help of a stellar cast, one that critics admire but audiences do not. However, compared to the aforementioned works, Nightmare Alley is more mature, thoughtful, confident, and ambitious in its setting and themes. It plays with psychology, noir, detective stories, or almost a hundred-year-old horrors, and despite the predictable twist, it describes the narrative circle almost perfectly. Perhaps only the screenwriting habit of making the main character make exactly the mistakes that the supporting characters (often repeatedly) warn her against seems unnecessary to me since Pan's Labyrinth. But for lovers of the spine-chilling and immersion into images that look like they have aged for decades, this manipulative journey is a sure bet and, for me, the best del Toro film since Hellboy II: The Golden Army. (11/03/2022)