‘Nightmare Alley’: Guillermo del Toro’s Highly-Stylized Film Noir Lacks Realism and Substance [Review]

Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” screened for press last night. Reviews have been mixed, but I’m leaning towards it being a semi-successful film.

This is not a crowd-pleaser by any stretch of the imagination. Bradley Cooper’s Stanton Carlisle is despicable in his attempt to climb to the top by any means necessary. There are no likable characters aside from Rooney Mara’s Molly, who is at first Cooper’s love interest and accomplice in the swindle, only to eventually grow a pair of morals and defy his authority.

Stanton learns the tricks of the trade via the carnival setting and manages to swindle his way to becoming a one-act sensation in the big city, faking his supernatural abilities. It’s in New York City that he meets Cate Blanchett’s Lilith, a psychiatrist who teams up with Stanton to funnel her patients’ deepest and darkest secrets to him — he gets the data on the people who pay him the big dough to visit deceased loved ones, they split the shares.

The film’s first half is a real slog, introducing a bundle of characters who appear in and out of the frame. It eventually picks up steam once Blanchett shows up in the picture. It all amounts to an incredibly stylized affair, with very little heart and a hefty amount of shallowness.

Blanchett’s is a strong role, and she chews up the scenery in rather comically dark faahion. It’s purposeful overacting. She knows what kind of movie she’s in. And yet, as watchable as del Toro’s film might be, there isn’t much originality to it. He’s tackling familiar territory that was much better conveyed in Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film.

Del Toro’s is a very slime-filled and dark as coal adaptation of the novel and does feel like a Guillermo del Toro movie through and through: lots of below-the-belt shots, swirling camera, and high-end production design. In that sense, this can very much be seen as a companion piece to “Crimson Peak.” It is del Toro feeding his cinematic fetishes via the first half’s carnival setting, which takes place in the real world, but feels like the fantasy of ‘Peak’ and “Pan’s Labyrinth.” And yet, there are no ghouls or creatures here, just soulless humans and freaks.

Sadly, the style in the film overshadows the substance. Dan Laustsen’s photography uses a lot of mirrors and circular objects to convey its main character’s spiral descent into madness. This is a pure genre exercise from del Toro, akin to “Crimson Peak” — a glossy film noir with over-the-top aesthetics and theatrics — and it mostly works, especially in the film’s more involving second hour.

But something feels off, as if del Toro forgot to inject any sort of humanity into his characters. They all feel like pawns on a chessboard rather than involving, full-blooded thespians. Del Toro treats the story more as fantasy than reality. His hunger for genre gets the best of him here. [B-]