Review: ‘Nightmare Alley’ is a Lingering Noir Masterpiece

del toro nightmare alley poster
Searchlight Pictures

Nightmare Alley, the newest release from Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, is now available to watch in theaters or at home on HBO and Hulu. The film is a remake of the 1947 Edmund Goulding movie of the same name and based on an original novel written by William Lindsay Gresham in 1946. Guillermo del Toro’s new film boasts an incredible collection of cast members, including Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett, Richard Jenkins, and Ron Perlman. The film was released in a colorized version and a black-and-white noir version titled Nightmare Alley: Vision in Darkness and Light (theaters only).

Nightmare Alley follows lonely drifter Stanton Carlisle (Cooper) as he comes upon a local carnival looking for work. There he meets a strange team of carnival workers that teach him the tricks of the trade of mentalism, and after perfecting it, Stanton decides to take his talents on the road with his newly met love interest, Molly (Mara). While developing his gift and making more money, Stanton starts to become submerged in a life of greed and darkness, surrounding himself with dangerous swindlers that may hold him responsible if their interests aren’t met.

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Let me start by saying that del Toro is one of my favorite directors of all time. I feel that he has a stylistic gift to put an immense amount of effort into every single sound and visual aesthetic in his films. Every set piece and prop has one mission: to entrench the viewer in the story visually. This has been a pattern throughout Guillermo del Toro’s career and has only gotten stronger with his more recent films. The Shape of Water was an aesthetically and audibly perfect film, and Nightmare Alley does this just as well.

I saw the noir version of Nightmare Alley, so I can’t yet attest to how beautiful the colorization is outside of screenshots, especially for the macabre carnival sets. Still, I can say that the contrasted lighting in the noir version was stunning. For example, there were scenes where most of the room was dark, and the only light came from an unshaded window, with snow falling in the background, while Cate Blanchett, in a dark dress and bright blonde hair, was the focus of the shot. These shot styles were plentiful in the noir version, and shooting in black-and-white was very much considered while shooting the colorized version. It was all so impressive.

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Like most del Toro films, all performances were top-notch, which isn’t surprising with a cast of this talent level. Bradley Cooper has been Oscar-nominated four times for his acting, yet this is the best performance of his career. Co-stars Willem Dafoe was perfect at being a sleazy, apathetic slimeball, with Mara Rooney meek and hopeful. There wasn’t a single weak link in the film regarding the cast.

The story is an excellent showcase in morality vs. greed vs. desperation. Some viewers may feel that certain characters would have benefitted from more development, but let’s not get it twisted. Nightmare Alley is Stanton Carlisle’s story from start to finish, and all of these other characters are just bumps in the road. The ending was pitch-perfect storytelling, a means to an end, expressing a moral so lingering that even days later, I find myself retracing the tale piece-by-piece, picking out every moment that could have gone differently for the main character.

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I look at some other critical responses to it, and I don’t agree with a lot of them. There are two significant reasons some critics have come out of this film with mixed feelings. Number one, Nightmare Alley is not your typical Guillermo del Toro horror film. Having that expectation (which is understandable, as it was primarily marketed as one) and getting a gritty noir crime drama may rub them the wrong way. That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of horrific moments and spooky aesthetics, with a focus on the horror of humanity the horrible ways we can treat one another, but overall, I wouldn’t call this horror. It was a perfect love letter to 1940’s detective-style noir films.

The other reason is that Nightmare Alley is a particularly nasty-spirited film. Most of the characters are only out for their self-interests, with no care for those they hurt in the process. This is not a feel-good movie. Nothing about it is upbeat. You’ll spend the entire film feeling empathy for characters who consistently make the wrong decisions, and that’s the point. Sometimes redemption doesn’t come. Sometimes, when you choose the wrong paths, the purposeful or accidental mistakes come back to bite you. Nightmare Alley isn’t here to make you feel good. It’s here to entertain you in all aspects, and to me, it does that flawlessly.


REVIEW OVERVIEW
Nightmare Alley
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Stephen Rosenberg
Stephen is a massive horror, sci-fi, fantasy and action movie geek. He's an avid horror & sci-fi book/comic reader, musician and podcaster. He co-founded and co-hosts Motion Picture Meltdown (movie-roasting podcast since 2009), which is part of the United Cypher Podcast Network. Stephen is the Editor-at-Large for Horror Geek Life and an Associate Editor and contributing writer for MovieWeb. Feel free to contact him regarding screeners, reviews, press kits, interviews, and more!
review-nightmare-alleyNightmare Alley isn’t your typical Guillermo del Toro horror film, but a perfect love letter to 1940’s noir crime dramas. The cast was incredible, with standout performances across the board. Like most del Toro films, an enormous amount of effort was put into every scene and set, both aesthetically and audibly. The story was fantastic, with a circular moral lingering in my brain days after watching. Though some may not like the particularly nasty spirit of the film, for me, it’s going to be a hard film to beat in 2021. Being able to watch the colorized version on VOD (Hulu and HBO) is great, but I do recommend if you can find a late showing in an empty theater of the black-and-white noir version, it is stunning.

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