Nightmare Alley

From the filmmaker who's always looked for beauty in the grotesque and whose fascination with horror, fantasy, fairy tales & monsters knows no bounds, Nightmare Alley marks quite a departure from his earlier works. While the story features a dark premise and the imagery is infused with gothic flavours, it plays out like a straightforward neo-noir psychological thriller and is devoid of the supernatural.

Co-written & directed by Guillermo del Toro (Pacific Rim & The Shape of Water), the first act does create an intrigue & mystery about our protagonist and what he may be up to but once the story departs from the carnival setting, the interest does start to fizzle out as it becomes evident where it's headed & how it's going to play out. It isn't necessarily a complaint but for a director of del Toro's calibre, more was expected here.

On the technical front, the film scores high marks with its sumptuous production design that brings its period setting to life in splendid detail. Deft camerawork & amber lighting also add to its noirish tone and the decadent score enriches it some more. Performances are where it delivers the most valuable goods. Bradley Cooper is committed throughout, plus his act only gets better as plot progresses and he is strongly supported by the rest.

Overall, Nightmare Alley is a perfectly fine example of its genre and will keep most viewers invested in its proceedings with its rich production value & impressive acting. However, the characters still remain distant for some reason and the story as a whole feels more or less underwhelming in the end. To sum it up, Guillermo del Toro's latest offering isn't without its charms and has a few neat tricks up its sleeve but nothing about it is original or refreshing.

Edmund Goulding's 1947 film "Nightmare Alley" is one of my all-time favourite noirs and it's the film in which Tyrone Power certainly gave his finest performance. Of course, not having read William Lindsay Gresham's original novel I can't say how faithfully it stuck to its source material any more than I can say that this Guillermo del Toro remake, clocking in at 40 minutes longer than the first film, is a faithful adaptation. I did expect del Toro's version to be more 'explicit' than Goulding's but would it capture the seedy vibe of the deliciously unpleasant 1947 classic or would this simply look like a 21st century over-art-directed period piece?

The good news is, that in typical del Toro fashion, it looks great and the period detail is perfectly captured without seeming overdone and it's also brilliantly cast. Bradley Cooper is a lot less appealing than Power as the carny with a dubious past and an uncertain future, which is just as it should be, while as the three women who impact on his life, Toni Collette, Rooney Mara and especially Cate Blanchett are all excellent and there's first-rate work from Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins and, walking off with the picture, David Strathairn.

The bad news is del Toro certainly drags it out. This is definitely a movie that could do with some trimming and worse, apparently there's an even longer director's cut out there somewhere. It's a good yarn and it's well told and as remakes go, it's a cut above but it won't supplant Goulding's classic in my affections nor does it approach "The Shape of Water" in del Toro's canon.

Like all of Del Toro's films, Nightmare Alley is a visual feast. The production design and cinematography transported me into his grim and glossy dystopian vision.

Also, the acting is some of the best I've seen in one of Del Toro's movies. Bradley Cooper gives perhaps his finest performance, and he sells every unsettling moment of this horrifying cautionary tale as his character is consumed by the consequences of his pride.

The best moments in this story really are some of the best scenes of the year, and they will stick with me for some time to come.

The film's biggest weakness is it's obviously bloated runtime. The second act really meanders and focuses on romantic subplots without giving us reasons to believe that the characters fall in love. A great deal of material should have been either explored more or cut altogether. As it stands, the center of this story is woefully half-baked.

Still, the production design and performances alone make this worth checking out. It really is something to behold.

Over the past thirty years, Guillermo del Toro has directed some of the most haunting movies: "Cronos", "Mimic", "The Devil's Backbone", "Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Shape of Water". He now adds "Nightmare Alley", a disturbing look at a man's overconfidence.

Bradley Cooper plays a man who joins a traveling carnival but begins letting his belief in his own abilities get the better of him, especially after he starts associating with a morally ambiguous psychologist. Cate Blanchett's performance as the psychologist is what makes the movie, in my opinion. That and the production design create one of the most mind-blowing things that you'll ever see; it certainly earned its Academy Award nomination for production design.

I don't know if I would call this the year's best movie, but it's one of the most impressive. Along with Cooper and Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, David Strathairn, Mary Steenburgen, Ron Perlman, Richard Jenkins and a host of other people put on splendid performances. You should definitely check this movie out.

I liked Nightmare Alley at first. It's visually gorgeous and pulls you in with its ambience and bits of mystery. But at a certain point, where what I'd call the "second act" begins, I looked to see how much was left of the movie, thinking it was about the time in a noir when things really get going like a runaway freight train, and realized it was only half over!

I felt pretty restless at that point, in spite of Cate Blanchett's pitch-perfect performance. It wasn't so much that less time should have been used up in the first act as that every single thing should have been shorter. This should have had the brisk quality of classic noir, instead of the slow boil noir here.

The movie does finally go into runaway freight train mode almost two hours in, and that last part is intense and gripping and everything you'd want it to be, but really this whole movie should have been 90-100 minutes and a good finale doesn't erase the boredom I'd felt for most of the previous hour.

Del Toro's a terrific director, the movie looks amazing, and Blanchett is phenomenal, so I won't say skip it. I will say, lower your expectations and don't count on something worthy of the best picture Oscar nomination this got.