The trailer of this Guillermo del Toro-directed, neo-noir psychological thriller promises a shock ending that’s touted to be, perhaps, bigger than the film itself.

But if you know what to look for — or if you’ve seen enough films — you may know where the narrative is heading…not that it’s a bad thing. The shock is the perfect curtain-closing moment in what is otherwise a very fine, but not spectacular, film.

Nightmare Alley, an adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel that was also adapted into a 1947 film that diversified actor Tyrone Power’s resume, is a departure for del Toro. It is a shadowy drama centred on a desperate and unscrupulous man who dumps a body in a hole in the middle of a wood-planked lounge, drizzles the said hole with gasoline, and then burns the body — and the house — down.

As the man walks away, one notices the severity of del Toro’s frame: it’s wide, long and curving at its left and right ends. The instructions for the director of photography Dan Lausten, who del Toro worked with in Crimson Peak and Shape of Water, was to shoot between 11mm and 20mm; that’s often too wide for films (most are shot between 25mm to 135mm), but they worked well for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, so why wouldn’t they work here?

As good as it is, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is not for everyone

The obviousness of the lens choice bags the aesthetic: with its far-flung centre of frames, and elongated ends closing in on the audience, the image skews and distorts reality; it feels as if one is actually in an alley, irrespective of whether the scene is set in a carnival, a posh hotel lounge or the grand, snow-capped garden of a very evil man.

Nightmare Alley is full of evil men: the man who burned his house is Stanton Carlisle (Bradly Cooper, also one of the film’s producers) — a man who hardly speaks for the first 10 or 15 minutes of the film, but is quite gifted in the pick-up game.

‘Stan’ joins a travelling carnival and witnesses human cruelty first hand: a man is starved to death and is then forced to eat a live chicken in front of the audience. The sequence, you know by gut, is saying a lot about the characters around Stan and, in the context of the story, it will eventually lead to something bigger.

Stan has a fling with a phony clairvoyant (Toni Collette), from whose drunk husband he learns the trick of fooling others by mentalism. Knowing just enough to make it, he leaves the circus for the big time in the city with Molly (Rooney Mara), one of the more innocent of the characters in del Toro and film critic-turned-screenwriter Kim Morgan’s screenplay.

It’s there, more than half way into the film, that we get to the film’s dramatic focal point: Stan, in one of his shows, ridicules a woman who calls his act out. She is Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a psychologist who is perhaps as fragile and despicable as Stan.

Guillermo del Toro hardly empathises with Stan, yet keeps his presence dead-centre in all scenes. It’s basically his journey we are seeing, without getting emotionally attached to him, or his sense of reasoning. The women he meets and uses give us reasons to judge him — but not love or hate him.

Telling a story this way is a unique and risky narrative call that works a little too well. One doesn’t feel anything at all for Stan, thanks to a very restrained performance by Cooper.

Powered by an all-star cast, some actors — such as Richard Jenkins and Mara — are underutilised. With Mara, in particular, one realises that her scenes were edited out of the film in order to maintain the two-and-a-half-hour running time.

Other actors — William Defoe, Collette and Blanchett — are cannibals; they eat the frames alive (Blanchett, in particular, is the epitome of femme fatales; she slinks through the floors like a venomous viper and is just as deadly).

Guillermo del Toro is in love with his characters and his world-building. The excessive running time isn’t a drag, even at the expense of his protracted yet highly detailed, artistically lit, cinematography (the shots linger quite a bit). Del Toro is also unconcerned about the level of compassion his characters evoke.

His prior films with roughly the same ambience (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, Crimson Peak) gave us people we could sympathise with. Not this film. And perhaps that’s why, as good as it is, Nightmare Alley is not for everyone.

Released by Searchlight, Nightmare Alley is rated R for bloody violence of not-so-good people. The film is streaming on Hulu and HBO Max

Published in Dawn, ICON, February 13th, 2022