Our most enduring images and memories of film noir tend to be rooted in the 1940s and 1950s: say the words and monochromatic visions of fedoras, slinky satin gowns and unrestricted billows of cigarette smoke inevitably come to mind. That makes it a difficult genre to tackle in the present day, even if its themes and social corners are hardly era-specific. Lean too hard into the period styling and it feels like empty cosplay; update it too much and the shadowy romance dissipates.
Guillermo del Toro’s snaky, seductive remake of Nightmare Alley (now on all major VOD platforms) gets the balance just about right, even if its early-40s production and costume design is sumptuous in a way that Edmund Goulding’s 1947 original, still among the darkest and harshest of all classic noirs, never thought to be. Expensively dilapidated and luridly lit, Del Toro’s film indulges in a degree of genre fetishism, never less than when Cate Blanchett is on the screen, sheathed and hairsprayed and vamping up a storm as a venomous femme-fatale psychoanalyst. But it retains a genuine jolt of human corruption and moral curiosity, all held in Bradley Cooper’s remarkable lead performance as an ambitious, cool-blooded carnival worker willing himself into high society at any cost. Cooper wears a fedora and high-waisted suit well enough, but his character’s tortured interior life never feels dressed in quotation marks.
