From his 1993 debut feature, vampiric body horror Cronos, through to his most recent offering, the Best Picture-winning interspecies romance The Shape of Water, released in 2017, Guillermo del Toro has trucked exclusively in the fantastical.
In this brooding showbiz noir, however, adapted (together with Kim Morgan) from the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, the writer-director confines himself for the first time to a world without the possibility of magic – a world where those who do believe in such things aren't enlightened insiders but easy marks; chumps to be duly parted from their change.
That much is established right from the start: "Step right up and behold one of the unexplained mysteries of the universe!" Willem Dafoe's carnival barker commands a rapt crowd, all eyes on a sorry figure hunched in the straw-lined pit below. "Is he man or beast?"
Welcome to the 'geek show': a sideshow attraction of yore in which the performer would bite the head off a live chicken in order to sup (so the barker's spiel went) on its blood. It was regarded as a sordid spectacle, even by the carnies of 1930s America: geeks were typically down-and-out addicts, indentured by the supply of their chosen poison.
Unlike Shape of Water's Amphibian Man (or the titular demon from Hellboy, or the eyeball-palmed Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth), the monsters of Nightmare Alley are wholly man-made.
Amongst the punters Dafoe reels in is Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a drifter with nothing to his name but some daddy issues and a busted moral compass. He looks on, perturbed but intrigued, as the squealing geek tears into the bird that's tossed down to him, resembling nothing so much as Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son.
"How do ya ever get a guy to geek?" Stan wants to know, after falling in with the travelling carnie outfit. You get the feeling it's a question he's going to regret asking by the time the film is done with him.
The viewer may well regret it too, if not for the same reasons – at 150 minutes, Nightmare Alley proves a stolid saga, absent much of the spark and, well, magic of del Toro's finest work.
But it is recognisably of a piece with his filmography, beyond just the familiar sepia glow (courtesy of returning cinematographer Dan Laustsen), a hallmark of the director's steampunk-adjacent aesthetic. Like his dark fairytales – and unlike classic noirs – Nightmare Alley is shot through with a strong sense of morality. It's a cautionary tale descended from the line of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – only Stan is both the doctor and his ungodly creation.
As the ambitious antihero of the piece, Cooper (last seen going ham in Licorice Pizza) anchors a well-appointed, if a little unimaginative, ensemble cast: Stan first ingratiates himself with Toni Collette's spunky seeress Zeena and her bottle-nursing husband Pete, played with a sad clown's pathos by David Strathairn.
From the couple he charms the precious verbal code they developed back in their days as a classy mind-reading act, all the while cosying up to Rooney Mara's pretty young performer Molly in the hopes that she'll become his new partner, in business and in bed.
Once Stan has successfully leapfrogged over his carnie colleagues – refashioning himself for the supper club set as "The Great Stanton", a mentalist gifted with "second sight" – he finds that he's not content with petty displays of his allegedly paranormal abilities. ("What is the object being held by this lady?" Who cares?)
A leonine Cate Blanchett goes full femme fatale mode as the psychiatrist Lilith Ritter – something of a mind-reader in her own right, you might say – who encourages Stan to stray into the murkier waters of medium-ship. (The fact that the couch in her sprawling Deco office is shaped like a canoe just might be a sign that she's going to sell you down the river, bud.)
Amongst the assembled talents, all seemingly happy to play it safe, it's Cooper who sounds the only off note.
At the start of Gresham's book, Stan is a boy of 21; there is a naïveté to his opportunism that gets stripped away with age and success. That's not a quality Cooper, handsomely weathered at 47 (and untouched here by digital de-ageing à la The Irishman), is equipped to convey – and consequently the character becomes something different and less dynamic; his arc is flattened. Each time Dafoe calls him "kid" or "young buck" hammers this point home a little more.
Cooper isn't the first to step into The Great Stanton's shoes on screen – that honour belongs to Tyrone Power, a matinee idol of Hollywood's Golden Age, who starred in the (far superior) 1947 adaptation directed by Edmund Goulding.
(Del Toro has made a point of stating that his Nightmare Alley is a new adaptation of the book for which Gresham is best remembered rather than a remake. And yet, there are a few too many plot points and lines of dialogue that mirror inventions of Goulding's film for me not to parse this claim as vanity speaking.)
Power's performance as Stan burns with something altogether darker than Cooper's: the dashing Mask of Zorro star petitioned Fox to buy the rights to the book himself, coveting the lead role as a chance to break out of the swashbuckling mould. As it happened, audiences of the day preferred him in his pigeonhole; the film was a flop.
But Power could share in the character's hunger; in his egotistical desire to prove himself capable of more than was expected of him. Not so Cooper – he must've gotten that stuff out of his system with A Star Is Born.
Nightmare Alley is in cinemas now.
