Like its disreputable bedfellow the horror genre, film noir is an unruly beast – a term used to unite wildly disparate movies sharing an aesthetic philosophy that is on the tilt and frayed at the edges. From the hard-boiled crime dramas of the 1930s to the softcore erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s, the most potent noirs are disreputable affairs, as stylishly sleazy as the rotted societies they portray. On one level, Guillermo del Toro’s neo-noir Nightmare Alley could not be more “respectable” – an awards contender with an A-list cast, from the Oscar-winning director of the popular romantic fantasy The Shape of Water. Yet from its bruised colour palette to its spiralling descent into madness and degradation, this is deliciously damnable fare, looking back through the prism of Del Toro’s adventurous oeuvre to the existential angst of his vampiric feature debut, Cronos.
Based on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham (first brought to the screen by Edmund Goulding in 1947), Nightmare Alley stars Bradley Cooper as Stanton Carlisle, a natural-born conman whom we first meet torching his family home. Escaping the past, Stan joins a travelling carnival, ingratiating himself with Zeena the Seer (Toni Collette), a clairvoyant whose act is based on an elaborate code cooked up with her alcoholic husband, Pete (David Strathairn).
