Dir: Guillermo del Toro. Starring: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman. 15, 150 minutes.
In Nightmare Alley, our hero Stanton Carlisle – an ambitious carny played by Bradley Cooper – is haunted by the perpetual feeling that he’s being watched. Not by the ghosts that habitually inhabit Guillermo del Toro’s films – be it the spindly limbed phantoms of Crimson Peak, or the boy with the shattered head staring out from the shadows in The Devil’s Backbone. Nor is it God, or at least in the traditional sense. No, the thing that’s really watching Stanton – and watching his every move – is about as del Toro-esque as you can get: a foetus, suspended in a medical jar, with a big, cyclopean eye planted in the middle of its forehead. It knows Stanton’s ultimate fate, but it will not tell. Maybe it knows your fate, too.
