Guillermo del Toro hits us with a spectacular noir melodrama boasting gruesomely enjoyable performances and freaky twists. He shows us that in spite of the old song, there are in fact a couple of businesses like showbusiness: psychoanalysis and crime. Del Toro conducts us into a fairground of fear with his usual love of the fantastical and the hallucinatory, the same adoration of classic golden age Americana and some spasms of body-horror violence. Thankfully though, it’s without the supernatural whimsy that sometimes threatens to drown his movies in twee.
Nightmare Alley is adapted from the 1946 novel by pulp author William Lindsay Gresham, who had a great fascination for the US’s sleazy carnies, circuses, travelling shows and magicians with their weird shimmer of the occult. (It’s something to ponder that, after their divorce, Gresham’s ex-wife Joy Davidman moved to England and famously married CS Lewis.) Nightmare Alley was first filmed in 1947 with Tyrone Power in the lead role, and now it’s Bradley Cooper taking on the haunted, saturnine part of Stan Carlisle, a guy with no money and a violent past who needs to disappear for a while.
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