Director Guillermo del Toro famous for his fantasy worlds, loves his mythical creatures, monsters and weird outsiders, and now he is taking on the film noir genre with "Nightmare Alley," a thriller with Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.
Del Toro recently charmed audiences with "Shape of Water," a visually stunning love story between a mute cleaning lady and a mysterious water creature trapped in a laboratory. The film won four Oscars in 2018, including Best Picture and Director.
Del Toro, also known for "Hellboy" and "Pan's Labyrinth," now brings his signature style into a new genre. The noir thriller "Nightmare Alley" is a remake of the eponymous novel by U.S. author William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), first filmed in 1947 with Tyrone Power.
In this version, Del Toro gives us a star-studded cast: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman and David Strathairn.
It is the first starring role for Cooper after the musical romantic Western "A Star Is Born" in 2018. Now, cast as a sly crook in "Nightmare Alley," he may be playing the coldest-blooded character in his career.
Cooper transforms himself into poor drifter Stan, who hires himself out as a showman at a fair in the late 1930s.
There he watches a pair of psychics – played by Toni Collette and David Strathairn – manipulate their audiences, posing as a medium who can seemingly contact the dead.
Stan falls in with circus girl Molly, played by Rooney Mara, then makes a name for himself in wealthy New York society as a seer and medium, together with his devoted girlfriend.
It is in the city that he meets a cunning psychiatrist, played by Blanchett. She finds him wealthy clients, but in the end becomes his undoing. "I know you're not good. And neither am I," Stan tells his calculating lover.
The ominous comments give us some hint of the bloody carnage and vertiginous fall that follow, artfully directed by Del Toro.
The 1947's "Nightmare Alley" is a gritty black-and-white film that runs for a lean 110 minutes, with all the cold brutality of a film noir.
Contrast that with Del Toro's remake, an indulgent drama that is half an hour longer than the original, with a set that is visually stunning.
In the first half of the film, we discover the colorful, bizarre world of the fair, with little people, giants strong as bears, freaks and a medical chamber of horrors that repels visitors while drawing them in, too.
It's a perfect setting for Del Toro, a director known for enchanting his audiences with fantasy worlds.
"Nightmare Alley" is rightly seen as an Oscar candidate in Hollywood, and the film was picked as one of the 10 best of 2021 by the American Film Institute (AFI). Usually, several AFI picks enter the running for the Best Film Oscar.
