Nightmare Alley

A magical neo-noir thriller by Guillermo del Toro! Nightmare Alley isn't for mainstream audiences and you need to be in the mood for it, but if you're properly tuned in like me, you're in for an awesome magical movie experience. The film benefits a lot from a perfect cast, with Bradley Cooper in the lead and Cate Blanchett also in a very prominent role of her career (the rest of the characters have less space, but Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette and Ron Perlman are good, too). The first hour was very close and appealing to me, set in a post war circus, a setting I like a lot and here they portray very nicely what goes on behind the curtain (all the shenanigans). The story of the wild man is awesome, it has quite a disturbing and sultry atmosphere. Visually it's absolutely breathtaking to the point of being mesmerizing, some of the shots will make want to pause the film and take a picture (Guillermo is a god in visual styling). The second half goes in a different direction, and I won't say which one, but it definitely builds up decently, the tension and uncertainty builds up and the finale is quite uncompromisingly ironic. The film is two and a half hours long and has a slower pace, so impatient viewers will probably fall asleep or give up on it, but I surprisingly stared open-mouthed and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. It's a perfect example of manipulation, psychology, scamming and deception with a nice period setting, magical atmosphere, excellent actors, stunning visuals and well written dialogue. The scene where the older gentleman explains to Bradley the trick of manipulating people with the right words- is great. I took away a lesson from the movie, I feel I was on top of things and it's definitely something to debate with friends for half an hour, so very good for me. Story 4/5, Action 2/5, Humor 0/5, Violence 2/5, Fun 4/5 Music 4/5, Visuals 5/5, Atmosphere 4/5, Suspense 3/5, Emotion 3/5, Actors 4/5. 8/10. (03/24/2022)

The continuation of a cycle of stories, which, like Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water, lay dusty in the attic until Guillermo del Toro came along and turned it into a visual masterpiece with the help of a stellar cast, one that critics admire but audiences do not. However, compared to the aforementioned works, Nightmare Alley is more mature, thoughtful, confident, and ambitious in its setting and themes. It plays with psychology, noir, detective stories, or almost a hundred-year-old horrors, and despite the predictable twist, it describes the narrative circle almost perfectly. Perhaps only the screenwriting habit of making the main character make exactly the mistakes that the supporting characters (often repeatedly) warn her against seems unnecessary to me since Pan's Labyrinth. But for lovers of the spine-chilling and immersion into images that look like they have aged for decades, this manipulative journey is a sure bet and, for me, the best del Toro film since Hellboy II: The Golden Army. (03/11/2022)

A rare oddity. Del Toro finally closed his usual toy store and made his most mature film in a long time, if not ever. Nightmare Alley is a dark neo-noir beautiful ride full of strange individuals, obscured motivations and human hardships, all in a phenomenal, delectable visual stylisation, which is elaborated to the smallest detail. It is not a particularly pleasant viewing and some passages drag a bit too much, but it has its highlights and there are quite a lot of them. Surprisingly, the violence can be as intense and experiential as some of the dialogue and interactions between the main characters. Bradley Cooper in an unusual role, which he tackled more than competently. (06/14/2022)

I’m not fond of carnivals from the first half of the 20th century, with their bizarreness, the way their tormented animals and boasted about the deformity of disabled people, but the setting in the late 1930s and early 1940s suits me. However, I feel that the story and its plot arc is not so substantial to justify the enormous runtime. I would have cut the beginning at the carnival by half, maybe more, and nothing would have happened, leaving Bradley and Rooney Mara's reunion and , for the final (very funny, by the way) twist, the important monologue of the the demonic Willem Dafoe about how they recruit human scum to play the role of renegades who are locked permanently in a cage and eat chickens alive. On the other hand, if I were Del Toro I'd focus more on the intrigue in the big city, its grimness and depravity, because Cate Blanchett is a great femme fatale and the sparks between her and Bradley are electrifying. Overall, I enjoyed it, but a pair of scissors for the editor would have been really nice. But it's hard when you consider how much del Toro loves the bizarreness of the old fairs and carnivals, he must have felt like a kid in a candy store in their backdrop. (06/17/2022)

By all accounts, it looks like the key to enjoying this movie is not knowing the source material. Which is the case for me, and so I instead thoroughly enjoyed the gradual unfolding of the scope of the plot and its unexpected twists, which actually makes practically the entire first half of the film mere exposition. As long as I didn't recognize it in the process, though, I'm fine with it. I enjoyed the preservation of the noir naivety and boorish dialogue, as well as the adaptation of noir visual schemes under actual filming techniques. Nightmare Alley never feels like a faithful illusion of a point in time, instead it's very stagy and polished, which on the one hand relegates the plot to the cheap interiors of circus marquees, yet on the other hand invites us back into the most stylish office ever, which must have actually cost about the same as it would to build the Taj Mahal. Likewise video games circa 2010 (before the gritty look became trendy) such as FEAR, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or Doom 3. Everything was shiny and looked unnaturally clean, including the dirt. I also often thought of Verbinski's A Cure For Wellness while watching it. (04/28/2022)