Nightmare Alley

 Del Toro’s latest is dripping with the kind of prestige that comes when a great filmmaker has just bagged some hefty Oscar gold. Decadent décor and lush cinematography are draped around a cast of acting heavyweights all wearing their serious faces, backed by the kind of (mid)budget that is rare to see for a played-straight drama nowadays. The whole thing feels like a rich chocolate gateau, including the feeling afterwards that there might have been a bit too much of it.

The aforementioned prestige stops this from being as lean as it needs to be, as the 1947 version was for sure, with a backstory/framing device for Bradley Coopers protagonist that doesn’t add much of interest, and extra bits of bloat hear and there that drag the pacing to a crawl at times, but there’s a compelling enough idea serving as the narrative backbone that kept me engaged throughout. As Coopers character climes up the rungs of society, from the mud caked carnival with one bath for all to share, to the bourgeois clientele of a big city hotel, to the judges and millionaires in their spacious mansions, the con remains the same. No matter where you are the same types of people are playing the same games to swindle cash from the same types of suckers, it’s only the amount of cash and the venue that change. It’s certainly nice to see del Toro return to a nastier kind of movie after the simplicity and softness of The Shape of Water, with almost every character revealing themselves to be one shade darker than you expect, and a few moments of satisfyingly grisly violence, but it has to be said that the film’s final stretch doesn’t have the same kind of cutting, bleak impact as the ’47 version, smudging a couple of key character turns that should have been clearer in a film of this length.