This is the best time of year film-wise, we are getting all the Oscar contenders and every week there is a new movie worth seeing in the cinema.
Nightmare Alley was getting great reviews in America, but it has a really terrible title and is also a remake of a film from the 1940s and I am just sick of remakes. On the other hand it is from Oscar winning director Guillermo Del Toro, and has an all star cast.
It opens with Stanley Carlisle setting fire to his family home, with his dead father inside, and getting on a train. He is now a drifter in the midst of Depression era America. He eventually winds up in a carnival and, after doing a few odd jobs and proving himself useful, he gets stable work under the care of a tarot card reader and her ‘mind reader’ husband.
They are happy to teach him their trade and he picks up the tricks quite quickly. Eventually he passes them out and looks to take his act to the next level. He leaves the carnival, with beautiful fellow ‘carny’ Molly, and they start an up-market show in a posh Chicago hotel. There he is confronted by a psychiatrist and eventually is offered the chance to sell his soul.
The cast is terrific with Bradley Cooper (Stanley ), along with Richard Jenkins, Ron Pearlman, David Strathairn, and Tony Collette, but it is Cate Blanchett as the psychiatrist who steals the show.
That said, Bradley Cooper is clearly a lot older than the character is supposed to be, and is referred to as a young man several times throughout the film. In fact, in the original, Tyrone Power was 13 years younger than Cooper is now.
However, there is a reason for this. There is a scene, toward the beginning of the final third, between Blanchett and Cooper, that is just absolute cinema magic. She is trying to psychoanalyse Stan and he is trying to use his tricks on her. It is just electric and it requires the star power and charisma that Cooper and Blanchett have in spades. Doing this scene would have been the main appeal of not only both roles, but for Del Toro to direct a remake.
This is the biggest surprise I have had in a cinema in a long time. I absolutely loved Nightmare Alley. I have not been a massive fan of Del Toro’s last few movies and was not sure he had a film the quality of Pan’s Labyrinth in him, but he proved me wrong here. This is a stylish, clever, film with a pitch black heart, and an absolute sledgehammer ending.
