The monsters aren’t supernatural in Guillermo del Toro’s latest project—although we would love to see Willem Dafoe presenting the child-eating Pale Man or sexy Shape of Water fish-guy in his circus’ freak show.
Nightmare Alley has some horribly human scares in store for us instead. Step right up and see the trailer below, with Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Ron Perlman, and Dafoe as the sinister circus troupe of your darkest dreams.
Whether you’ve seen the Best Picture nominee in cinemas yet or not, del Toro’s grim freakshow is now available to rent or buy through Google Play, Apple TV, and the Prime Video Store—as well as streaming on Disney+, along with fellow nominee West Side Story.
Nightmare Alley is drenched in Del Toro’s signature palette of late: all sickly period colours, turquoise and sepia with vicious red accents. The 1947 noir film used black-and-white to tell William Lindsey Gresham’s dark tale of a carny (Bradley Cooper in this version) who uses whatever and whoever he can to manipulate money out of a gullible audience.
From the lurid thrills of the fairground, to the elaborate mind-reading shows he puts on with the help of a wicked psychologist (Cate Blanchett), our anti-hero is setting himself up for one nightmare of a fall. “Well, we’ve had our share of snake-charmers in the past”, a sinister Richard Jenkins warns. “We deal with ’em.”
Our review of the film from Travis Johnson claimed that “there is no more singular and distinct voice working in mainstream cinema than Guillermo del Toro right now, and Nightmare Alley might be the most thorough explication of his obsessions and themes yet.”
The overwhelmingly positive write-up went on to describe, “a macabre, mystical, carnival ride through a world of beautiful monsters and monstrous humans that reflects our own moral crises back to us like a funhouse mirror.”
If this trailer and that description has you electrified like poor Rooney Mara in whatever gimmicky device she’s strapped to, get excited to see Nightmare Alley either in select cinemas or on demand via the streaming option of your choice. You don’t need Cooper’s psychic skills to know that it’s something special: critics and Academy members have already backed it.
