»Nightmare Alley« by Guillermo Del Toro: Too beautiful to be pulp

"Now that's a bit exaggerated," one thinks right at the beginning of Guillermo Del Toro's visually impressive, but unfortunately overblown classic remake "Nightmare Alley." In the first scenes of the film, which was stretched to two and a half hours, you can see a man laboriously hacking through the floor boards of a rotten house in order to dig a grave underneath. He then limbs a lifeless body into it, carefully tied up in sheets, and then sets the whole house on fire. Too much evil and effort: It would have been enough to set the fire to remove the traces of the murder.

The entire eleventh film by the Mexican director is subject to a similar overkill effect. In 2018, Del Toro won the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture for his romantic monster parable The Shape of Water. Since then, the 57-year-old has been one of the top filmmakers in Hollywood. He began his career in the nineties with horror phantasmagorias such as "Devil's Backbone", later he directed comic and show value blockbusters such as "Hellboy" or "Pacific Rim", but also the disturbing fable "Pan's Labyrinth" about the horrors of Franco -Dictatorship in Spain. In his best films, the declared cinema fanatic and pop culture nerd negotiates social sadness on a brightly colored pulp foil.

After his Oscar triumph, Del Toro has now been able to fulfill a dream that has occupied him since the early days of his career, as he recently told the »Hollywood Reporter«: a remake of the noir classic »Nightmare Alley« from 1947, which was a German distribution title "The charlatan". Based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, set in desolate America under the influence of the

The dark story follows a con artist's rise from a traveling carnival to high society, his defeat at the hands of a vengeful femme fatale, and his fall. It's the story of the man, Stanton Carlisle, who begins by committing an atrocity against his own father and trying to reinvent himself - the old American Dream, but which becomes a nightmare in »Nightmare Alley« because it resorts to violence, self-denial , hubris and shenanigans.

The attraction of the material at a time when false prophets and jugglers make it to the highest political offices and the irrational, esoteric is making its way into current scientific debates about climate and viruses is obvious.

Unfortunately, unlike in »The Shape of Water«, which also tells a story about the suffering of migrants and the marginalized, Del Toro does not manage to integrate the political into his rich tableau this time.

His »Nightmare Alley«, whose star cast and noble presentation once again quacks after Oscars, is a spectacle in which there is a lot to see, beautiful and shocking, but which ultimately remains a rather despicable fairground of film-making vanity.

In the element of the remote

Del Toro, who wrote the screenplay with Kim Morgan - journalist, film historian and since 2021 his wife - is in his element of the remote at least in the first half of the film: Carlisle, played by Bradley, has risen from the ashes of his parents' house and drifts Cooper, wander around aimlessly.

For a few dollars and a warm meal, he hired himself out as a temporary help at a carnival that ran through the country with the freak show that was usual at the time: »Hellboy« Ron Perlman gave the »strongest man in the world«, there were people of short stature and contortionists – and Rooney Mara plays a beautiful young woman who can send lightning bolts of electricity coursing through her body.

A demonic Willem Dafoe directs the succulent, ravishingly staged circus of oddities, the main attraction of which is a »geek«, a feral creature in chains who is fed a live chicken, fed the animalistic bunch of humans wild, to the horror of the audience surrounding his kennel growls and bites his throat. In a key scene, Carlisle is explained how to keep finding and cynically enslaving such geeks and freaks, failed existences.

The attractive newcomer finds care and guidance for his later career in the fortune teller Zeena (Toni Collette) and her frail husband Pete (David Strathairn), who has a notebook full of formulas and codes that can be used to fool trusting people into thinking they have supernatural abilities.

He soon becomes a talented fake medium himself, cleverly channeling deceased loved ones and his audience's innermost conflicts of soul.

He only keeps access to his own demons tightly closed.

Together with the naïve Molly (Mara), who succumbs to his charms, he heads to a glitzy city to make it big in a swanky nightclub.

The more Carlisle distances himself from the existentialist filth, but also from the warming community of the carnival people, leaving important, emotionally supporting secondary characters on the back burner, the colder and more distant the film becomes.

He literally freezes in the magnificent art deco interior of the practice rooms of the cool and glamorous psychologist Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), who entangles Carlisle in a sinister plot for revenge against a powerful business boss, from which he can no longer free himself, despite all the weediness.

Cinematic illusion

There are always impressive scenes, for example in a snowy cemetery full of corridors and sculptures, impressionistic shadow plays like Orson Welles. But all that cinematic glamor doesn't belie the plot's simplicity, to which Del Toro adds nothing but rooms, accessories, and those now-explicit depictions of violence that wouldn't have been possible in the 1940s when the original was made.

To make matters worse, even with Blanchett's always precise support, Bradley Cooper fails to bring humanity and depth to his complex character.

Cooper's much-admired screen intensity, which has earned him multiple Oscar nominations, remains a claim here, too.

Like his director, perhaps he simply wanted too much of a good thing: too much pretense, too much ambition, too much swagger and tinsel about a sour bit of pulp.

One would have liked to have seen »Nightmare Alley«, the tough little B-movie directed by young Guillermo Del Toro.