Starring: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins
Distributor: Searchlight Pictures
Runtime: 150 mins. Reviewed in Jan 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This psychological thriller with a dark edge tells the story of an ambitious alcoholic, who joins a motley array of circus people, some of whom choose to be willing objects of voyeuristic derision. The film is directed by Guillermo del Toro in dark fantasy style to brilliant effect.
Stan Carlisle (Cooper) is a drifter with a tortured family history. He kills his ailing father, burns his home, and joins a travelling carnival as a circus worker. He finds himself being asked by the Carnival’s owner, Clem Hoatley (Dafoe), to help control a freak living like an animal in a locked cage. Clem lures men with troubled pasts and uses their dependence on him to physically and mentally abuse them until they sink into madness to become what he needs them to be – objects of ridicule who can entertain by acting grotesquely.
Stan is taught ‘mentalist tricks’ by tarot reader and fake clairvoyant, Zeena (Collette), and he becomes romantically attracted to a fellow performer, Molly Cahill (Mara). He lures Molly away from the carnival with romantic promises and reinvents himself as ‘The Great Stanton’. During his mentalist act of trick deception one night, he encounters Dr Lilith Ritter (Blanchett), a femme-fatale psychologist, who is intrigued by Stan’s manipulative skills, and interrupts his routine to demonstrate personal power and superiority. Pursuing her own kind of manipulation, Ritter begins an affair with Stan, who discovers she is exacting revenge for when she was publicly humiliated by him in his act. Himself now humiliated, and injured by Ritter, Stan returns to the ‘nightmare alley’ of circus life, and is forced to embrace what he never wanted to be, in order to survive – a circus ‘geek’ who entertains by inviting public derision, and revulsion.
This American noir thriller is adapted from a screenplay written by the movie’s director, Guillermo del Toro and Kim Morgan, and is based on a 1946 novel of the same name which was authored by William Lindsay Gresham. The film was recognised as one of the top 10 films of 2021 by the National Board of Review, US, and has received awards for production design, cinematography, and direction in the US. It has a dark plot and style, and most of the characters in it are genuinely unpleasant.
This lush, grim and violent film holds its tension by focusing on characters that are haunted by regret, and it is the second movie made from Gresham’s novel. It is a modern thriller that is executed creatively by del Toro who masterly directs and crafts the film. Cooper stands out as the haunted, anguished Stan Carlisle, and Blanchett is hypnotic in her role as an over-the-top manipulative psychologist, who exacts revenge in a terrifying way.
The film is much darker than del Toro’s Oscar-awarded Shape of Water (2017), but one is forced to admire its creativity while at the same time being required to watch enormous human sadness, horror, misery, and deceit. The grotesque imagery of the film fits the plot-line, its dream-like tone is compelling, and the performances are uniformly strong, especially those of Cooper, Blanchett and Collette. The film shows horrific violence, and expresses spiritual desolation in a highly distinctive and telling way. This is a pessimistic movie that depicts the spiritual isolation of deeply distressed and disturbed people.
The film’s intricate design cloaks the tragedy of what might otherwise be unbearable. Despite its calculated build-up to a nightmarish and effective conclusion, the film chooses not to highlight the way out of the spiritual isolation, which envelops its characters so completely. Rather, it conveys messages that imaginatively explore the risks and dangers of being isolated without any chance of redress. In doing that, the imagery that the film uses is powerfully dramatic, and extraordinarily impactful.
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