They say bad publicity is better than no publicity, and once again that adage seems to have proven true. Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley was released in theaters on December 17, 2021, just as news of the Omicron subvariant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus began to dominate headlines. Within days, del Toro’s film was deemed a flop, cursed with bad luck and, perhaps even worse, a somber plot that doesn’t appeal to audiences looking for escapist entertainment. Yet, as this narrative gained popular momentum, a handful of Hollywood insiders rallied around Nightmare Alley. In January 2022, legendary American filmmaker Martin Scorsese published a brief commentary on Nightmare Alley in the Los Angeles Times. According to Scorsese, the film’s roots in American history—both in terms of its Depression-era setting and its links to Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film noir of the same name—give it particular resonance amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. “The urgency and despair of then,” Scorsese writes, “overlaps with the urgency and despair of now in a way that’s quite disturbing. It’s like a warning bell.” Critics generally agreed, and Nightmare Alley would go on to garner four Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture.
Like del Toro’s previous film The Shape of Water (2017)—which won multiple Oscars, including Best Picture—Nightmare Alley is an expansive work that lends itself to interpretation. As Scorsese’s op-ed intimates, it is by no means a noir-by-numbers homage but, rather, an exploration of addiction, desperation, exploitation, and, ultimately, the dominion of sin. The film is, in fact, as dismal as it sounds, though Nightmare Alley’s stunning costumes and production design do help take the edge off. The story centers on Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), who, the opening scene indicates, is on the run from a previous crime. He finds work at a rural carnival, which boasts a variety of rides, attractions, and oddities. For a time, Stan seems to get his life together, though he’s anguished by the presence the carnival’s “geek,” who, wild-eyed and forlorn, eats live chickens in front of an audience. Resolving to never wind up in such a state, Stan concocts a plan: he will learn the secrets of a psychic act and, along with his newfound love interest Molly (Rooney Mara), take his gig on the road. For a time, Stan and Molly achieve success. But matters become complicated when Stan finds himself embroiled in a grift with prominent psychologist Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), who, after one of Stan’s shows, conceives of an opportunity to unite her clinical knowledge with Stan’s theatrical gifts to scam people who long to speak to the dead. It is, to be sure, a labyrinthine plot, though the last half hour is riveting. Chillingly, as the movie comes to a close, it appears that Stan’s sins have come back to haunt him.
Del Toro is perhaps the most imaginative auteur working today, and Nightmare Alley, particularly in its carnival sequences, is a great showcase for his talent. A lapsed Catholic, Del Toro seems to have retained all of the teaching about mortal sin and none of that about divine grace—a trait that distinguishes Nightmare Alley from Scorsese films such as Raging Bull (1980) and The Irishman (2019). With this in mind, del Toro imbues his carnival with a number of grotesque and horrifying features, including a “House of Damnation”…
…and a three-eyed baby named Enoch, who, we’re told, died soon after childbirth and is now preserved as a “carny freak” in a jar of formaldehyde:
The carnival is indeed a kind of hell—a domain that turns human degradation into a source of profitable amusement. In this scene, carnival owner Clem Hoatly (Willem Dafoe) tells Stan that “geeks” are not monsters. Rather, they are men who have been tempted through pride and weakness to debase themselves:
“Poor soul,” Stan mutters at the conclusion of Clem’s confession. It is one of the few humane moments in Nightmare Alley, which does not fail to live up to its name. Perhaps, as Scorsese’s commentary suggests, del Toro was hoping that the film would address, say, the institutional abuse of ostensibly supernatural power. Or maybe the whole thing is an atheistic inversion of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” (1955), in which Catholic schoolgirls confront the mystery of God’s will in a sideshow “freak.” Either way, one should mind the words often affixed to carnival attractions: enter at your own risk.