Nightmare Alley offers a compelling account of the emptiness and amorality of material gain, writes Simon Duckett

The first thing that strikes you about Nightmare Alley, the latest film from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo Del Toro, is that it looks fantastic and the second is, for the first 20 minutes or so, the string of first-rate actors that pop up on the screen one after another. Clearly, this is a serious enterprise.

It’s 1939 and we’re introduced to the threadbare yet fantastical twilight world of grotesques that inhabit the peculiarly American version of the travelling carnival with the arrival of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a jobless drifter with a dark past in the classic tradition of film noir. He attracts the attention of several regulars and winds up with a job setting up the tents in a scene reminiscent of Disney’s classic Dumbo (and who are now owners of Fox Searchlight, producers of Nightmare Alley).

Soon he discovers a talent for ‘mentalism’ – the apparent reading of minds whilst blindfolded – encouraged by Zeena (Toni Collette) and her alcoholic husband Pete (David Strathairn), two old hands who have developed a technique of coded words but who also warn him of the dangers of turning the act into a ‘spook show’ whereby the performer starts to convince members of the public (and comes to believe himself) that he actually does have supernatural powers.

Growing into his adopted life, Stanton entrances sweet performer Molly, The Electric Girl (Rooney Mara), to whose show he enthusiastically suggests improvements but who is also watched over protectively by, amongst others, strongman Bruno (Ron Perlman).

Nevertheless, success and better things beckon and, equipped with Zeena and Pete’s book of codes, he entices Molly (now relegated to his assistant) to Buffalo, New York and a sumptuous yet curiously suffocating world of art deco splendour, with extravagant promises of “giving her the world and everything in it”.

Stanton now performs in a tuxedo, dazzling audiences with his verbosity and apparent feats of mental discernment. He meets rich and influential people and is applauded, admired and congratulated. He also starts to lose control of his dreams and steadily drifts away from Molly, who maintains contact with her carny ‘family’. At one of these swanky shows, he meets Lilith (a splendidly leonine Cate Blanchett), a psychoanalyst, who seems to offer access to the super-rich of society – and their secrets. Is she, however, as much a show woman and purveyor of flim-flam as he is?

The world of Amberson’s Carnival portrayed here is one of last resort where rejects, fugitives and those with nowhere else to go end up, forced to survive as best they can. Early on, we are introduced to the ‘geek’ who lives in a cage, trapped by poverty and his addictions as much as the bars, whose act is to emerge and bite the heads off chickens. “Is he a man or a beast?” asks the barker and owner Clem (Willem Dafoe) of the appalled but fascinated crowd (which includes a fascinated Stan).

Clem’s employment technique is to track down traumatised, alcoholic soldiers returned from ‘the war’ and offer them jobs (“only temporary!”) along with food, somewhere dry to sleep and a drink – which he has laced with opium. It also provides a home for the (fictional) exhibits who would not be acceptable on the outside. ‘Spider girl’ has ended up there because of her ‘lustful ways’ disapproved of by her parents and Electric girl performs in a scanty costume for which she is nearly arrested when the Carnival is raided by the cops, reminding us that these people really do reside on the edge of society, barely legal and subject to the whims of the local law enforcement.

These are no noble heroes though. They suffer the betrayals as well as the loyalties that arise from living life on the edge and have either come to a stoic acceptance of their lot or, like Stan, will do absolutely anything to escape and does.

Yet what does he escape to? He starts to listen to the miserable, guilt-stricken and elderly members of the elite and their stories of unnecessary loss and wanton cruelty for which they now crave a form of forgiveness, which he readily agrees to facilitate in exchange for large fees, the safekeeping of which he entrusts to Lilith.

What he fails to realise is that Lilith is every bit as keen to protect her own income stream from the danger threatened by this handsome but rakish and uncouth stranger (of significantly lower social class, it is worth adding). In the end, he holds out for one last big score, begging Molly to help him. Against her better judgment, it all goes sensationally wrong with Stanton suffering a fate that is both predictable and surprising at the same time.

It is the classic scenario of the hapless noir anti-hero of James M Cain or Jim Thompson with big dreams and an amorality to match, but who is undone by a fatally fascinating woman and cruel, unfeeling, almost evil fate. This is hardly surprising, given it’s an adaptation of a 1946 novel of the same name, which was adapted into a film noir in 1947.

At one point, Lilith is nearly strangled by a telephone cord in the manner of Anne Savage in Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (although in that little-known ‘poverty row’ masterpiece the hapless anti-hero was so hapless he did it by accident). A bag of cash is scattered meaninglessly in the manner of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing – they are all single dollar bills. Stanton however, had choices but he chose badly. There is no escape from pain through riches. There is no escape from poverty by attempting to emulate the rich. There is only humanity, loyalty and, in whatever form it takes, love.

Without the tendency towards whimsy of, say, his previous The Shape of Water and with a pace that holds your attention throughout its not-inconsiderable two and a half hours, incredible sets that could be an unholy mixture of Orson Welles and Baz Luhrmann and rare but startling eruptions of violence this might be a classic in the making. Well worth a watch.