“Step right up and behold one of the unexplained mysteries of the universe!”

Nightmare Alley is what you get if you tell a noir style mystery amidst the fantastical backdrop of a circus, but you forget that the most important part of a mystery is the intrigue and the most important part of a circus is the wonder.

With a runtime of two and a half hours, I can only describe Nightmare Alley’s story as “telegraphed”. While this isn’t always a bad thing [some films thrive off of the audience knowing what is coming for their characters] in this one… it isn’t great. Early on, the ending becomes clear and the film plows on ahead without any desire to dissuade your assumptions or give you any meaningful herrings to think otherwise. These are similar to my issues with 2018’s linear mystery, The Clovehitch Killer. The difference between these two films [I gave Clovehitch a 7.8] is that Clovehitch’s mystery, while obvious, was still engaging and interestingly told. It also didn’t throw away one of the most interesting casts of the last decade.

Alley, similar to 2021’s Pig, has several chances to get weird and instead chooses to imply that weirdness and do nothing with it. This would have been a much stronger film if it leaned into its implied supernatural [almost Lovecraftian] threats established about midway through the first act. Alley constantly introduces characters who ultimately do nothing to enhance or motivate the story beyond their initial appearances and two-dimensional attitudes that, similar to the “weirdness” talked about above, could have been dynamic entries into the ultimate “twist” that the ending lays out. Instead, nearly none of the characters we meet have longer implications than the scenes in which the thing they offer is given. Though the cast itself is wonderful and each gives an excellent performance, they simply aren’t employed well enough to be meaningful.

Nightmare Alley is very much a Guillermo del Toro classic. It looks like one of his movies. It sounds like one of his movies. It is told like one of his movies. If you like the things he makes, you’ll like this. If you only like his masterpieces, this is one that will pass you by as well. While I wouldn’t say that Nightmare Alley was bad, I would certainly say that the only part that was up to snuff was it’s visual appeal. There really aren’t artistic eyes in the field quite like del Toro’s and, from a visual perspective, Alley was marvelous and well realized. It’s just too bad that artistic vision didn’t carry over into the narrative.

“Same grift, different threads.”