NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Cert 15 ★★★
In cinemas now
Before he utters a word in Guillermo del Toro’s sumptuous noir thriller, Bradley Cooper has dumped a corpse and set fire to a house.
When he does speak, he’s wielding a cudgel while hunting down “The Geek”, a ruined drunk who’s been imprisoned and forced to play a monster in Willem Dafoe’s travelling carnival.
If he’s going to be our hero, Cooper has his work cut out.
While he never gets us to root for this ne’er do well, del Toro keeps us hooked with a twisty plot and wows us with gorgeous production design.
As in William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel and the 1947 film version starring Tyrone Power, the early action takes place in the seedy carnival where Stanton Carlisle (Cooper) becomes a fake mind reader after being recruited by double act Zeena and Pete Krumbein (Toni Collette and David Strathairn). “No good comes out
of a spook show,” warns Pete in a rare moment Cate of sobriety.
But after wooing and recruiting naive showgirl Molly (Rooney Mara), Pete flees the carnival to take their mind-reading double act to the big city.
After becoming a big hit at New York’s Copacabana Club, Stanton ignores Pete’s warning and starts to seek bigger returns.
A wonderfully cast Cate Blanchett sashays through the second half as a femme fatale psychologist. She stands to take a cut for sharing personal secrets about her clients which Stanton uses to reel in the wealthy and grief-stricken who are desperate to talk to dead loved ones.
But when he targets sinister industrialist Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), this could be a swindle too far.
You won’t need to be psychic to guess the final twist and 47-year-old Cooper feels a little old to play the ambitious young con artist. But del Toro, the visionary behind Pan’s Labyrinth, summons up another collection of fantastically disturbing images.