Bradley Cooper leads a starry cast as an ambitious grifter in a sumptuously made noir that can’t quite grip us tightly enough
An exquisite stage is set by Guillermo del Toro for his much-hyped follow-up to best picture winner The Shape of Water, a big, starry adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley. It has become something of a passion project for a director whose career has been defined by his passions, a self-declared cineaste who spends more time tweeting about other people’s work than his own. It’s his most strikingly beautiful film yet, a velvety, precisely styled noir with the year’s most impressively stacked cast (two Oscar winners and six nominees, all bringing their A game) but its sleek shell is sadly as duplicitous as its untrustworthy conman protagonist, blinding us with dazzle but leaving us tricked.
Of Del Toro’s previous films, the closest it resembles is 2015’s Crimson Peak, a similarly lavish yet similarly soulless attempt to add prestige to pulp, unable to fully deliver on either a high or low level. Nightmare Alley is marginally better but still a curious misfire, overlong and overstretched, working only in all-too-brief bursts, a stumble after the giddy heights of The Shape of Water.