Nightmare Alley starts promisingly enough. The casting and acting is good, and the 1940s circus setting is full of potential. The film almost even had me fooled for the first hour or so.
But then I started to see through the film's tricks. What I mistook for the character's depth and complexity was soon revealed to be nothing more than caricatures ripped from a Screenwriting 101. And soon I could clearly see the course that had been charted for them too. Minute by minute, the people on screen felt less like humans and more like puppets hurtling towards an entirely predicable conclusion. This robbed the film and the central relationship in it of any of the emotional weight it had once had.
Farther along I actively started to resent the film makers for taking the film in the direction they did. It felt emotionally manipulative. Yet at the same time, Nightmare Alley never commits enough to shake off the air of being a PG rated tale from Sin City. That leaves the film dangling in an uncomfortable spot: it mistakes being gritty with having emotional heft, but is also scared to fully commit to grittiness / noir / the surreal because it is still clinging to an undergrad's pretensions of telling some very human and very important story.
And without going into full on spoiler territory, the end of the film is truly insufferable. The whole time you're thinking, "Oh no, there's no way they'd have the sheer audacity to try pulling something that stupid off!" But no! Off go the film makers, leaping headlong into the stupidity with such grinning gusto that I felt viscerally embarrassed for them.
There's no angle from which I can recommend Nightmare Alley. It's certainly not good noir. It also does very little beyond the obvious with its traveling circus / freak show trappings. The acting is the high point, but this is undercut by the plot. And at two and a half hours, Nightmare Alley really gives you time to bask in the vast creative and emotional emptiness that lies just beneath its occasionally flashy posturing.
But then I started to see through the film's tricks. What I mistook for the character's depth and complexity was soon revealed to be nothing more than caricatures ripped from a Screenwriting 101. And soon I could clearly see the course that had been charted for them too. Minute by minute, the people on screen felt less like humans and more like puppets hurtling towards an entirely predicable conclusion. This robbed the film and the central relationship in it of any of the emotional weight it had once had.
Farther along I actively started to resent the film makers for taking the film in the direction they did. It felt emotionally manipulative. Yet at the same time, Nightmare Alley never commits enough to shake off the air of being a PG rated tale from Sin City. That leaves the film dangling in an uncomfortable spot: it mistakes being gritty with having emotional heft, but is also scared to fully commit to grittiness / noir / the surreal because it is still clinging to an undergrad's pretensions of telling some very human and very important story.
And without going into full on spoiler territory, the end of the film is truly insufferable. The whole time you're thinking, "Oh no, there's no way they'd have the sheer audacity to try pulling something that stupid off!" But no! Off go the film makers, leaping headlong into the stupidity with such grinning gusto that I felt viscerally embarrassed for them.
There's no angle from which I can recommend Nightmare Alley. It's certainly not good noir. It also does very little beyond the obvious with its traveling circus / freak show trappings. The acting is the high point, but this is undercut by the plot. And at two and a half hours, Nightmare Alley really gives you time to bask in the vast creative and emotional emptiness that lies just beneath its occasionally flashy posturing.
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