FREAKS AND GEEKS

Guillermo Del Toro doesn’t shy away from the macabre in anything he does, which makes him one of the most interesting and courageous filmmakers working today. That he can get a major studio to bankroll a remake of a classic film noir from 1947 is even more impressive in an era when Marvel and Disney seem to have a stranglehold on what gets made in Hollywood. Of course, it helped that his last major project, “The Shape of Water,” released in 2017, won the Oscar for Best Picture.

“Nightmare Alley” begins with the silhouette of a man dragging what appears to be a corpse, wrapped in a heavy tarp. He drops the body into an opening in a wooden floor, lights a match and is next seen walking away from a house engulfed in flames.

The arsonist and, we suspect, murderer is a man we come to know as Stanton Carlisle, played by Bradley Cooper, in full-on moustache and fedora. We soon learn he’s a drifter with a complicated past, a man on the run with enough secrets to fill a valise. He hops a bus and ends up at the end of the line—a dusty burg that’s hosting a Depression-era carnival.

The carny manager is a con man played with gusto by Willem Dafoe who takes a shine to Carlisle and offers him a job and a dry mattress. Soon, Carlisle is part of this itinerant gang of freaks and geeks, including a man whose singular talent is biting off the heads of live chickens. He’s a wreck of a human being who lives in a cage when he isn’t performing for paying customers. For the curious, all it takes is a quarter and a strong stomach for this sort of sideshow entertainment.

In time, Carlisle befriends a couple of mentalists who teach him their stock in trade: perfecting a grift that keeps on giving. Reading minds is a neat trick when you can handle the side hustle, they tell him. No ESP required. Just know how to profit off people’s vulnerabilities, if not their gullibility.

But Carlisle isn’t satisfied with nickel-and-diming the carny crowd. He aspires to greater feats of fleecing the public. So, he and a performer who fakes daily “electrocution,” played by Rooney Mara, are off to Buffalo and a gig at a swanky nightclub where Carlisle wears a tuxedo and the aura of a Vegas-style showman.

But one night he’s upstaged by a mysterious woman in the audience played by Cate Blanchett, an icy blonde with lips the color of blood, which seems by design. Lilith Ritter, as it happens, is a noted psychologist with devious designs on the hapless Carlisle and to say more would spoil the many twists the story takes from here.

From a production standpoint, “Nightmare Alley” features passageways that get darker and narrower as the tale unfolds, suggesting a noose that’s tightening around our twisted hero or maybe a fate he cannot escape. Dressed in extravagant Art Deco, doom has never looked so good.

And be aware that the word “geek” here doesn’t mean what you think it does. It can make the blood run cold.

“Nightmare Alley” is Rated R