Guillermo del Toro‘s new movie Nightmare Alley was released in theaters this past December by Searchlight Pictures, the film making just under $10 million at the worldwide box office at a time when audiences aren’t really showing up for movies unless they’re “event” cinema based on big time properties. Alas, that’s just not how Del Toro tends to usually get down.
If you missed it in theaters, you’ll be happy to hear that Nightmare Alley is coming home very, very soon, first making its way to HBO Max and Hulu on February 1, 2022.
Meagan wrote in her review for BD, “Nightmare Alley offers psychological thrills in a profoundly haunting and intricately woven rumination on society’s dark underbelly, on the pursuit of success and damnation that might lurk at the end.” Meagan goes on to write, “It’s not the filmmaker’s strongest effort, yet it’s still a soaring spectacle that casts a spell.”
Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, and David Strathairn star in Nightmare Alley.
In the film…
“An ambitious young carny (Cooper) with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words hooks up with a female psychiatrist (Blanchett) who is even more dangerous than he is.”
The movie adapts the novel by William Lindsay Gresham.
Published in 1946, the novel spawned its first feature film just one year later starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell, and this new take was written by del Toro and Kim Morgan.