Having managed to contextualise his entire career with his last film The Shape Of Water, it somewhat stands to reason that Guillermo Del Toro would then decide to stretch out into new territory with his following release. Stepping away from the more speculative genre fixtures that have populated his filmography up to this point, he’s now stepping into down-and-dirty film noir, with a sideways-remake of the 1947 Tyrone Power film of the same name (itself adapted from the William Lindsay Gresham novel of the same name). However, out of a want to keep whatever plot revelations are in this story intact so I can get the most out of them (after The Witches, I want to give Del Toro the best chance possible for a rebound), I have not watched the original nor read the source material. But even in that gap, this film has more than enough going for it to be worth recommending.
For a start, Bradley Cooper can stand proudly next to Simon Rex as one of modern cinema’s greatest depictions of the charismatic con artist, starting out leaving a burning building to work at a carnival and spreading his influence from there. It taps into a similar area of logistics as Ouija: Origin Of Evil in how the script and the performances lay out all the engineering and applied psychology involved in the sideshow trade. Some of it is highly interesting, like the mechanics behind Madame Zeena’s psychic performance (herself performed brilliantly by Toni Collette), while other points are astoundingly brutal and harrowing, like Willem Dafoe’s Clem and his explanation of where the carnival’s Geek comes from.
And in that exploration of how people can manipulate others as simple parlour tricks, it steadily unfolds into much darker applications, with Cooper’s Stan utilising every bit of insight he’s gained (and even stolen) to further his own ambitions and, in turn, leading his marks down some particularly morbid paths. As someone who grew up when Crossing Over with John Edward was still on the air (along with its numerous critiques and piss-takes) I’m rather surprised that this managed to express ways that cold reading is a hazardous practice that I hadn’t heard before. Tricking an audience that a woman can channel electricity, or read someone’s mind is one thing… but convincing them that the dead can communicate with the living opens itself to terrible ideas.
The text itself is fascinating enough as is, written by both Del Toro and Kim Morgan (who has some rather unique experience with reviving classic cinema from working on Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room), but the presentation is what makes it all sink in. Both in the grimness of the subject matter and the impression that Del Toro trying out old-school film noir was the right move to make. The reliance on practical effects, from the carnival’s many attractions to the later showings of gore, adds to the unpleasant tangibility of what’s going on, and the juxtaposition of dusty browns and burnished gold when transitioning from the carnival to Stan’s more high-class hunting grounds give the film a form of environmental sepia tone. It’s all in colour (with a black-and-white version also available), but it maintains that rustic quality of ‘40s cinema.
Through that insistence on tangible reality, both in its production values and its perspective on the tricks of the mentalist trade, the film’s look at exploitation not only fits in with Shape Of Water’s depiction of The Other, but slots in right next to Red Rocket as a film whose theme and main anti-hero seem… timely, considering the four-year con a lot of the world is still recovering from. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour film (close to forty minutes longer than the 1947 version) that earns every second it shows, creating a murky character study as steeped in nostalgic chiaroscuro as it is in razor-sharp psychological detail. This has been true since the early ‘90s, but it bears repeating here: When he’s in the director’s chair, Guillermo Del Toro does. Not. Miss.
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