Nightmare Alley is another sumptuously dark tale from Guillermo Del Toro

The 2010s were an interesting time for Guillermo Del Toro. The first half of the decade was spent in blockbuster land, exiting The Hobbit before making divisive sci-fi blockbuster Pacific Rim. The second half was devoted to two eerie period fables in Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. The latter was a surprise hit, with the girl-meets-fish romance winning Best Picture and Director Oscars.

Del Toro keeps things in the past for his new film, an adaptation of the novel Nightmare Alley. Bradley Cooper stars as Stan, a 1940s chancer who escapes his financial woes by working at a carnival. It’s there that he meets a husband-and-wife clairvoyant act who use an ingenious system to feign psychic powers.

Learning their secrets, Stan betrays them and runs off to New York to perform for the elite as The Great Stanton, eventually conning wealthy clients who believe he can commune with the dead. He is targeted by psychologist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), who knows Stan is a fraud but lures him into a pact that soon sees him dangerously out of his depth.

Del Toro has brought a lot of monsters to the screen – vampires, kaiju, whatever Hellboy is – and with this Noir saga he tries to uncover the darkness in our own nature. Like all good film noir, no one is a saint, and everyone’s got something to hide. The conmen are irredeemable scoundrels, but their marks are just as incorrigible. It’s a tone that’s hard to pull off but its done here with enough theatricality that it’s always good fun.

The stakes are immediately set through the film’s opening moments, in which Stan is disgusted by a carnival ‘Geek’ – is it a man? Is it a beast? – who bites the heads off chickens for the crowd’s amusement. From those grotesque depths, Stan eventually climbs to the dizzying heights of high society, and every rung on the ladder is illustrated in the director’s unmatched visual flair. Stan is warned over and over about the dangers of going too far, yet he seems fated to ignore that advice.

Lighting up the lens are a cast of actors born for this genre, particularly Blanchett. It helps that she arrives after the exposition-heavy first half, but she understands that villains are best when they’re fun.

Initially held back by the plot’s need to set ground rules, Cooper grows as Stan’s fortunes rise. It’s a tough task to make your lead character unsympathetic and still engaging, but the star makes no bones about Stan’s ruthless ambition. Indeed, it’s almost a relief when he pairs up with Blanchett, against the advice of his trusting partner Molly (Rooney Mara).

A parade of character actors fill out the billing, with special praise reserved for Toni Collette as the clairvoyant who first sees potential in Stan, and a very different turn from Richard Jenkins as Stan’s big mark.

With a chunky 150-minute running time and some wordy diversions, Nightmare Alley may disappoint those hoping for another instant classic. However, if you just can’t get enough of Del Toro’s dark stories, this will be yet another delight.