Nightmare Alley

By William Lindsay Gresham

Deal Ends: Thu 11th December

Now an Oscar-nominated major motion picture from Academy Award–winning director Guillermo del Toro, starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and Toni Collette.“[M]acabre and compelling,” this darkly psychological 1940s noir follows the rise and fall of a carnival grifter (The New York Times).Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.