The “disturbing and exhilarating” movie Martin Scorsese urged everyone to give a “closer look”
Sometimes, for a multitude of reasons, great films can fly completely under the radar.
It doesn’t matter if they feature a stellar cast, or a gripping story, or even have a masterful publicity campaign; people just don’t go and see them, and pretty soon, the next lot of movies come along, and they disappear. That’s when it takes expert people like Martin Scorsese to say, “Hey, did you ever watch…” and finally that film can get the attention it deserves.
For Scorsese, an outstanding example of that is 2021’s Guillermo del Toro film Nightmare Alley, which barely anyone remembers at all, probably due to the fact we were all trying to get to grips with a worldwide pandemic at the time, but it ticks all the boxes most serious film fans would look for and Scorsese is adamant it didn’t get anything like the warranted praise.
Featuring an all-star cast of Bradley Cooper, Toni Collette, Rooney Mara, and Cate Blanchett, Nightmare Alley is a psychological thriller adapted by del Toro from a 1940s novel about a carnival worker who becomes a successful psychic only for a psychologist to try to expose him as a fraud. It flopped hard at the box office, losing tens of millions, although critics worked hard to try to get it some recognition, and it picked up four Oscar nominations without a win.
Scorsese, of course, knows a decent film when he sees one, though, and wrote in The Los Angeles Times: “(It’s) disturbing, but exhilarating at the same time. That’s what art can do”.
“If you decided to just file Nightmare Alley away under ‘noir’ or some other category, I would urge you to take a second closer look,” he added. “And if you decided to skip it altogether, for whatever reason, please reconsider. In essence, what I’m trying to say is that a filmmaker like Guillermo, who gives us pictures this lovingly and passionately crafted, doesn’t just need our support: he deserves it.”
Del Toro didn’t let the comparative failure of Nightmare Alley deter him for long; he went straight into his darker adaptation of Pinocchio and followed it up with the horror anthology Cabinet of Curiosities for Netflix the same year. The Mexican director’s contract under Netflix really paid dividends earlier this year, however, as Frankenstein starring Jacob Elordi proved a massive hit.
The film racked up some 30 million views in just three days on release and topped the charts in more than 70 countries while gathering rave reviews for the performances and the cinematography. Oscar Isaac also starred in the film, and he’s getting ready to pair up with del Toro again for a new film called Fury, a thriller about two criminals travelling across America while murdering and reminiscing on previous crimes.
Scorsese, meanwhile, is working on a stream of projects, mostly as a producer or executive producer, but his next release as a director is going to be the much-awaited pairing of Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in What Happens at Night, the story of a couple who travel to Europe to adopt a baby, only to find themselves in a haunted hotel.
Scorsese will also likely direct DiCaprio again in an epic adaptation of David Grann’s book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.
