Coming off Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director with The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro most likely may have made something. What he selected was Nightmare Alley, a noir thriller set at a carnival with the director’s most star-studded forged but.

There’s Bradley Cooper, Willem Dafoe, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, David Strathairn, and others in what del Toro assures audiences just isn’t a supernatural movie, regardless of the trailer and title strongly suggesting in any other case. “This has no supernatural element,” del Toro not too long ago instructed Vanity Fair. “It’s based completely in a reality world. There is nothing fantastic. It’s a very different movie from my usual, but yes, the title and my name would create that [impression].”

Um, do you assume? We do. Check out the trailer for Nightmare Alley.

The “man or beast” on the heart of Nightmare Alley is Cooper’s character, Stanton Carlisle. He’s a former carnival employee who makes use of the methods he realized there to con millionaires out of their cash by pretending he’s a thoughts reader. This, after all, doesn’t go over effectively and will get the shady character into a number of bother.

The film is predicated on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, which was famously made into one other movie quickly after, in 1947. Del Toro (together with co-writer Kim Morgan) drew from the novel, not the film, for this adaptation and was much less enamored with the total, advanced story than the distinctive noir world it’s set in. “I wanted to do the universe of the novel, which is a little gritty, but also strangely magical. It has a very strange, mystical allure—and mythical. I was very attracted to that possibility,” he stated.

Fox is opening Nightmare Alley in theaters solely on December 17, clearly setting it up for an additional Guillermo del Toro awards run. Will this movie noir with a really supernatural really feel, even when it’s not really supernatural, do the trick? We’d by no means wager in opposition to the person behind Pacific Rim, Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone.

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