Guillermo Del Toro’s next feature film, Nightmare Alley, a noir thriller, has debuted its first trailer, released by Searchlight Pictures on September 17, 2021. You can check it out for yourselves!
Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name, the film is set for a December 17, 2021 release in theaters around the world, after it had been pushed back for two weeks from its original December 3 release. This is actually the second adaptation of Gresham’s novel, but the 1947 version with Tyrone Power heavily intervened in the story, while Del Toro’s script, co-written with Kim Morgan, is set to follow the original material more closely.
The film is going to star Bradley Cooper and Rooney Mara. Cooper plays Stan Carlisle, “an ambitious carny who discovers he has a talent for manipulating people by pretending to be a powerful mind reader and tapping into their deeply-rooted traumas, allowing him to swindle them out of their money”, while Mara plays Molly, “a young carnival worker who becomes Stan’s girlfriend and, over time, gets swept up into his increasingly ruthless schemes”. The film’s main villain will be played by Cate Blanchett; Dr. Lilith Ritter is “a psychiatrist who tries to expose Stan as the charlatan he is”. But this is not the end of the movie’s ensemble cast, which also includes Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, David Strathairn, Jim Beaver, Tim Blake Nelson, Mary Steenburgen, Holt McCallany, and Clifton Collins Jr.
Guillermo Del Toro, the Oscar-winning director of The Shape of Water, is the movie’s director, producer, and co-writer, and knowing that kind of movies Del Toro likes to make, we’re up for a pretty magical ride at the end of December. Horror is guaranteed in this movie but it will wholesomely be paired with Del Toro’s beautiful sense for combining the magical with the real. This is Del Toro’s unique artistic touch and something that has earned him the status of one of the most acclaimed modern-day filmmakers.