Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) is classic film noir in modern dress, and at its dark heart stands one of the genre’s most unsettling femmes fatales: Dr. Lilith Ritter, played by Cate Blanchett. Unlike traditional noir seductresses, Lilith is never fully revealed to the audience or to Stanton Carlisle, the man she ultimately destroys. She is not merely a love interest or a villain, but a psychological mirror, exposing the cost of ambition, greed, and the illusion of control.

What’s a good film noir without a mysterious, sinister woman at its heart, a femme fatal you cannot trust? In Nightmare Alley, the audience never really gets to know Dr. Lilith Ritter. She turns up midway through the film in a swanky dress, and boldly challenges the false spiritualist, Stanton Carlisle, to guess what’s in her purse, without his assistant feeding him “verbal cues.” He whips off his blindfold to see this insolent woman… and then cold-reads her so well, he puts the audience back in their seats. Clearly uncomfortable under his brutal scrutiny, Lilith slinks back to her chair… but that is far from the end of this blonde bombshell’s presence. It turns out she is a psychologist (an “analyst” in her words) hired by a client to find out if Stanton is the real deal, an actual psychic, or just another stage fraud. Lilith knows damn well he’s a cheat, but he knows she’s more than she pretends to be, as well.

Though William Lesley Graham never tells us much about her in the book either, there are clues left throughout del Toro’s gorgeous remake to hint about her past. Lilith has a lot of secrets and does not trust anyone easily. She warns Stanton not to swim with the sharks without fear of getting bit, and tells him if you cross the right people, they will leave you alive to regret it. She shows him a scar on her chest to prove it. When he says he wants to fraud sinister millionaire Ezra Grindle out of a few thousand bucks, Lilith tells him to forget it and run for the hills. He scares her. And there’s a good reason for that. We find out through the course of Stanton’s con that Grindle impregnated and caused the death of the woman he loved through a forced abortion. Since then, he has “hurt a great many girls.” The movie doesn’t tell us how or why; we just know he is a remorseless psychopath. We assume he sliced up Lilith after she got… too close? Or became his lover? Or he simply went off on her in an interview? Either way, she has a good reason to fear him.

But she also knows a good mark when she sees one. She’s curious about Stanton. Eager to get inside his head. Appallingly intuitive about him, from his point of view. She knows things about him, and his past, and his relationship with his father, that makes him squirm. Before Stanton knows it, he’s been conned. Lilith has set him up and benefits from all the dough he gets off her clients. She makes sure no one can trace any of it back to her and keeps the money he stores in her safe (his first mistake) for herself. She denies she ever had it, forcing him to go on the run.

A story of ambitions gone amuck, of one man’s greed destroying everything he held dear (for Stanton, nothing is ever “enough,” and his determination to con Grindle cheats him out of his wife/girlfriend, his notoriety, his money, and almost his life), Nightmare Alley isn’t a feel-good story, but it is an interesting, haunting film. I have never seen the original, but I read the book, and the remake does an excellent job of capturing the essence of the novel without getting sidetracked in its author’s “trick.” Gresham wrote the book to resemble a tarot deck, with each chapter pertaining to a certain card, ending with the Hanged Man. It makes for a disjointed narrative, since he had to construct a scenario to go with each card, but the thrust of the book is classic in its raw depiction of adult themes. It has sex, violence, and profanity aplenty, in a dark story that suggests there is no light at the end of the rainbow, hope does not exist, and foolishness will undo the recklessly ambitious.

Stanton’s story is one of greed and stupidity with unforeseen consequences; in the film, he is more likable than in the book, where he was more deliberate in his high-stakes con deals. The only way he gets Molly to go along with cheating people is to convince her they are doing “good” in these people’s lives, when he’s selling them a swindle and taking their money. In a dark twist, at the height of his arrogance, one of his clients, a woman who he ‘consoled’ by telling her her son looks forward to the day she and his father join him in the afterlife, repeats that phrase before shooting her husband and then eating a bullet.

Everyone’s lives are intertwined; there is no action without a consequence. Gresham meant nothing by the story; as an unhealthy atheist, this is how he saw the world, but I see it as a reminder that our lives matter, even if they seem small. If you are never content with what you have, you may throw it all away in search of something “more.” Stanton had a good gig and a happy relationship, but at the first taste of power over someone else, of money and a higher status, of the forbidden fruit of Lilith, he didn’t hesitate to take it. By the end of the story, he winds up alone and… living out the “role I was born to play” in another traveling circus. The author brings him full circle, but the last time around, he had a full deck. This time, he doesn’t.

A classic film noir, this story doesn’t promise or deliver a happy ending, because there is none. It’s a dazzling story, haunting in its exploration of the darker side of human nature, and full of unforgettable performances. Some may wonder why they remade a classic, since the 1947 film is so beloved, but … if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen Cate Blanchett in the role she was born to play, that of a femme fatale.

Written for the Bustles and Bonnets Blogathon!

Related Bustles & Bonnets Blogathon Posts:

• Why the 2006 Jane Eyre Finally Makes Rochester Worth Loving
• Nightmare Alley and the Femme Fatale You Were Never Meant to Know
• Last Night in Soho and the Danger of Loving a Beautiful Lie

About the Author: Charity Bishop writes historical fiction, historical fantasy, and suspense novels that explores the darkness in human hearts, and the light that refuses to be extinguished. Discover her books.