Nightmare Alley

“Man or beast.”

Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) washes up at a traveling carnival, a man with no past and nothing to lose. He learns the con from Zeena the Seer (Toni Collette) and Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe), then leaves to reinvent himself as a mentalist in the city, where he meets the psychiatrist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett). Del Toro frames each scene like a trap closing, and Stanton walks into every one, believing he can talk his way out of anything until he cannot.