151 min | R | December 17, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures
Stanton Carlisle learns to read a room well enough to fake talking to the dead, then carries the act uptown to fleece the rich. He is the smartest man in every room until he meets a woman who is smarter. The con man always forgets that he is also a mark.
Stanton Carlisle arrives at a traveling carnival with no money and no past he will admit to. He watches the mentalist act, learns the coded language that lets a performer fake clairvoyance, and decides he can run the con bigger and cleaner than the people who taught him. He takes the act to the city and turns it on grieving millionaires who will pay anything to hear from the dead. Guillermo del Toro builds a noir about a man who believes his intelligence makes him the exception to every rule he watches destroy other people. The film is about the lie at the center of the con. The mark is always the man holding the cards.
Bradley Cooper plays Stanton Carlisle with a controlled charm that never lets you see the fear underneath until it is too late. He is a man performing confidence so completely that he convinces himself. Cate Blanchett plays Dr. Lilith Ritter, a psychologist who keeps recordings of her wealthy patients and recognizes a fellow predator the moment Stanton walks in. Their scenes work as two grifters circling, each certain they hold the longer knife. Toni Collette plays Zeena the Seer with a weary tenderness that grounds the carnival half of the film. Willem Dafoe plays Clem Hoatley, the carnival boss who explains how a man becomes a geek, and Richard Jenkins plays Ezra Grindle as a powerful man whose grief has rotted into menace.
Del Toro and co-writer Kim Morgan adapt William Lindsay Gresham’s novel and split the film into two visual worlds. The carnival lives in muddy amber and rain and rot, every tent crowded with formaldehyde jars and sideshow grotesques. The city replaces that warmth with cold marble, black glass, and the hard symmetry of art deco interiors that trap the characters in straight lines. The camera lingers on the mechanics of the cons, the hidden wires and the coded patter, so the audience always knows the trick before the mark does. Del Toro stages the violence without flinching and lets the production design carry the dread. The result looks immaculate in every frame.
The structure traces a clean arc from gutter to penthouse and back, and del Toro telegraphs the ending early enough that the fall becomes the whole point. The problem is that the film admires its own surfaces more than it interrogates its protagonist. Stanton stays an idea about ambition rather than a man you fear for. The mentalism scenes carry real tension and the carnival passages have genuine grime, but the long con at the center moves with the patience of a filmmaker more interested in atmosphere than menace. This is a beautiful machine that runs cold. It shows you the trick, executes it perfectly, and never quite makes you feel the wound.