Why is no one talking about 'Nightmare Alley'?

by Elena Lazic

In his op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Martin Scorsese tried to convince readers to go see Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley by writing that “the urgency and despair of then overlaps with the urgency and despair of now in a way that’s quite disturbing.” I don’t know that this is true; maybe I’m just too close to the film still, or too much of an optimist to see any substantial similarities between the film and our current reality. In fact, it seems like no one is talking about what Nightmare Alley is about precisely because the film isn’t about our modern lives, or at least not in the literal sense that other big budget, non-IP films made today tend to be.