The first thing that surprises the alley of lost souls Guillermo Del Toro is his use of silences. To use the music as an enveloping element and the off-screen dialogues as a dynamic tour, this time his story bets on silence. Or at least, that is what happens with the character of Bradley Cooper. The new incarnation of Stan Carlisle does not say a word but makes clear his disturbing condition.
It is a plot game to which Del Toro pays special attention. The camera follows the character, watches over him, contemplates him. But he doesn’t seem to do anything but watch as he drags a corpse and then burns down a house. Barely ten minutes into the film have elapsed and something is already clear: the director’s monsters are back. But this time, they have a human face.
And it is not about a painful, humanized, friendly face. For the alley of lost soulsthe Mexican filmmaker made concrete decisions about how to show good and evil. On the one hand, the film’s precious staging sublimates the idea of latent evil. On the other, he insists on making it clear that there are no villains or heroes, no one redeemable in this carnival of moral horrors.
Carlisle is the first step towards something more elemental about the root of loss, of the deceptive beauty of manipulation. Slowly, the alley of lost souls Build your own stage. Del Toro moves away from simple solutions and shows a landscape of sophisticated decadence in which each story is incomplete. Whether it’s Molly (Rooney Mara) or the brooding Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), all in the alley of lost souls holds a secret. One about to reveal itself, deeply dangerous and very close to spiritual horror.
A beautiful festival of nightmares the alley of lost souls
Guillermo Del Toro has given face and humanity to unimaginable creatures. From a red-skinned demon with a bad mood, to a sea monster capable of love. For the manager, the journey of creating beauty from darkness has been long and often experimental. Also a test for his curious point of view on the fearsome. the alley of lost souls is no exception. From the first sequences, the director insists on narrating the world of his characters in an allegorical effort that is appreciated. However, it is not enough and despite the energy of the first installment (the most colorful, well-constructed and lively), the film soon declines. It does so because Del Toro decides to take the classic dark story about sin and fall from grace to create something more emotional.
And without a doubt, the alley of lost souls It is not a story that tends to the sensible. A double adaptation, the film fights against the temptation to pay homage to excess and oversaturate its visual discourse with nods to a larger universe. However, it is impossible not to compare the symbolic whites and blacks of Edmund Goulding from 1947 with del Toro’s richly contrasting color palette. Especially since the new version doesn’t have enough depth to make or break its characters.
Little by little, del Toro uses the degraded environment of a humble fair turned personal purgatory to show evil. But he fails to give his characters a full identity, metaphors for something more twisted and subtle. In the argument there is also much of the original novel by William Lindsay Gresham, published in 1946. In the same way as in the book, Del Toro spends time and interest in going through the most sensitive and sinister places of his characters, from the codes of film noir. But at the same time, to find a way to show the descent to the darkest places of morality, both of the time and universally.
For your third tranche, the alley of lost souls lost the ability to surprise. Or perhaps, he never had it and bases a good part of his effectiveness on dazzling with the strange, the singular and the painful.
Whatever the case, the film ends on a look at the darkness of men again silent. But this time it is not about the absence of sounds, but perhaps a failure to resize the origin of the evil that corrupts the moral. Who are the monsters in the alley of lost souls? For Del Toro it does not seem to be entirely clear. And without a doubt, it is the main flaw of the premise of it.