So when a carnival barker promises a crowd a good show it is easy to imagine del Toro nodding along as he murmurs, Step right this way, folks.
As a filmmaker, del Toro likes to lay an overflowing table, and there’s a lot to take in at the carnival, like the pickled baby, baptized Cyclops Boy; and a poor soul called the Geek, an ostensible wild man who bites the heads off chickens.
Like the earlier movie, del Toro’s is based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham, a desperate, pitiless book filled with exotic slang and steeped in the soured milk of human unkindness.
Part of the queasy appeal of Gresham’s novel is that it vividly brings to life the kind of low-rent carnivals that once entertained audiences with so-called human oddities, people who were often just disabled or marginalized.
He puts his frequent collaborator Ron Perlman in strongman tights, turns up the amperage on Willem Dafoe’s cadaverous smile and gives Collette time and space to leave an impression.
As del Toro peers into the carnival’s corners, he also folds in one of the movie’s recurring motifs: eyes.
Del Toro is a world builder, but he can have a tough time bringing his creations to life, which is the case here despite the hard work of his fine cast.
It’s no surprise that Blanchett makes quite the spectacle — she doesn’t walk and sit, she slinks and drapes — yet the performance is so mannered and self-consciously indebted to noir sirens of the past that you can almost see the quote marks framing it.