So this isn’t what I expected at all. It’s Guillermo del Toro, and it looked like a horror thing, so I expected… y’know, supernatural horror. Something in that Pan’s Labyrinth vein, maybe, or at least adjacent to it.

But instead what I got is a very straightforward mundane tragedy, about a guy who joins the carnival, uses that as a springboard toward a career as a mentalist, and then… well, I guess I don’t want to spoil it, but I did say it’s a tragedy, so probably not wrong to assume some hubris action coming into play.

Overall, I think this falls into the good-but-not-great pile. It’s stylish as heck, with a carnival that’s the perfect mixture of glitz and grime, and period stuff done evocatively. The acting is great, with Bradley Cooper and Rooney Mara both doing well as the leads, but also incredible supporting performances from Cate Blanchett and Toni Collette and David Strathairn and Willem Dafoe, among others. It’s extremely well-executed.

But… the bones underlying it are over-familiar. This really is a story whose broad outline you can see coming from a mile away. There’s a scene early on where you’re like “obviously this is foreshadowing” and then at the end, it turns out to have been foreshadowing. And in addition to being obvious, the plot is also implausible, requiring a sequence of absurdly unlikely melodramatic contrivances in order to work at all.

The implausibility I could roll with — I don’t need a movie to be working in a strictly realist mode — but in the service of such an obvious and conventional plot, it’s harder to forgive. If you’re going to require enormous suspensions of disbelief, I want a bigger payoff, you know?

Still, if all that keeps it short of greatness, it’s impossible to overlook the quality of the performances and visual style. Recommended to anyone looking for this particular brand of stylish tragedy.