10 Recent Movies Ruined By Unrealistic Expectations

In 2018, the great Guillermo del Toro won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for The Shape of Water, and so when he was announced to next be adapting William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley, it was assumed that he had another major awards contender on his hands.

And though Nightmare Alley was ultimately nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture, it simply wasn't a zeitgeist-capturing film like The Shape of Water. Del Toro's latest was a much darker, weirder, and less-commercial film than one about a woman shagging a fish, somehow.

If The Shape of Water had a relatively sentimental throughline, Nightmare Alley is a much trickier, more hard-edged film, and ultimately more low-key too.

Anyone expecting a mainstream-skewing hit was surely left puzzled by del Toro going off-piste and turning in a contemplative, emotionally ugly film without a crowd-pleasing resolution.

Nightmare Alley's great, but just far more of a 180 from The Shape of Water than anyone unfamiliar with the source material was expecting.