YMMV / Nightmare Alley (2021)

• Complete Monster: Clement "Clem" Hoately is a seemingly avuncular carnival operator who controls his carnies with special moonshine so they might never leave him. To obtain his Geeks, the lowest of the low, Clem finds men who have nothing left and painfully addicts them to opium, using withdrawal to torture them into the mistreated, barely human Geeks until addiction and ill treatment take their toll, whereupon he abandons them to die and begins breaking in a new Geek.
• Evil Is Cool: Dr. Lilith Ritter. She creates a multi-layer charade to get payback on two men that wronged her, gets loads of money in the process and remains squeaky clean and with a sympathetic story. Most importantly, she completely obliterates Stan when it comes to reading and manipulating people, playing him like a fiddle without him ever figuring it out until the bitter end. Oh, and she always dresses nicely and also runs a respectable practice, where she genuinely helps people in need.
• Jerkass Woobie: Stan is a loathsome piece of work who does a lot of horrible things but his final fate, ending up as a lonely alcoholic wreck who is so desperate for food and shelter that he becomes the new geek at a carnival, is so terrible that you can't help but feel sorry for him.
• Squick:
  • Anything having to do with the geek, naturally, given that he bites the heads off chickens for a living.
  • Clem's jars of pickled fetuses.
  • A close look at Grindle's corpse reveals that Stan punched his nose off. We also get a look at Anderson's mangled body after Stan runs him over with a car twice.
  • Stan squeezing a shard of glass from Grindle's spectacles out of his knuckle.

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