Headscratchers / Nightmare Alley (2021)

• Grindle has only told his darkest secrets to Ritter, and he's so security conscious that he won't even let Stan wear a ring in his presence. How, then, did Grindle find himself in Ritter's office, spilling his guts in a position that enabled her to record him and then place his recorded confessions in a box labeled with his name right on her shelf?
  • Ritter comments that he was her patient "briefly". It's possible that he opened up to her once and became intensely paranoid immediately after as a result of that exact experience. We also don't really see how Ritter treats regular patients. She shows her recording mechanism to Stanton himself, but that's part of a complex grift-within-a-grift business. She might be more covert in recording with actual patients.
• Stan realizes that the carnival is in town by picking up a flyer for Zeena's mentalism act. But then it turns out that the carnival doesn't have a mentalism act, so what was Zeena's flyer doing there?
  • Outdated flier, presumably, given we don't get any indication when the flier was actually made. Zeena used to be there but eventually left.
• If Grindle hadn't conveniently died, Ritter's plan would have been self-defeating. Stan would have just as much blackmail against her as she against him, since he could confess to Grindle that she had fed him Grindle's darkest secrets. Ritter herself admits that she's the only person who could have told him.
  • She was presumably banking on Grindle simply not believing Stanton (or killing him before he had a chance to explain). Knowing how people tick is her thing, after all, so she was making an educated guess.