Cronos

The aging antiques dealer discovers the device in the hollow of an archangel statue. The device was forged over 400 years previous by an alchemist who used this intricate creation to filter his blood and grant him eternal life—until his heart was pierced by debris from a fallen edifice and his contract with eternity was suddenly terminated. The antiques dealer isn’t seeking any such faculty, but the faculty finds him when the device reveals its talons, pierces the dealer’s flesh, draws and renews his blood, and sends him tumbling into a half-euphoric, half-bleak waking dream, rejuvenating his body, restoring his carnal appetites, and, along with these supernatural gifts, infusing him with an overwhelming desire for the blood of others. The dealer’s spirit is not sufficiently mercenary, however, to resort to serial murder as a means of maintaining immortality, so Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos (1992), one of cinema’s most inventive vampire tales, is bound to end in somber sacrifice—though the getting-there involves a lot of ghoulish fun.

I tire easily of the fussy, airless, wax-museum overbearing of del Toro’s more generously funded films, but here, with his first and, sadly, only Mexican feature, there is an air of the handmade, reflected in its tinkerer’s attention to gears, moving parts, and mechanisms, and a fascination with objects, flesh, and insects that, along with the themes of infection and addiction, invokes a kinship to the works of David Cronenberg (most obviously in the image of a hand sliding into a belly, a direct homage to Cronenberg’s Videodrome). The relatively thriftily decorated locations and the use of practical effects provide space for the film’s wonderful actors—among them Buñuel confederate Claudio Brook, the great Federico Luppi, and the oddly cast, hilariously deployed Ron Perlman—to stretch out, find their own cadences, and incorporate inspired bits of behavior into their scenes. These are loose luxuries rarely allowed in later del Toros, where I often sense that every second of screentime has been story-edited, arranged, and polished within an inch of its life.

Which isn’t to deny the cornier aspects of Cronos: the opening flashback exposition is straight out of EC Comics, and del Toro’s willingness to swap subtlety for blunt metaphor is perhaps most overt in his decision to name his protagonist Jesús—admittedly, not an uncommon name in Mexico, but one surely selected in this case for its Christian allusion. Yet such elements are so much more endearing in this early work than they are in belabored, weirdly sterile later movies such as The Shape of Water or del Toro’s pointless, musty variation on Nightmare Alley. In one of the supplementary features found on Criterion’s Cronos release, del Toro states that the worst thing you can give a filmmaker is everything he needs. As someone who places this humble debut high above its subsequent multimillion-dollar behemoths, I can only heartily agree.