Guillermo del Toro is a talented director. Most of us know him from his work directing The Shape of Water, which came out in 2017, Crimson Peak from 2015, or my personal favourite Pan’s Labyrinth back in 2006. Going back even further, I watched del Toro’s film Cronos from 1993 which is available to watch on Kanopy, a streaming service available for free to UFV students.
What a weird but interesting film. It starts off with a voiceover which tells us that a 16th-century alchemist created a small object he called a Cronos device that would bestow the gift of eternal life to whoever possessed it. The alchemist is found dead and we jump to modern-day Mexico, where an old antique dealer called Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) and his granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath) discover the device hidden in one of the antiques. Gris opens the device, which burrows painfully into his palm causing him to pull the device away from his hand.
The next day Gris is feeling amazing and looks a little younger. Meanwhile, a dying billionaire (Claudio Brook) is spending his last few years looking for the exact device Gris found. His nephew, Angel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman), is searching everywhere for the device. Their quest ends when they find the antique in Gris’s shop. From this point on it is a battle among the men.
Angel de la Guardia murders Gris over the Cronos device, and Gris comes back but looks terrible and weak. The device is able to give eternal life but at a price. Gris’s granddaughter, who is very young in the film, is an interesting character. Shanath is able to portray such an innocent little girl who is very much traumatized from watching her grandfather come back to life and then rot before her eyes. She watches as he sucks the blood from the billionaire but continues to be courageous and help her grandfather.
Del Toro created essentially a vampire horror film but without the religious and sexualized elements that are common in recent media depicting vampire. Del Toro has an eye for creating dark fables, much like Pan’s Labyrinth. Most of his shots are dark and expressive and take place in the rain or down a dark alleyway. He makes a nice, sunny, popular place to travel to, like Mexico, into a dim and gloomy horror film.
Del Toro created an eerie atmosphere throughout the entire film. When Gris and Aurora find the device in an old archangel statue, cockroaches come pouring out of it, which makes the audience squirm in their seats. When Gris smells blood for the first time and ends up licking it off the floor, the audience wants to look away with disgust.
Cronos is an impressive film that depicts the theme of eternal life and at what lengths people will go in order to pursue it. The film is older, so the effects don’t hold up to what we are used to today, but the story and the dark cinematography are what will capture you. Whether or not you are a del Toro fan, Cronos is well worth the watch
