Cronos (1993)

              Does this count?  I’ve decided this counts.

              Guillermo del Toro’s first feature film and the one that brought him to such international attention that a short four years later he was able to make ‘Mimic’ (remember ‘Mimic?’) is pretty much the Platonic ideal of the debut film of a budding auteur.  It showcases themes and visual ideas which would later be refined through his increased craft and skill and displayed in later movies to greater effect.  This isn’t to minimize what a very good movie this is since ideally you want an artist’s first work to be surpassed by his later ones and ‘Mimic’ aside that’s exactly what del Toro has gone on to do.

              A lot of words have been written about del Toro, and rightly so, and I haven’t seen enough of his filmography to meaningfully give a deep dive into the deeper meanings of his works as a whole.  Numerous essays have been written about the recurring motifs in his movies, his fascination with fairy tales, outsiders, sympathy for monsters, and that’s certainly all here in this film, just not as developed as his later ones.  If nothing else this series of reviews is just underlining how much I really need to dig into some directors’ filmographies, between del Toro and Herzog I really have been slacking the last few decades.  Think I’m good on Tobe Hooper, though.

              This is a movie about vampires in the most technical sense.  It features a quasi-immortal character who avoids sunlight and craves blood and that’s really where the similarities end.  Del Toro could certainly have made a straight vampire movie if he’d wanted to, I get the sense that that would have been an easier sell as far as production and marketing goes, but he clearly had other things on his mind.  The title and the constant clock visuals clue the audience in that this focuses on another part of the vampire myth, that of resistance to the passage of time. 

The backstory at the beginning of the movie establishes that an alchemist in the sixteenth century created a device to allow him to live indefinitely.  He survived for centuries before dying during an earthquake.  The device, hidden in a statue, is then sold to Jesus Gris, an antiques dealer, who discovers the device and accidentally uses it.  He begins to feel younger, hate sunlight, and crave blood.  A wealthy industrialist, vaguely dying of probably cancer, has been pursuing the device and discovers that Jesus now has it.  He sends his thuggish nephew Angel after him, which eventually results in Jesus’ apparent death.  He instead returns to life and, aided by his young granddaughter, attempts to steal the alchemist’s instructions from the industrialist.  After some struggles both the industrialist and the nephew end up dead.  Jesus almost drinks blood from his granddaughter but resists the temptation and instead smashes the device.  The movie ends with Jesus in bed with his wife and granddaughter, presumably waiting for death.

It's a fairly simple story, told well.  All of the characters are well drawn and played with skill by the actors.  Jesus is a kind man who loves his adorable granddaughter, the industrialist isn’t entirely unreasonable, and his nephew, while brutish, does have some unexpected depth to him.  This is a horror movie in the most general sense, it has some disturbing imagery around the changes happening to Jesus’ body and it involves either the supernatural or a kind of mad science (the movie correctly decides it doesn’t have to answer that question), but I wouldn’t call it scary, just tense and suspenseful in parts and deeply sad for much of it.  Jesus is a good man that has had something terrible happen to him and we watch him struggle with it.  Although he craves blood he’s only tempted to hurt anyone at the very end and only kills Angel because he threatened his granddaughter.  The central philosophical question of the movie is whether there is a price too high to pay in order to live forever and Jesus Gris pretty emphatically decides that there is.

It's too much to call it a problem but what I feel holds the movie back from being great is the lack of a powerful central conflict.  As I said it’s the story of a bad thing happening to a good person, and that’s about it.  I realize that’s essentially the definition of a tragedy, but Jesus is missing the flaw or conflict to make it really work.  When he’s introduced Jesus has a pretty happy life.  He dotes on his granddaughter, his business seems to be doing fine, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly amiss.  He doesn’t do anything to precipitate the events of the movie, in fact we don’t even see him buying the statue housing the device as it’s already in his shop when the story starts.  He uses the device completely accidentally and the antagonists seek him out on their own, he does nothing to draw attention to himself.  As the movie progress you continually feel sympathy for Jesus and completely understand his actions but my overwhelming takeaway from all of this was just feeling bad for the guy.  He didn’t do anything to earn any of this.

The vampiric parts of the movie really are minimal.  For the first third of the movie all of the effects of the device that we see are Jesus maybe looking a little younger, feeling a litter better, and paying more attention to his wife.  After that he starts shading his eyes from the sun and complaining that lights are too bright.  It’s not until a full forty minutes into the movie that the craving for blood really starts when, during a dinner scene, another diner gets a nosebleed and Jesus sits bolt upright in rapt attention.  There follows a very good, tension-filled sequence as he follows the other diner to the bathroom in an attempt to lap up the blood he leaves behind.  He ends up being forced to lick it off of the bathroom tiles in what is a very direct reference to ‘Blood for Dracula’ (another criticism you can lay at del Toro if you want to is excessively quoting and referencing other films over the course of this one, you can feel the fanboy energy creeping in at the edges; I think he keeps it well within the bounds of acceptable, if you don’t mind what Tarantino does this is nowhere near as overt).  He’s then killed by Angel and after being prepared by a mortuary assistant spends the last chunk of the film as a seemingly rotting corpse, stapled and stitched together.  He never gets fangs, never gains supernatural strength, never gets a mind whammy, he just doesn’t die. 

Which is exactly why the industrialist wants the device.  The question the movie poses is whether eternal life spent as a pale, mottled-skinned drinker of blood who shuns the day is worth it.  Clearly for the industrialist the answer is yes, eventually Jesus Gris answers no, what I feel holds the movie back is that this was not a question that Jesus was asking before the events of the movie.  He wasn’t dying, wasn’t suffering, didn’t have a family member he wanted to save, wasn’t pining after his lost youth, he was doing just fine.  The movie poses a question that the main character wasn’t interested in answering.  This is a movie with a purely reactive protagonist who ends the movie just reaffirming that he’s fundamentally a good person, which was never in question.

Some time should be spent affirming how from the jump Guillermo del Toro is a masterful visual storyteller.  Most of the story is told without dialogue, expository or otherwise.  Characters are introduced, relationships are explained, plot twists are conveyed, just about everything important is told through framing, camera movement, background details, and the expression and actions of the characters.  In the opening scenes the bond between Jesus and his granddaughter is shown without a single word.  He cleans her face while she beams at him, they drive together to his antiques shop, as he unlocks the doors to open it for business she’s riding his shoulders, after a scene transition we follow Angel as he enters the shop for the first time to find the two of them in the middle of a game of hopscotch.  It’s all so well done it’s going to make it all the more annoying to get thrown back into movies helmed by directors-for-hire who just lock down a two-shot and have the characters dump their backstories to each other in flat dialogue exchanges.

This is such a good debut movie that it’s a damn shame it took another thirteen years for him to start getting the attention he deserved (I love ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ and ‘Hellboy’ but he wasn’t really taken seriously until ‘Pan’s Labyrinth.’).  We now have a couple of his takes on actual vampires with ‘Blade II’ and “The Strain,” although I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he took another crack at it from another angle one of these days.  From the bits of the commentary track I listened to (I avoided most of it because I know me and if I hadn’t this entire thing would have been reacting to what he said instead of trying to establish my own thoughts) it’s clear that years and years of effort and thought went into this debut feature.  I wonder if directors have kind of the opposite problem as musicians do when they cram so many ideas into their first works.  Bands, even really good ones, will sometimes flame out when they have to produce a second effort while directors can instead relax and not frantically try to fit everything in.  I do remember being blown away by ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ when I saw it in the theater.  It really makes me wish the studios would get out of this man’s way and let him make the movies he wants to make already.  The world needs his ’At the Mountains of Madness.’