Guillermo del Toro’s directorial debut is a startlingly assured gothic fable that fuses vampirism with the director’s now-trademark fascination with arcana, alchemy, clockwork machinery and an underlying sense of the macabre. There are better debuts out there, but very few that come with the director’s sense of style and tone already so clearly cemented. From the very start, you can see the style that will be present in every subsequent del Toro film.
Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) is a kind-hearted elderly antiques dealer who lives with his wife (Margarita Isabel) and granddaughter, Aurora (Tamara Shanath). He is drawn into something far beyond his understanding when he acquires a strange angel statue. Hidden within it is the mythical Cronos device – an ancient mechanism said to grant eternal life at a terrible cost.
When Gris activates it, mechanical, insect-like legs erupt from the device and pierce his skin. After recovering, he finds himself increasingly drawn back to the sinister mechanism, discovering a new vitality and confidence each time. No sooner is he enjoying this newfound youth, though, than the sinister De La Guardia family comes calling, determined to claim the device for themselves.
Luppi is the epitome of warmth as Jesús Gris, embodying a decency that makes his corruption all the more tragic. He’s equally great playing Gris as a doddery old man, and the younger, more virile side that emerges once he uses the machine. Most importantly, you completely buy the affection he holds for his largely mute granddaughter. He brings a sense of warmth and gentleness to their scenes together, and the pair’s sweet relationship is what gives the film its emotional core. Aurora’s love for her grandfather is plain, even as she watches his transformation with large, doleful eyes. It’s this bond that ultimately informs his final act of sacrifice as the monster within him fights to take hold.
Ron Perlman, in the first of many collaborations with del Toro, all but steals the film as the sinister Angel De La Guardia. Rather than a straightforward villain, Perlman gives him eccentricity and odd charm – an almost childlike vanity, and fixation on his appearance (especially his nose, which, in a bit of black humour, gets broken several times over the course of the film) and a curious playfulness toward Aurora, which makes him more than just a heavy. As his dying uncle, Claudio Brook brings a more sinister intellect to the film. While Gris desperately wants to stop his thirst for blood, De La Guardia is obsessed with the idea of regaining his youth, and Brook sells this desperation brilliantly, as well as his character’s cruelty, using his sticks as weapons as much as walking aids. His living quarters are also one of the most striking sets in the film – a completely sterile room, where everything is wrapped in plastic, and organs he has had removed sit in jars, like some ghoulish art exhibit.
Cronos sits second only to Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction in the way it frames vampirism as compulsion rather than choice. Luppi’s performance as he uses the machine, equal parts fear, fascination, and something else, something vaguely carnal, is the most disturbing part of the film. There’s something uncomfortably sensual about the way Gris laps at blood on the bathroom floor (a scene that is both repellent and strangely intimate) while the agony / ecstasy he experiences using the Cronos device recalls a gentler version of the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser. Del Toro pays homage to traditional vampire cinema too, with its iconography surfacing in subtly playful moments – the reversed funeral suit evoking Dracula’s cape, or Gris shielding his eyes in a gesture reminiscent of Bela Lugosi’s theatricality.
It’s also gratifying to see that del Toro’s fascination with insects, bodies, and metamorphosis is evident from the very start of his career. The Cronos device is a perfect expression of this, but the imagery extends throughout: cockroaches spilling from the angel statue, Gris’s own larval transformation, and the older De La Guardia’s beetle-like movements as he drags himself through his environment; his walking sticks acting as extra appendages.
Watching Cronos today makes you yearn for a more grounded film from del Toro. Unlike the glossy, unreal aesthetics of his more recent films, his debut is very much set in the real world. It’s atmospheric and gothic, but this is created through the set design, the mise-en-scene, and a masterful use of shadows and light. De La Guardia’s bedroom, sterile and full of hanging sculptures covered in plastic; the neon-lit final confrontation with Angel in front of the De La Guardia sign, the beams of light that hit Jesus in his vampiric state – these are all wonderfully evocative, stylised moments, but everything remains rooted in a tangible, physical world, even at its most fantastical.
A sublime gothic fairytale, Cronos is the perfect debut for del Toro, and one of the most promising directorial debuts of genre cinema. In a brisk 90 minutes, he set out his stall as a uniquely ghoulish visionary, one who reveres classic horror while establishing a sensibility entirely of his own.
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