Cronos

Guillermo del Toro’s first film is less a vampire story, of which it is, and more of a love story between a grandfather and his granddaughter. It is filled with del Toro’s wildly inventive imagination – you’ve got to see the inside of the golden egg/mechanical spider to believe it – and love for humanity amongst all of the gore, it is a great debut film. It should come as no shock that he’s only made a handful of films and I have either loved or respected them all.

Cronos is half in Spanish and half in English, but it’s merged together in a realistic and believable way. There’s no tourists played for laughs or awkward moments with border patrol here. These groups of people occupy the same part of town and interact routinely. Well, mostly Frederico Luppi as the grandfather and Ron Perlman as the anatagonist’s nose job obsessed nephew interact. Our main villain and heroine are confined to one room or mute throughout much of the film.

And while later films like Mimic or Pan’s Labyrinth would be brutal and vivid in their violence and gore, but never without a certain amount of taste and always necessary to the story, the gore and brutality is relatively limited in this film. But our main character still removes his blue skin to reveal a shiny white new layer, and gets his mouth shown shut while being embalmed. Del Toro understands that unnecessary gore and bloodshed actually distract from and takeaway from a good film. And this is a very good one. Mimic and Blade II would be creative dips, but not without a certain amount of charm and respectability, he would go on to great things with The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. Here’s the beginnings of one of our greatest young directors currently working.