Cronos (1993)

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2020) Guillermo del Toro’s first feature-length film was Cronos and, well, that’s pretty much all you need to know about it. No, it’s not a polished as any of his later features. No, it’s not quite as baroque, or finely-controlled, or entertaining. It was, after all, shot in Mexico on a threadbare budget, from a young filmmaker who had many things to prove but not much pull in getting what he needed to execute his vision. But here’s the thing: Del Toro had a vision even at such an early stage. Cronos is slickly made even at its low budget—The visual density of the film’s images is particularly interesting. You can dissect it as an early work prefiguring del Toro’s entire subsequent career (including an improbable appearance from Ron Perlman), but it’s also easy to watch as its own little modest supernatural thriller in which an elderly antique dealer is gradually turned into a vampire. Unlike other horror filmmakers’ first efforts, Cronos is not a pure-horror film in execution: there’s some dramatic depth to it, some restraints on the exploitation side, and a clear artistic ambition at play. Cronos is interesting both by itself and as a proof of concept for some of the themes, tropes, filmmaking tics and gothic grandeur that del Toro would explore in other films.